The sound of something you survived by growing stronger in the places nobody could see, twisting yourself tighter around your own center until the force that was supposed to destroy you became the very thing that made you worth finding.
She didn't know yet if the wood would hold.
She didn't know if the fourth log would split open the way the first three had, taking with it the last of her money, the last of her sister's patience, the last reason to keep the lights on in a shop that was already more memory than business.
She didn't know if Wade Prescott would come back in the winter with a bigger number on a cleaner piece of paper or whether he'd skip the paper entirely next time.
She knew one thing.
She'd looked at those trees longer than anybody else was willing to look. She'd seen something in the twist that everybody else had called damage, felt something under the bark that nobody else had bothered to feel.
If that wasn't enough, then nothing was. If that wasn't enough, then thirty-eight years of learning to listen before she cut had been nothing but a slow way of going deaf.
She closed her eyes.
The wind kept pushing. She kept still.
Morning would come. The wood would be waiting.
So would she.
She stopped fighting the wood.
That was the first thing that changed, though nobody watching from the outside would have seen it as a change at all.
What they would have seen, if they'd bothered to drive past the shop on Keller Road during those cold weeks after Wade Prescott's visit, was a woman who appeared to be doing nothing.
Standing beside a log for twenty minutes without picking up a tool. Crouching at the cut end with a flashlight while the wind pulled at her jacket.
Running chalk lines along the bark, then wiping them off, then running them again in a slightly different place, like someone rewriting a sentence until it finally says what it means.
What Colleen was doing was listening, not with her ears, but with her hands, her eyes, the part of her memory that held thirty-eight years of reading grain the way a river pilot reads current.
She'd spent two months trying to impose her will on these logs, cutting where she thought the wood ought to yield, fighting the twist instead of following it.
Three ruined logs had taught her what Emmett could have told her in five words if he'd still been alive to say them.
You don't argue with walnut.
She started with the fourth log, the one with the tightest spiral, the one she'd been circling for weeks the way a person circles a conversation they're not ready to have.
She rolled it a quarter turn on the sawhorses, studying how the bark rippled along the underside where the tree had pressed against the earth during those decades of growing.
The ripple told her something, not where to cut, but where not to cut.
The grain beneath that ripple would be compressed, locked under pressure that a blade would release all at once, the same explosive tension that had cracked log number three clean in half.
She marked that section with red chalk.