It took the better part of four years before Hartswell stopped thinking of itself as a place that only received letters.
Charlotte was never universally liked for the work she did. Being right about nine struggling holdings in a single bad harvest earned her more resentment than admiration among certain families who preferred not to be corrected by a woman who'd once knelt in mud with her arm inside a ewe.
But old Silas lived out his last years walking that land with a wage and a cottage of his own, trusted by every tenant on the estate. Danny grew into a man who ran the family farm exactly as his sister had taught him.
And the eldest of Edmund and Charlotte's children was born deliberately in the very cottage where Charlotte herself had been born—the last child of that family who ever would be.
Years later, sitting together on the old stone wall after a harvest, Edmund asked her whether she'd ever regretted the condition she'd set that first day, since within a year she'd taken back half of what she demanded and returned to the very house she'd refused to be impressed by.
Charlotte only shook her head.
"I never took it back," she told him. "I simply needed to know, before I gave you anything at all, that you could stand in a cold kitchen at five in the morning and say out loud that you didn't know how to do a single thing. Everything else we've built came from that one sentence, and you've never had to say it twice."