Annie rolled her eyes. "You talk about this tree like it's in charge."
"At the moment, it is," Maren replied.
The shop remained busy where possible. Luis prepared ordinary orders in the mornings and helped document the table project in the afternoons. Maren found a local welder willing to fabricate a restrained steel base, and together they worked out the support the long top required without making the metal look like it was fighting the wood for attention. She drew the edge treatment, revised it, and then removed some of her proposed corrections because the original irregularities were more expressive than anything she could invent. She stabilized the selected char where necessary, carefully retaining its visual history rather than concealing it beneath dark stain.
A conventional shop would have trimmed the live edge straight to increase repeatability. Maren followed its natural line. Another shop might have filled every healed crack until the result resembled new material. She kept the meaningful scars visible while making sure they didn't compromise the table's structural function or normal use. She didn't leave dangerous instability in the name of romance. She distinguished between evidence of the tree's history and defects that would make the object fail its owner.
The work changed the shop's rhythm. People began coming by to ask whether the giant tree had been sold, and Maren learned to tell them that most of it still hadn't found a customer. When the table began to take shape, visitors stopped asking about the log and began asking how the grain had come to look like that. They leaned over the surface to see whether the curling bands were painted. They moved sideways and watched the light shift across the figure. Their surprise was more useful than any advertising slogan she could have written.
Annie helped take photographs. She was too young to operate machinery, but she knew how to hold a plain background and where the afternoon light fell across the shop floor. She suggested moving the table closer to the wide loading door because the photograph from that angle made the figure look like moving water. Maren tried it and found her daughter was right. They made a little ritual of reviewing images after dinner, Annie pointing out where the surface looked alive and Maren explaining why some details mattered to a designer and others mattered to a customer who had to live with the table.
One evening Luis stayed after his shift while the table rested on its base. He stood at one end and stared down the length of the top. The long waves traveled away from the black scar beneath the finish and seemed to draw the eye forward no matter where he stood. He finally said that he'd never been proud of being wrong before, and Maren asked what he meant. "I thought you bought a funeral," he told her. "Turns out you bought something that wasn't finished living."