Bet the Farm

Six weeks before his wedding, cherry grower Gideon Hale spends the $86,400 meant for his and his fiancee's house on a drainage system for a storm no forecast has confirmed. Mara Voss gives him until sundown to get it back. He does not. The bet costs him the wedding, his harvest equipment, his father's trust and a $200,000 loan he can barely service - and Gideon is staking the whole Cedar Ridge orchard on one thing: fourteen days of soil moisture data saying an atmospheric river is about to hit the valley. Neighbor Wade Kessler is betting the other way, buying out every pump and every roll of rain cover before Gideon can pay. When the storm finally breaks, the valley finds out who read the water right. But surviving one flood is not the same as being right forever, and the man who won the wager still has to choose between saving his own farm and rebuilding everyone else's.