Because Norah had always been the one who stood between Colleen's work and the world that wanted to buy it.
People who already knew Colleen's name before Norah said it.
People who used words like heirloom, legacy, generational, instead of just table or cabinet.
People who understood without being told that what they were asking for couldn't be rushed.
Norah didn't say, "I told you so," because she hadn't told Colleen so.
She'd told Colleen the opposite.
She'd argued against the purchase, pushed back on the spending, shown her the numbers that proved this was a mistake.
She'd been wrong.
Being wrong gracefully is one of the harder skills a person can develop, requiring more strength than being right.
Because being right just takes information, while being wrong takes character.
The commissions came.
A dining table for a family in Roanoke who wanted something their grandchildren would eat breakfast on.
A set of cabinet doors for a kitchen renovation in Savannah that the architect had almost finished before discovering that no commercial wood could match the vision she'd had for the space.
A headboard for a woman in the Shenandoah Valley renovating her grandmother's farmhouse.
A woman who told Colleen over the phone that she wanted the bedroom to feel the way it had when she was a child sleeping there during summers, back when the world felt permanent.
Each commission took months.
The wood dictated the schedule.
Colleen set her prices fair, lower than demand would have allowed, higher than charity, at a point that respected both the labor involved and the material's right to be valued for what it was.
She turned down every request to rush, every offer to pay a premium for faster delivery, every suggestion that she hire an assistant, expand the shop, or scale the operation to meet the demand that was growing past what one woman working alone could supply.
"The wood tells you when it's ready," she told one customer who called to push harder than most, a man from Atlanta who was accustomed to buying speed with money. "Not the calendar.
Not your checkbook."
Then Wade Prescott escalated.
Not because he cared about furniture. Not because Colleen's small commissions threatened his industrial lumber business in any measurable way.
Because men like Wade do not tolerate being proven wrong by people they've already dismissed, especially not by a woman working alone from a shop they've been waiting to buy.