It was the kind of sound a young man makes when he sees something that doesn't fit inside his understanding of how the world is supposed to work.
"Storm must have twisted them somehow," Ryland offered once he'd recovered himself. "Standing timber doesn't grow like that.
Natural grain spiraled clean through. Tears the blade, warps as soon as it dries.
Can't run lumber out of it. Not lumber anybody wants anyway."
Colleen didn't look up.
"Didn't ask if anybody wanted it. Asked what happened to it."
Ryland didn't have a real answer for that. Nobody at Brier Creek did.
The storm itself had come through two nights before, a wall of wind that moved sideways instead of down. The kind old-timers said only showed up once in a generation.
The kind that didn't just knock trees over, but rearranged the way they'd been standing for decades. It had taken a barn clean off its foundation, taken half a hayfield three miles off, and deposited a fishing boat in the middle of a soybean field where no fishing boat had any right to be.
What it hadn't taken was whatever Colleen Ser was looking for, crouched low with her palm pressed flat against bark that still smelled like the storm.
Out of sixty-three trees, she only wanted to look closely at eleven of them, walking past the straighter ones without so much as slowing her boots.
The ones she stopped at were the worst of the lot by every measure a timber operation knows how to apply. Trunks torqued so hard the bark had split in places.
Grain spiraled tight enough to make a sawyer wince just looking at it.
Trees that had clearly spent their whole lives fighting something long before any storm arrived to finish the conversation.
She didn't say what she saw. She didn't say anything at all for a long while.
She just kept moving log after log, running her thumb along the twist in each one like she was reading something written there in a language only she still remembered.
Ryland watched from the gate, clipboard forgotten against his leg, not sure whether he was watching patience or stubbornness or something he didn't have a word for yet.
That was the first thing the whole yard would spend the next month wondering about. Not why the logs were rejected.
That much was plain enough by noon.
But why a woman everybody in three counties respected, yet nobody quite understood, was willing to drive all the way out to a muddy timber yard to put her hands on wood a commercial mill had already written off as waste.
Colleen drove home that evening past her own shop on Keller Road, a building that had been her husband's before it was hers, before it was theirs, before it became hers alone again four years ago when Emmett's heart quit on him in the middle of finishing a cherry bookcase for the Prestons down in Westville.
He'd fallen right there beside the lathe, still holding a chisel, which was exactly the way Emmett Ser would have chosen to go if anybody had given him a choice in the matter.
Nobody had given him a choice. Nobody ever does.
The shop sat quiet now. There had been a time when the bell over that door rang most mornings, when orders came in faster than two people could fill them, when the smell of sawdust met you at the road before you even turned into the drive.
These last few years, the bell rang less. Fewer customers came through.