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favorite stretch of two-track alongside the river. I flipped off the air-conditioning and opened my side window, inhaling the thick, river smell of water and vegetation and damp and cool. The river was down when it should have been up, climbing our high banks, but it was still beautiful; running slow; ripples where it crested over old logs; tiny whirlpools where it got ahead of itself.
    I passed two old sheds, not used much anymore except for extra shovels and such, and passed places where the bank had been dug out by the hogs. I’d have to tell Justin. He, like everybody else in rural Texas, was always fighting back the hogs that ran wild, mostly coming up into the groves from along the riverbanks, moving along from places where the land was still wild and vegetation grew to the river’s edge, giving the hogs cover.
    At my greenhouse, I parked around back. I loved the words “my greenhouse,” like I was who I had wanted to be since grad school, the person my professors there told me I could be: a helper to all pecan ranchers, to my own family, saving millions that bad years took, and even better, saving the terrible heartache brought to families just like ours.
    That was what got me into bioengineering in the first place, that awful year I stood out in the grove beside my daddy, Jake, and watched the blossoms fade. That year the drought during the spring went right on through summer. I told myself back then, when I was still a kid, that I would do something about it. I wasn’t going to be like the other ranchers, who bowed their heads and talked about God’s will. Things were changing in all sectors of farming now. New kinds of trees and plants. If there was a stronger strain of pecan, I knew I would be the one to find it. Just as David Milarch, the Michigan farmer who cloned ancient trees of the world to save them for the future, did. I hoped to promise a better future, too. A sturdier pecan tree that would save Texas ranches from global warming.
    And I was getting close, using clones from our own trees. A process called micropropagation. Branch tips harvested and planted in baby food jars with my own vitamin-enriched gel. New jars, new beginnings. Hundreds in the greenhouse, along with two-year-old saplings, and the four-year-old trees I’d already moved outdoors, into my fenced test grove.
    Soon I’d be cutting further back on water, to see how the trees fared, maybe take the five-gallon buckets away and depend solely on drip irrigation. Then, at the end, if scab didn’t attack them and no fungus survived, and the new trees could withstand a drought better than the old trees, and the pecans were as good or better—they would go into the regular groves, replacing dead or fallen trees, some that had been around for as long as 150 years.
    The test grove was board-fenced with wire below, driven into the ground to protect the new trees from those feral hogs. I’d put a lock on the gate just so lookie-loos—maybe a workman, or his family—didn’t wander in and decide to grab themselves a little pecan tree.
    Just getting near my own grove made my heart beat faster. I took a deep breath, taking in the sweetish smell of spring and tree buds and something even sweeter and thicker in the air, then dug down in my shoulder bag for the key.
    When I reached out for the lock, it hung sideways, open and dangling from its severed hasp. Somebody had cut the lock, then put it back on as if to fool me.
    Nobody should have been in my test grove. There were workers who helped me inside the greenhouse, even planted the trees outside, but at the end of the day, I was always the last to leave. Nobody needed to get inside for any reason.
    I reached out and touched the hanging lock, pushing it from where it dangled. I pulled the gate toward me, praying whoever had cut the lock wasn’t still in there.
    I stepped through the gate and looked around for anyone ready to jump me. It took a long moment before the change in my grove