"It means we have work," she said. "Good work. Work that can change things if we do it right. We still have to do it."
Annie thought about that, then nodded. "You know how," she said.
Maren smiled. "I know some of how. We'll learn the rest carefully."
They celebrated by ordering pizza from a place in town, not by buying anything expensive. Luis brought his wife and son to the shop the next afternoon, and the four adults and two children sat beside the big redwood log while somebody handed around paper plates. Dale stopped in with a six-pack of root beer and admitted that he'd been wrong about the decision to keep the tree, though he still thought the original gamble had been frightening. Maren told him he hadn't been wrong to warn her about the freight. She would never forget that his warning had forced her to limit the first cut and keep the shop alive long enough to make another decision.
The celebrations ended early because the production schedule began on Monday. Maren hired two additional employees for the defined contract period and brought Luis into the planning meetings instead of treating him as a pair of hands hired to follow orders. She arranged the equipment lease only after the project advance cleared and set aside the sums required for subcontractors and payroll rather than spending the incoming money as though it were profit. She had watched too many businesses mistake a large deposit for earnings and discover the difference when a bill came due. She wasn't going to make that mistake with a tree that had already taken her close enough to the edge.
The first serious production problem appeared before September was out. A slab intended for the reception desk developed movement outside the tolerances agreed for that piece. The defect wasn't catastrophic, and nobody was injured or deceived, but it meant the element could not be used as planned without risk of future failure. Maren photographed the condition, informed the architect and project manager, and proposed using the piece for a smaller object while shifting the reception design to a different mapped region. The change cost time and required new drawings, but the client accepted it because the documentation made the problem understandable before it became a surprise on site.
Preston's company, delivering conventional timber for other areas of the resort, encountered its own ordinary scheduling issue around the same time. Maren heard about it through the project manager and noticed that nobody used it as evidence of bad character. Large suppliers had delays; small suppliers had delays. Competence was how a business handled them, communicated them, and protected the people who depended on the result. She began to understand that the main difference between her and Preston wasn't a moral one about who was good and who was bad. It was a difference in what each of them had learned to see and the kind of value each could deliver.