Life returned to Alder Bend in pieces. People rebuilt, replanted, tried to forget. The fields never grew as tall again, but the harvest was steady, honest. Children slept through the night.
Elaine stayed. Sometimes, at dusk, she walked the edge of the new fields and felt a familiar pressure, not of being watched, but of being remembered. The soil there was warm, alive in a way that felt almost gentle.
Cropsy was gone, they said. But the land still listened.
And it remembered what people had taught it to become.
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