She listened for a while, made notes, and held the phone against her shoulder while she opened the composition book to a fresh page.
The woman's voice carried something Norah recognized.
The sound of someone returning to a place they left too soon, carrying the receipt for a decision they'd paid more for than the sticker price suggested.
Wade's headboard had arrived on schedule, exactly as promised.
Kiln-dried walnut, machine-sanded, finished in polyurethane thick enough to see your reflection in.
It looked like furniture. It felt like furniture.
For about seven months, it performed the basic functions of furniture, which is to say it held a mattress off the floor without complaint.
Then the veneer began to separate.
Not dramatically, not all at once.
In small places at first, the corners where moisture from the bedroom air crept between the surface layer and the substrate beneath it.
Then along the top edge, a line of separation that grew a fraction wider each week, like a wound that never quite heals because the material underneath was never quite whole.
By month eight, the finish had cracked in three places.
The joints had loosened enough to creak when someone leaned against it.
The whole piece had developed a slight warp that no amount of shimming could correct because the warp wasn't in the legs.
It was in the wood itself, kiln-dried too fast, stressed too hard, built too quickly to hold its shape against the ordinary pressures of being used by people who live in a house that breathes.
"I should have waited," the woman told Norah. "I knew it when I canceled.
I just couldn't afford the time."
"You can't afford not to take the time," Norah replied.
Which was the most Colleen thing Norah had ever said, a sentence that would have surprised them both if either of them had stopped to notice.
"I'll put you on the list. It'll be about nine months.
Mrs. Ser will call you when the wood is ready."
She hung up, wrote the woman's name in the composition book, and sat for a moment looking at the page, then at the phone, then out the window at the shop where Colleen was working.
The sound of the hand plane came through the glass in a rhythm so steady it could have been breathing, so constant it had become the heartbeat of the property itself.
The sound that meant things were being built properly, which is to say slowly, which is to say with the kind of care that outlasts everything designed to replace it.