"I still can't see a finished thing in his plan. Only material for his sales department. I need to know if I can make the finished thing better than he can. If I can't, I'll revisit the offer."
I wanted to ask how she proposed to find out before her creditors did it for her. But she'd been honest with me, and I owed her the same honesty in return. I told her she was approaching the point where the size of the upside didn't matter if she couldn't stay solvent long enough to reach it. She nodded and wrote that sentence on the margin of her legal pad. She was not romantic about the cost. She was simply unwilling to pretend that no value existed outside the categories that had made Preston wealthy.
Preston eventually stopped sounding amused. He asked Maren what she imagined she was going to do with a massive log that required specialized cutting and a market she had never entered. Finding beautiful wood, he said, was not the same thing as knowing how to sell it to rich people. The sentence landed hard because it was accurate in its essential point. Preston's company had built thirty years of relationships with architects, purchasing managers, hotel owners, luxury-home builders, and designers who needed unusual materials on deadlines that didn't bend for anyone's intentions. Maren knew cabinet shops, local builders, and individual customers who ordered by word of mouth.
She did not have a marketing department, an approved vendor portfolio, or an account manager who could call a specification director and be answered within an hour. She had a shop phone that shared a desk with a moisture meter. Her website displayed photographs of stair treads, kitchen cabinets, and the occasional custom table. She could describe wood to anyone standing in front of her, but she didn't know the language or the people who would turn a unique trunk into a seven-figure architectural interior. Preston recognized that gap and understood how to make it sound like a judgment on her worth rather than a practical challenge she might solve.
For five weeks, Maren tried to solve it the most obvious way. She wrote to eleven design firms, describing the redwood, attaching photographs, and including a short extract from Shaw's report. Three replied with polite refusals. The others said nothing. She contacted two galleries that sold commissioned furniture and received a suggestion that she build a portfolio of completed pieces before approaching them again, which sounded helpful until you realized that the material she was trying to sell would have to finance the pieces she was being asked to make first.
A hotel procurement office told her that all specialty wood had to come through approved vendors, with reviews that could take more than a year. The buyer was kind enough to explain that even a visually extraordinary material couldn't bypass a system designed to prevent delivery failure. Another office suggested she contact Preston Harrington, who, as the person on the phone said cheerfully, already handled a substantial share of the region's unusual architectural lumber. Maren thanked him for the recommendation and sat looking at the receiver after the call ended. The circle had closed so neatly that she almost admired it.