She found her sister standing beside something that stopped her in the doorway.
Norah walked closer.
She reached out slowly, the way a person reaches toward something they don't quite trust to be real, and placed her hand next to Colleen's on the open face of the wood.
The grain moved under the light like something alive. Gold shifting to amber, shifting to brown, depending on the angle.
Each wave flowed into the next without a single straight line anywhere.
"Colleen."
Her voice was softer than it had been in months. Softer than it had been since the night Emmett died.
"Maybe it's beautiful. It's going to be a nightmare to work."
But she was smiling when she said it.
The first real smile Norah had seen on her sister's face since before the storm.
They stood there together for a while, two sisters with their hands on a piece of wood that had been alive longer than either of them, feeling under their palms the record of everything it had endured to become what it was.
Norah didn't mention the savings account. She didn't open any folder.
She didn't say a single word about money.
That silence was worth more than any number she could have put on a page. What followed was the hardest kind of patience.
The kind that looks like nothing to anyone watching from the outside.
The kind that makes neighbors slow their trucks when they drive past, shake their heads, and wonder what happened to the woman who used to produce furniture people could see.
Air-drying figured walnut is not the same as drying straight lumber.
Straight-grain boards can be stacked in a shed, given a few months of airflow, and brought down to working moisture content by late summer if the weather cooperates.
Figured wood moves in ways straight grain never does. The same internal forces that created those beautiful waves of color also make the board want to twist, cup, bow, and warp in every direction at once as the moisture leaves.
Rushing it means losing everything to cracks that open like fault lines across the face of the figure, destroying in a week what took sixty years to build.
Colleen constructed a drying shed behind the shop. Not a large structure, just big enough to hold the boards from the remaining logs.
She now had the confidence to cut each one open along the lines the wood itself had shown her how to follow.
She stacked them with stickers between every layer, narrow strips of dry pine that allowed air to pass evenly across every surface.
She checked the moisture content each week, pressing a pin meter into the end grain the way a nurse checks a pulse, reading the numbers with the careful attention of someone monitoring a patient who can't afford a setback.
Twelve months. That was what the wood needed.