The trouble arrived as a rumor with a person attached to it. Four days after the log came in, a supplier called to ask if Maren was closing the shop. She asked what gave him that idea. He said he'd heard the redwood had cost her everything and that she didn't even have equipment to cut it. His tone carried the casual concern of someone repeating a story he'd heard twice already and therefore considered probably true.
The next morning, a cabinet company in Sacramento postponed a substantial order. The purchasing manager explained, with a degree of discomfort that suggested he wished he hadn't been honest, that his own supervisor had heard Winslow Custom Timber was overextended. He couldn't risk a deposit if there was any chance the company wouldn't finish the work. Maren said she'd been in business long enough to deliver on everything she'd ever promised him and could provide references or arrange different terms. He apologized, said they'd revisit the conversation next month, and ended the call.
The loss wasn't theoretical. It changed what money would be in her account on the first of the next month. It affected what she could promise the saw repair shop, which had already quoted her for replacement bearings, and whether she'd be able to order stock for other jobs without using her personal credit. Rumor had turned an uncertain investment into an immediate threat to the work that was supposed to finance it. I watched her stare at the office calendar after the call and understood that she was seeing a different kind of crack: one that could travel outward if nobody stopped it.
I heard Preston's contribution to the rumor at a supplier lunch in Santa Rosa. He delivered it in the same voice he used to tell a good story about a customer who had ordered the wrong material. "Winslow just bought a log she can't even cut," he said. Nine words, not a claim that could easily be disproved because they were true in the most unhelpful way. She had bought a log too large for her existing saw. What he omitted was why she had avoided making the cuts that would solve that problem mechanically and ruin it economically.
A few people laughed. I didn't. A man who controls an account list Preston's size understands that a true fact can be arranged to produce a false conclusion. I asked him whether he'd considered how the rumor might affect her regular orders. He looked at me with mild surprise, as though I'd mistaken a weather report for a personal insult. "I'm not responsible for her purchasing decisions," he said. That was also true, and it wasn't quite the question I'd asked.