Not the three or four months that commercial lumber usually required. A full year of sitting in shade, breathing, releasing its moisture slowly enough that the figure held together instead of tearing itself apart.
Twelve months of a shop that appeared from the road to be producing absolutely nothing.
The neighbors noticed.
People in small towns notice everything, especially inactivity, especially when that inactivity belongs to someone they've already decided is in trouble.
Trucks slowed on Keller Road the way they slow past a house where someone has been sick a long time.
Conversations at the feed store included Colleen the way weather includes places that have been damaged, casually, without malice, with the certainty of people who believe they already know how the story ends.
She heard the talk because you always hear the talk in a county that size.
Heard that people thought she'd given up. Heard that Wade Prescott had told someone at the Rotary lunch that the Ser property would be on the market by fall.
Heard that Furman Odell had defended her at the hardware store, told a man who was speculating about her finances that he ought to mind his own garden before he started counting the weeds in someone else's.
She heard all of it.
She let none of it change what she was doing, which was waiting.
Letting the wood breathe, letting the moisture leave at its own pace, letting the figure settle into the boards the way a memory settles into a person slowly, deeply, in a way that won't let go once it's finally found its place.
When the wood was finally ready, more than a year after she'd first pressed her hand against that bark in the mud at Brier Creek, Colleen built one small side table.
Nothing grand, nothing designed to make a statement, just something to teach her own hands the material before she trusted herself with anything larger.
She chose mortise-and-tenon joinery instead of screws because a board that had already survived a storm, a saw, and a year of drying without cracking deserved joints that would hold through whatever came next.
Joints that locked together through friction and geometry, the oldest form of faith one piece of wood can place in another.
She hand-planed the top instead of running it through the machine sander.
Sanding figured grain too aggressively tears the very waves that make it valuable, ripping the softer fibers between the dense curls of reaction wood and turning beauty into fuzz.
A hand plane pulled slow and careful, with the blade set shallow enough to take shavings thinner than paper, reveals the figure instead of erasing it.
Each pass brought more of the pattern to the surface. More gold, more amber, more of that deep chocolate movement that seemed to shift under the light like something not quite finished becoming what it was.
The curls of each shaving fell soft on the shop floor.
The smell of fresh oil soaking into open grain filled the building for days afterward, a smell so particular to figured walnut that Colleen sometimes caught herself standing still in the middle of the shop just breathing it.
The way a person breathes in the scent of a place they thought they'd lost.
She finished the table in hand-rubbed oil.
Nothing glossy, nothing that hid the wood behind a shine, just enough to bring the grain to life and seal the surface against moisture without covering the story written in it.