Chapter 35
THIRTY-FIVE
“Can you show me the zones for the hollow heart field?”
My head snaps up from my computer, and my eyes widen when I see Silas standing in the doorway of my office. For a moment all I can do is stare at him, frozen in place while my brain—which has been running nonstop with thoughts of him since last night—suddenly decides to stop working completely.
“What?” is all I manage to say.
He steps into my office, and my heart thrashes as he approaches my desk.
I’ve been stressing all night and all morning about what it means that I kissed him, and I did not expect to see him today at all. Especially not here in my office.
He’s never come to my office before.
And he came here after I kissed him.
What the fuck does that mean?
My head is going to fucking explode.
“Can you show me the zones for the hollow heart field?” he repeats, and my brow furrows.
After everything that happened between us, he’s asking about field zones? The same zones he’s made very clear he doesn’t like and doesn’t understand. And it’s the middle of the morning. Isn’t he supposed to be out running the planter?
My eyes drop briefly down his dirt-streaked jeans and worn hoodie before I force my attention back up to his eyes. “Are you not planting today?”
“I was. But…” He steps closer and leans over the desk, bracing both hands on the surface as he looks straight into my eyes.
Jesus fucking Christ.
“Please, Levi.”
Well, fuck me.
I nod, and he pushes himself upright again.
There’s a restless energy in him, almost like excitement, which is really fucking confusing.
The last time I saw him, I had just kissed him, and he shoved me back and stared at me like he was afraid I might try it again. Like it was the last thing he wanted.
But right now, I don’t see any of that. It’s like he’s pushed that kiss out of his mind, and it didn’t even happen.
So I guess we’re just ignoring it.
That… sucks.
I’ve barely had time to process what any of this means or how the hell we’re supposed to move forward from here. But if pretending it never happened is what he wants, then I guess we go back to being friends.
I’m not sure I can do that, but I’ll try. Because I can’t lose him as a friend over this. And if he’s giving me a second chance at being friends… or a third, I suppose… then I’ll take it. No matter how hard it’s going to be to pretend I didn’t like kissing him.
I gesture for him to pull a chair up next to me as I open the mapping software and bring up the Geographic Information System layers for the hollow heart field. I built the zones using the data we have, which is about as far as I’ve taken the analysis so far.
We never did go over the report.
As he sits down beside me, I have to remind myself to breathe and keep my attention fixed on the computer screen instead of letting my mind drift back to the way his mouth felt against mine.
But the memory presses in anyway, vivid and unwelcome in the worst possible way.
I remember the warmth of his lips and the way his tongue slid against mine, sending a rush through me that felt so fucking good I wanted more immediately, even while I was freaking the fuck out.
I squint my eyes at the screen, afraid to even look at him. Because if I do, I’ll be tempted to lean in and steal another kiss. Even though he made it quite clear last night that he doesn’t want that.
But he’s here…
For the field.
He’s here for the field. That’s it.
I angle the laptop towards him so he can see the zone map.
He leans closer to study it, and despite everything I try to do to keep my attention where it belongs, my eyes drift to him anyway.
I watch the way his gaze moves across the screen, and how his brow tightens slightly in concentration as he pulls his lower lip between his teeth while he thinks.
He’s sitting so close that if I shifted in my seat, my shoulder would brush his, and I quickly force myself to drag my eyes away from him.
“This isn’t right.”
I look back at him with a furrowed brow. “What?”
He shakes his head and gestures toward the screen, meeting my eyes with a look of determination. “The middle zone is one zone, not two.”
My gaze slides back to the screen, where the two zones that make up the middle of the field cover almost the entire centre section.
“It’s two,” I say slowly. “I used soil properties, electrical conductivity, yield stability layers…” I shake my head and glance back at him, unsure what he’s talking about. “These are two different zones based on the data. They’re set up for correct yield optimization.”
Silas shakes his head. “No. They may be right to optimize yield, but they’re not right to explain hollow heart. So they’re not right for planting.”
I blow out a breath and study the screen for a moment, trying to think of how to explain this in a way that will make sense to him.
I point to one of the middle zones. “Each zone is actually quite different. The soil texture changes, moisture holding capacity shifts, and the organic matter levels aren’t the same.
The problem before was treating the entire field like one zone.
” I tap the map lightly. “There’s variation across the field, but nothing severe enough to explain why hollow heart keeps showing up. ”
“Yes, exactly,” Silas says immediately, his eyes widening with sudden enthusiasm.
I stare back at him. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
Silas blows out a forceful breath, pointing at the screen again. “Every one of these zones may be different, but the stressors from each one push in from all sides and overlap right in the middle over both of those zones.”
I look back at the map, scanning it again. “Each zone having its own stressor isn’t uncommon…”
Silas releases a frustrated noise and shifts forward in his seat. “I know. But that’s what I mean. The middle section, if everything lines up just right, or… wrong… it gets all of them.”
I lean forward and start clicking through some of the data tied to the two zones in the centre of the field.
As the numbers shift across the screen, I notice that there’s a lot more variability here.
Those zones show higher variance than the rest of the field, which can suggest some kind of external environmental influence affecting the crop.
I lean back slightly, thinking through the implications of this. “So the soil is different,” I say slowly, “but the conditions acting on it are the same.”
“Yes.”
I nod as my mind starts swirling with everything I know about working with field variability data.
The pressures don’t stop at the zone boundaries…
If all the conditions that normally fall within acceptable ranges, which wouldn’t cause hollow heart or abnormal growth on their own, start lining up in the same place, they could create an unstable environment for the crop.
And so far, this field has only ever been analyzed by comparing single variables against yield. Since none of those variables showed a strong correlation with yield loss caused by hollow heart, the field was written off as too inconsistent to manage.
“So if three or four mild variables overlap in the same area,” I say slowly, staring at the map as the idea takes shape in my head, “that interaction might not stand out. Unless someone already suspected interaction effects, and the field had already been identified as unstable.”
I slide my gaze to Silas, who stares back at me with so much hope in his eyes that my heart skips a beat.
His brows lift, and he gestures toward the computer with a quick wave of his hand. “Do the… model thing…”
I huff a quiet laugh before pulling the laptop closer to me.
But if this doesn’t actually show what he thinks it will, I don’t want to crush him.
There’s a very real chance this won’t work.
Interaction effects like the ones he’s describing are hard to model because they depend so heavily on seasonal weather patterns.
That uncertainty is exactly why we’re in this situation in the first place and why this field was never analyzed this way before.
Most agronomy analysis assumes soil properties are the primary drivers of variability, so the models usually examine single variables against yield.
But… problems like hollow heart rarely come from just one factor.
More often they emerge from several mild stresses interacting with each other at the same time.
And in some cases, environmental pressures can override the differences in soil zones entirely.
But that kind of interaction is difficult to isolate unless it’s already suspected and we know what to look for.
Silas pushes away from the desk and starts pacing slowly across the office while I begin pulling up the relevant datasets.
I bring in data from the outer zones surrounding the middle of the field from layers that were never used when the original zones were built because they weren’t necessary for planting prescriptions.
Zone maps are usually built from intrinsic soil to define how a field is divided.
But… environmental pressures don’t necessarily follow those same boundaries, and the way they move across the landscape isn’t always obvious from the data alone.
So… maybe he’s right.
Maybe those pressures extend farther than the individual datasets show.
I start overlaying the spatial layers and environmental factors, building a stress index map as the model begins stacking the influences together. As the map updates, I feel a spark of excitement ignite inside me.
This could actually make a lot of sense.
And sure enough, as the layers combine, the pattern starts to appear.
The directional influences converge across the centre of the field, forming a long overlapping band that stretches directly over the two soil zones in the middle.
The soil zones themselves are still different. But the stress environment across them is the same.
Together, they create one shared problem zone.
When seasonal conditions push that section past a certain threshold, the crop swings from slow growth into rapid expansion, and that’s when hollow heart shows up.
And when those conditions don’t line up, it behaves normally, which makes the entire field look inconsistent.
“Holy shit.”
Silas pushes off the wall near the window where he was leaning, bending over next to me to look at the screen. His shoulder brushes mine, and electricity shoots through me at both the sudden closeness and the realization that we may have actually figured this out.
“Holy shit,” he repeats.
An incredulous laugh escapes me. “Oh my god. So this field has only ever been evaluated with each variable on its own, and every one of them looked acceptable,” I say, talking through the realization as it settles in.
“But nobody ever modelled how those stresses move across the field together or what happens when they converge.”
“Whatever that means, yeah,” Silas says, nodding as he keeps staring at the screen.
I huff softly and nudge him with my shoulder, so he looks at me. His eyes are bright with the same excitement buzzing in me, and his smile pulls one from me, too.
“You did it,” I tell him.
His gaze drops briefly to my lips before lifting again to meet my eyes, and my pulse skyrockets.
“We did it,” he says.
As we look into each other’s eyes, smiling like idiots and excitement swirling between us, everything else fades away.
Not only the discovery we’ve made about the field, but the knot of anxiety that’s been twisting inside me since last night and the fear that I might have destroyed everything between us.
I don’t think I did.
I think we’re ok.
Because suddenly it all makes sense.
Two zones are functioning as one system, with pressures pushing in from every side.
But that doesn’t mean it’s broken. It just needs a different kind of analysis. It needs time, patience, and the right perspective to be understood.
And once it is, no problem is too big.