For the first time, Maren did not dismiss the idea immediately. She asked him to send the offer in writing and then took it home without telling Annie what it was. She knew exactly what the money would accomplish. She could cover the hauling, the two crane operations, the specialty rig, and Shaw's inspection; she could pay the shop's bills, replace the failing bearings, and put something back into the reserve account she'd almost emptied. She might even have enough to repair her pickup before its transmission stopped pretending it was healthy.
She read the figure four times. Then she called Dale and asked him what he'd do. He told her that profit realized today was worth considerably more than profit imagined tomorrow. He wasn't being glib. He explained that a customer in a premium market might take a year to find, and in that year the log could continue to cost money for protection, handling, testing, drying, and storage. If her normal work suffered, the profit she hoped to make on the redwood could disappear under losses elsewhere. He told her she wouldn't be a failure if she accepted Preston's offer. She would be a business owner making a rational decision.
Maren agreed that it would be rational. She called Preston the next morning and asked one question. Would the finished material remain identified as the work of Winslow Custom Timber, and could she participate in determining the cuts to preserve the character that made the log valuable? The silence on the line was brief but unmistakable. Preston said his company couldn't manage production by committee and that a purchased asset belonged to the buyer. He might, as a courtesy, mention the salvage source if the marketing department found it useful.
That answer mattered more to Maren than either of them expected. She had brought the tree home because she saw something unusual in the grain, and she didn't want to sell it into a process designed to produce standardized slabs as rapidly as the yield calculation allowed. Preston offered security, but he also offered to end the experiment before she'd discovered what the material could become. She thanked him and said she wasn't ready to sell. He increased the price that afternoon.
His second offer was genuinely serious money, enough that I found myself angry when she told me she'd rejected it. Not angry with her, exactly, but angry at the risk a gifted person sometimes takes while trying to protect the thing they know better than anyone else. I understood what Preston was buying: the chance to turn Maren's eye into his own inventory. I also understood that Maren had a daughter, a shop, and bills that did not care how rare the figure might be. When she told me the offer had risen again nine days later, I asked whether pride had entered the decision.
She considered the question instead of getting defensive. "Probably some," she said. "I don't like that he's offering to rescue me from the situation he helped make worse. But that isn't enough of a reason to keep the log."
"Then what's your reason?"