The decision came at a kitchen table on a Tuesday night. Maren drew a long rectangle on a clean page and placed three curved lines within it, each starting at the burned end and running across the surface. She drew the irregular live edge and the healed scar. She erased sections until the remaining shape looked less like a sawmill plan and more like something a person could sit beside. She drew a steel base low enough to keep the wood visually dominant, then turned the paper around and showed it to Annie.
"Would you want to sit at this?" she asked.
Annie looked at the sketch. "Only if you leave the black part," she said.
"Most people would cut it away."
"Then it would just be a red table."
Maren sat very still. The comment was simple enough to sound obvious after she'd heard it, but it resolved an argument she'd been having with herself for weeks. She had been trying to decide whether a premium buyer would prefer the figured wood cleaned of every sign of its violent history. Annie was telling her what a child saw without being trained to fear defects: the old burn was the beginning of the story, and cutting it away would make the extraordinary surface harder to understand. Maren wrote a sentence beneath the drawing. Do not disguise the reason it exists.
She didn't rush to cut the log after that. For nineteen days she mapped the exposed face against Shaw's photographs, the visible growth lines, selected examination points, and the limits of the sound outer body. She used a scale model and colored marks to represent the uncertain direction of the figure as it disappeared into the trunk. She reviewed the plan with Wyatt, who told her where the proposed cuts would be practical and where unseen defects might force a change. They agreed that the next cuts would aim to preserve long continuous surfaces and that the operation would stop if reality contradicted the plan.
I came by during that period and found the shop office covered in diagrams. Maren had pinned photographs to the wall at different angles, trying to imagine the same grain translated into a dining surface. She moved small cardboard templates over the images like pieces on a board game. One proposed cut offered more total area but risked dividing the figure into unrelated sections. Another sacrificed potential standard yield to protect a long dramatic arc of the recovery growth. Every choice was a trade between what she knew and what she hoped.
"You've become your father," I said as she shifted a template for the third time.
"He would have stopped me from buying it," she replied.
"You think so?"
"Until I showed him the grain. Then he would have spent three days telling me everything wrong with my plan."