The shop grew carefully. Luis took on a supervisory role that reflected the work he'd already been doing. Maren hired additional full-time employees as the order book justified them, including a young man named Owen who was good with measurements and less patient with the repetitive parts of the craft. She added equipment that served real bottlenecks rather than buying machines merely because success had made it possible. A wider sander helped with large surfaces. A moisture-controlled drying room improved reliability. Later came a mill head with enough capacity to handle material that would once have forced her to rent specialty access every time.
She did not throw away the old saw. It still handled most of the everyday work and reminded new employees that a machine is valuable because of what it does, not because of its size or purchase price. She also kept the original drying shed and made improvements rather than demolishing it in a burst of confidence. The shop remained recognizable, though the order board now included architects' names that would have startled the woman who'd spent five weeks writing unanswered emails. There were more people at the workbenches, more documentation in the office, and more clients willing to wait for the right material rather than demand an imitation by Friday.
Annie grew into an age when she was less inclined to sit on the fence rail with a juice box and more inclined to tell her mother when an explanation sounded like advertising. She took photographs for the shop on weekends and became good at noticing the moments when natural light revealed something no camera flash could produce. She still kept her grandfather's little jewelry box, its redwood surface worn smooth from years of being handled. When friends asked whether her mother had become rich because of the famous table, Annie told them no. Her mother had become busy doing the kind of work she had always wanted to do.
I asked Maren once whether Annie understood how close the original purchase had come to being a disaster. She said her daughter understood enough to know that the results hadn't been guaranteed. Maren didn't want the story remembered as one perfect decision that made all future decisions easy. She wanted Annie to see the risk, the people who had warned her honestly, the people who had helped her, and the moment she stopped cutting because she didn't yet know enough. A good instinct was a beginning, she told her daughter. The work of making it right came afterward.
Two years after the auction, Preston sent a letter. I didn't know about it until Maren showed it to me because, unlike everyone else in our business, she didn't turn their history into a public entertainment. The letter was professionally written and, I thought, shrewd. Harrington proposed a distribution partnership in which it would represent Winslow specialty materials to clients who wanted one-off architectural work, in exchange for a commission that was commercially reasonable. Harrington would gain something its competitors couldn't readily source, and Maren would gain access to a sales network that had taken Preston decades to build.