At twenty minutes past four, a man in a gray jacket walked past the booth and stopped so abruptly that the woman behind him almost collided with his shoulder. He took two steps backward, stared at the table, and then came closer without speaking. He walked along the wounded edge, crouched to examine the retained char, and stood up slowly at the far end. Maren watched him with the instinctive caution of a person who has spent a long day hoping for exactly this kind of attention and doesn't want to frighten it away by making the wrong sound.
The man remained quiet for several minutes. He moved around the table again, watching how the grain changed in the light. He set a folder beneath his arm and lightly traced the boundary between the healed scar and the figured redwood with his fingertips. Maren kept still. She had learned from the tree that silence could be part of looking, and she wasn't going to fill it with a rehearsed sales pitch before the man had finished seeing what he'd come to see.
"Where did this come from?" he asked at last.
"Storm salvage from a private ranch in northern California," she answered. "The tree fell in February. The source and recovery are documented."
He asked about the burn. Maren told him what the visible growth suggested and what Shaw's report could confirm. She did not claim to know the exact year of the injury, though the ring evidence suggested it might have occurred around the 1940s, or exactly which stresses had caused every band of figure. He seemed pleased by the distinction. He asked about the drying process, and she showed him the records. Then he asked the question that would turn out to be more important than the price of the table.
"How many slabs do you have left from this same tree?"
Maren took a breath. She had prepared for someone wanting the finished table or perhaps one more piece like it. She began to explain that the existing table was available and that selected material remained for several additional commissions. The man raised his hand gently and stopped her. He wasn't asking because he wanted another dining table. He wanted to know whether a substantial architectural interior could be made from the same continuous tree.
His name was Julian Cross. He was a principal at a San Francisco architecture firm designing a small luxury resort on the northern California coast. The property would have a little over forty guest rooms, but its heart was a conference and gathering hall the client expected to feel rooted in its landscape. Two previous interior schemes had been rejected as attractive but anonymous. The client wanted an experience no other resort could purchase from the same set of supplier catalogs.