When the light caught the top at an angle, the figure seemed to move. Gold flowing into brown, flowing into amber, rippling across the surface like water holding still only because you happened to be looking at it.
She carried it to the truck herself and drove it twelve miles to Denton's, a small furniture shop in town that sold her cabinets on consignment, mostly out of friendship.
Mostly because Garland Denton had known Emmett since high school and still felt an obligation to the name, even though the name wasn't bringing customers through his door the way it used to.
Garland helped set the table in the front window without saying much about it.
He ran his hand across the top once, raised his eyebrows, and nodded in the way men in that part of the country nod when they see something they don't fully understand but know enough not to dismiss.
He put a price tag on it that Colleen set herself, higher than her cabinets, lower than the wood deserved.
Nobody bought it that first week.
People walked past the window the way people walk past anything unfamiliar in a town where familiarity is the primary currency.
A few stepped inside, ran their fingers over the top, asked the price, made a face that suggested the number was unreasonable, and walked back out.
A man in a Prescott Millworks cap, whether by coincidence or instruction, stood in the shop long enough to say he could get a plainer table for half the money at the big-box store out on the bypass.
Garland Denton didn't respond to that, which was the politest form of disagreement available to a man standing in his own store.
The second week passed. Nothing.
The third week, the table sat in that window like a question nobody was interested in answering.
Colleen drove past Denton's twice without stopping because stopping would have meant looking at the table still sitting there unsold.
Which would have meant confronting the possibility that she'd spent a year drying wood, two months learning to cut it, weeks building a piece of furniture from it, only to discover that nobody wanted what she'd found any more than they'd wanted the trees it came from.
She didn't stop.
She didn't complain at home.
She went back to her shop each morning and kept working the remaining boards because a woman who'd waited twelve months for a board to dry was not going to lose her nerve over three slow weeks in a shop window.
Then Wade Prescott walked into Denton's on a Thursday afternoon.
Garland was behind the counter when the door opened. He knew the sound of Wade's boots before he saw the man, the way you know the sound of something heavy approaching a floor that wasn't built to hold it.
Wade didn't browse.
He walked straight to the counter the way a man walks to a counter when he's come to deliver a message, not buy merchandise.
He leaned against it with both hands, lowering his voice just enough to sound confidential without actually being quiet.
"Garland, I'm going to level with you. I've got contracts with three retail chains that stock your shelves.
I'm not saying that's leverage. I'm saying it's a relationship."