The Shenandoah woman wasn't the only one.
Over the following months, two more customers who'd taken Wade's offers returned to Colleen's list.
A kitchen island that had delaminated along the glue joints within a year.
A bookcase whose shelves had bowed under the weight of books they were supposedly rated to hold because the boards had been cut from wood dried so aggressively that the cellular structure had collapsed in places invisible to the eye but fatal to the fiber.
The way a bone weakened by disease can look solid in an X-ray but shatter under a weight a healthy bone would carry without notice.
Wade Prescott didn't lose his business.
Men like Wade don't lose their businesses because their businesses are built on volume, not on quality, on contracts that renew automatically, on relationships with retail chains that care about price per unit, not about grain pattern or joinery or whether a table will still be standing in fifty years.
He lost something more specific than his business.
He lost the part of the market that runs on reputation.
The part where people talk to each other about what they've bought, where they bought it, whether it lasted, whether it was worth the wait.
He lost the customers who tell other customers, the ones whose opinions compound over years the way interest compounds in a savings account.
Norah understood that slowly at first, then with a momentum that no amount of advertising can manufacture because it isn't manufactured.
It's earned.
The county never received another complaint about the Ser property.
Wade's name was never attached to the first one. It didn't need to be.
Everyone in the county understood the arithmetic of that situation the same way they understood the arithmetic of weather without needing to see the calculations, just by looking at the sky.
Furman Odell came by the shop one afternoon in October.
He didn't knock because he'd never knocked, because in that part of the country a closed door means come in, a locked door means I'm not home, and standing on the porch without entering means you've got something to say that you haven't figured out how to say yet.
Furman was standing on the porch.
Colleen came to the door with plane shavings in her hair the way she used to come to the door when Emmett was alive, when the shop ran long hours, when there was always some part of the work clinging to some part of her when she stepped outside it.
"I owe you something," Furman said.
He was looking at the shop behind her, at the light coming through the open bay door, at the boards stacked along the walls with their figured grain catching afternoon sun in colors that made the whole building look like it was holding a sunset inside.
"You don't owe me a thing, Furman."
"I told you those trees might not be worth the trouble. Stood right there in your yard looking at that burn pile, thinking I was being kind, thinking I was sparing you from a mistake your father would have warned you about."