The Price of the Compound

Tess Okonkwo is thirty-one and has four months of samples that say a private compound is poisoning a river. Halvard Renn is fifty-two and has owned that compound, that river, and most of the county's opinion for ten years. He knows within six days that a graduate student is sampling his stream. He does not stop her. He files her. Then he reads her field notes, eats two tables away from her for a season, and refuses to introduce himself because introducing himself would make it real. Someone else on the compound's payroll is not so patient. When a consultant breaks into her lab at two in the morning, Halvard is standing in the doorway with nothing left to explain. She asks him how long. He tells her the truth, and the truth costs him the compound, the land, and the county. What it buys him is a smaller house downstream and a woman who writes his name on the last page of her dissertation, first.