Do not touch.
Then she moved to the opposite side where the bark ran smoother, where the twist seemed to open up just slightly, like a fist unclenching one finger at a time.
She marked a line there in white.
Maybe.
Three weeks she spent with that single log, not cutting, not measuring in any way a commercial operation would recognize, just turning it, reading it, pressing her thumb into the grain at different points to feel how the wood responded to pressure.
Some mornings she'd come out to the shop before dawn, before the light was strong enough to see color, because she'd learned years ago that her hands notice things in the dark that her eyes talked her out of in daylight.
Norah drove past the shop twice during those weeks, slowing but not stopping the way a person checks on a house they're worried about without wanting to have the conversation that would follow if they actually knocked.
She could see through the open bay door that Colleen was working. She just couldn't see what the work was producing because it wasn't producing anything visible.
Not yet.
On a Saturday afternoon in late January, with the light coming low through the west window the way it only does in winter, when the sun sits so close to the horizon that everything it touches turns the color of old honey, Colleen set the blade.
She chose a line that followed the twist instead of crossing it. A cut that would take the log apart along its own internal logic rather than against it.
The saw screamed the way it always screams when it meets walnut. High-pitched, almost musical, the sound of metal negotiating with something harder than it expected.
She cut six inches, stopped, and checked the curve for signs of stress.
The wood wasn't fighting her. Not yet.
She cut another six inches. The sawdust coming off the blade was finer than what she'd gotten from the first three logs, darker, almost oily between her fingers when she rubbed it.
Something was different about this one. Something deeper.
She cut through.
The blade cleared the far side of the log.
For a moment, nothing happened.
The two halves sat together on the sawhorses, still touching, still holding the shape of the tree they'd been part of for six decades.
Then gravity did what gravity does.
The halves began to separate slowly, like a book falling open to a page it had been pressed flat against for too long.
The shop went very still.
Walnut dust hung in the gold light like something suspended in water, like the air itself had decided to hold its breath.
The smell came up first, sharp, dark, sweeter than any straight-grain board she'd ever opened in thirty-eight years behind a saw.