He paused long enough for the weight of that word to settle.
"Selling handmade one-offs in the front window from a shop that's struggling, using reject timber that no mill in the state would certify for commercial use, that doesn't look great for you. It doesn't look great for the store.
People start wondering about your standards."
Garland Denton had owned that shop for twenty-two years.
He'd survived recessions, bypass construction that diverted half his foot traffic, and the slow erosion of a customer base that increasingly preferred particle-board convenience over solid-wood permanence.
He was not a man who frightened easily.
But he was a man who understood arithmetic, the kind of arithmetic that included Wade Prescott's supply contracts on one side of the ledger and Colleen Ser's single unsold table on the other.
He called Colleen that evening.
His voice carried the particular strain of a man who is doing something he knows is wrong but has calculated the cost of doing otherwise.
"Colleen, I think we ought to pull that table from the window. Not because there's anything wrong with it, but because I can't afford to lose what I've got left over something that isn't selling."
The line was quiet for a long time, long enough for Garland to wonder whether she'd hung up.
She hadn't.
She was standing in her kitchen with the phone against her ear, looking out the window at the drying shed where the rest of her boards were stacked like a promise nobody had accepted yet.
Feeling something tighten in her chest that was part anger, part exhaustion, part the particular kind of loneliness that comes from being right about something the world isn't ready to agree with.
"I'll come get it Saturday," she finally said.
She didn't say anything else. She didn't ask why.
She didn't need to.
Wade Prescott's fingerprints were on every surface of that conversation without his name ever being mentioned.
That was how men like Wade operated. Not through direct confrontation, because direct confrontation leaves evidence.
Through pressure applied to the edges, through relationships leveraged so quietly that the person being squeezed wasn't sure whether they were being pushed or whether the walls were simply closing in on their own.
Saturday morning, she drove to Denton's.
She parked out front and sat in the truck for a moment, looking at the table still visible through the window, that grain still catching light in a way that made the glass look like it was holding water instead of air.
She opened her door.
A silver sedan she didn't recognize had pulled up behind her. Out-of-state plates, Virginia.
A man stepped out, mid-fifties, gray at the temples, wearing clothes that were expensive in a quiet way, the kind of expensive that doesn't need labels because it fits too well to be anything other than tailored.