"However long the wood needs."
He paid the price on the tag without negotiating.
He asked whether she'd consider commissions.
She told him she'd consider it once she had more material ready to work.
He left his card on Garland's counter, shook Colleen's hand a second time at the door, and loaded the table into his sedan with a care that suggested he understood he was carrying something that couldn't be replaced.
Garland Denton stood behind his counter after the door closed, looking at the space where the table had been and holding a receipt that represented more money than he'd made on any single piece in the last six months.
He picked up his phone, put it down, picked it up again, and called Colleen's cell before she'd reached the highway.
"If you build another one, the window's open."
She didn't remind him why the window had almost closed.
She just said she'd let him know when the next piece was ready, which was its own kind of grace, the kind that costs more to give than most people realize.
Word traveled the way it travels in the furniture world, slowly, through the hands of people who still touch what they buy before they buy it.
Thornton Graves showed the table to a collector in Richmond who showed photographs to a dealer in Washington who mentioned it at a restoration conference to a woman who wrote for a small woodworking magazine out of Vermont.
Three paragraphs, one photograph. That was all the magazine gave it.
A caption read: "Rural North Carolina cabinetmaker working rejected storm timber produces figured walnut of extraordinary character."
The photograph showed the tabletop from above, lit by a window, the grain rippling across the surface like a topographic map of something too beautiful to be terrain.
A cabinetmaker two states north called the shop number listed in the article just to ask what species the wood really was.
Disbelieving that American black walnut could hold figure like that without being imported from somewhere exotic, he listened while Colleen told him what she told Thornton Graves, plainly and without embellishment because the truth didn't need any.
"It grew right there on a hillside that spent sixty years fighting wind. The storm didn't make it beautiful.
The storm just knocked it down so somebody could finally see what was inside."
She kept that magazine clipping folded inside a drawer in her workbench.
The drawer where she kept Emmett's last chisel, his reading glasses, and the pencil stub he'd been using to mark a measurement the morning his heart stopped.
Things that mattered without needing to look at them often. Things that stayed where they were put because the person they belonged to had earned a permanent place.
The phone started ringing.
Not often, not every day, but with a consistency that Norah noticed before Colleen did because Norah was the one answering it while Colleen was in the shop.