Chapter 2

2: 2

2

The mayor pushed open our front door and settled into the head seat like a man who'd sat there a hundred times.

The look he gave me was pure disapproval.

"Little Leo, you're supposed to be a college graduate. Did all those books rot in your gut?"

"With all those out-of-towners watching, you kick up a fuss like this and who's going to rent a harvester from our village anymore? You're trying to sink the whole business on purpose!"

I corrected him quietly.

"It's not the village's. I bought that harvester myself."

The smile on his face thinned a little.

"You're a Cobb Village girl. The moment that machine came into Cobb Village, it became communal property."

"Folks have lined up work outside, five or six thousand a day. You keep your eyes glued to your own little plot, what's that going to get you? Widen your thinking a little, can't you?"

He wore the look of a man burdened with a headache he couldn't shake.

I wanted to laugh. I tugged at the corner of my mouth, but nothing came.

"If rice isn't worth anything, then why did you insist on finishing everyone else's fields before you'd rent the machine out to us?"

The mayor swept a scornful glance over me.

"It's grain everybody sweated to grow. Whoever heard of harvesting someone else's before your own? You think we're fools?"

"No. You treated my family like fools."

I pointed out toward the yard. Our rice stood alone in a stretch of paddy that had already been cleared, glaringly out of place.

My mom always said the money didn't come easy for me, and while she still had the strength she'd plant another acre so she could take a little of the load off me.

She planted a hundred acres in one go, worked her back into a bend, and now the whole crop was rotting in the field.

The mayor's hand went still on the table, and for a moment he had nothing to say.

Two seconds later he slammed his palm down, the table leg screeching against the floor, and shoved himself to his feet.

"So we harvested your rice two days late. Is that worth blowing up into all this?"

"The harvest window's only a few days. Two days lost on your hundred acres, that's ten grand down the drain!"

Then he looked at me and let out a mocking little laugh.

"Everybody knows you're an influencer with millions of followers, raking it in. You really care about a lousy ten grand?"

I said nothing.

Back when I first became an influencer in college, the villagers said to my parents' faces that I was parading myself online, that it was no decent way to live.

It only stopped once I started selling off the rice grain, the fruit, all the farm produce they couldn't move.

Even then, they looked down on me behind my back.

No matter how much money I made for them, I never got so much as a thank-you.

The mayor stood and clapped a hand on my shoulder, the weight of it startlingly heavy.

"Enough. You follow what the group decides. If you won't fall in line, don't blame this village for having no room for you."

He turned to go, paused, and added one more thing.

"You may not care that your name is Cobb. Your father does."

My dad's clan loyalty runs deep. He puts family and blood above everything, or he'd never have let these people run this wild.

But this time it was my mom who got hurt.

"And if I'm not willing?"

"Not willing?" The mayor snorted through his nose. "I've been mayor of Cobb Village for thirty years. You're welcome to try."

He walked out of the yard, raised a hand and swept it through the air, and the men from the village scattered at once.

That night, a dull thud jolted me out of sleep.