She didn't advertise. She never had and never needed to.
Norah handled the calls now, sitting at the kitchen table most mornings with a notebook she'd bought specifically for this purpose.
A ruled composition book she'd picked up at the dollar store because Norah didn't see the point in spending money on things that served a function rather than a feeling.
She answered each inquiry with the same gentle directness, explaining the wait times to people who sometimes tried to negotiate, sometimes tried to jump the line with larger deposits, sometimes tried the particular kind of flattery that assumes a craftsperson will work faster if you tell them they're an artist.
Norah declined these offers with a firmness that surprised even Colleen.
She'd expected her sister to suggest taking the extra money, the way she'd expected Norah to push for expansion, for efficiency, for all the sensible financial moves that sensible financial people recommend when demand exceeds supply.
Instead, Norah had arrived at a position Colleen hadn't anticipated, a position that had nothing to do with numbers.
"If you speed up, you become Wade Prescott," Norah told her once over coffee in a rare moment of philosophical clarity that caught them both off guard.
"You start measuring the wood by how fast it moves through the shop instead of how long it took to grow. The whole point of what you do is that you don't do that."
Colleen looked at her sister across that table, across the years they'd spent sitting at it disagreeing about money, about risk, about the gap between what a balance sheet says is possible and what a pair of hands says is true.
She didn't say thank you because thank you would have been too small for what Norah had just given her.
Proof that someone who had spent her whole life believing in arithmetic had finally encountered a truth that arithmetic couldn't hold.
One customer pushed harder than most.
A man from Atlanta, the kind of man who ran three businesses from his phone, who'd built his life on the principle that speed is the same as quality as long as nobody looks too closely.
He called four times in two weeks trying to get Colleen to move his commission ahead of others on the list, offering to double the deposit, triple it, whatever it took to get the wood cut faster, dried faster, built faster.
Norah handed Colleen the phone on the fourth call because there are limits to what a sister can absorb on someone else's behalf.
"Mr. Hadley, I'm going to tell you what the wood would tell you if it could talk, which it can't, so I have to do it instead."
She let the silence settle.
"The wood tells you when it's ready. Not the calendar.
Not your checkbook. If you can wait, I'll build you something your family will still be eating breakfast on when your grandchildren have grandchildren.
If you can't wait, I understand. There's a furniture warehouse on every highway in America that will sell you something by Friday."
He waited.
The call from the Shenandoah Valley came in June, eight months after the woman had canceled her headboard commission to take Wade Prescott's offer of a factory-built alternative delivered in two weeks.
Norah answered.