The ones who did were mostly loyal holdouts ordering cabinets because they'd always ordered cabinets from the Sers, not because they couldn't get them cheaper at the warehouse store Wade Prescott's outfit supplied out on the bypass.
Colleen knew the silence better than anyone, though she rarely said so out loud. Saying it would have meant admitting that the thing she'd built with Emmett over thirty-eight years was shrinking season by season into something that might not survive another winter without a reason to keep going beyond habit.
Her sister was waiting up when she got in. Norah Hallstead, fifty-seven, was sharper with numbers than Colleen had ever been, the kind of woman who could look at a bank statement the way a doctor looks at an X-ray.
She'd been running the books on the shop since Emmett died, not because Colleen asked her to, but because Norah understood that grief makes a person forget to open envelopes, forget to invoice, forget that a business doesn't pause for mourning no matter how much it ought to.
"You went back to that yard."
It wasn't a question. Norah set a cup of coffee on the table between them the way she set most things between them these days: carefully, like she was placing a piece on a board in a game neither of them was sure they were winning.
"I did."
"Still thinking on it?"
"Colleen, we don't have room in the budget to think too long on something. Not this year.
You know that as well as I do."
She did know. She knew the number in their savings account as well as Norah did, maybe better, since she was the one who'd watched it shrink a little each of the last few seasons while orders dried up the way creeks dry up in August, so slowly you don't notice until the rocks start showing.
But she also knew what she'd felt standing in that mud with her hand against bark that was trying to tell her something the rest of the world had decided wasn't worth hearing.
Thirty-eight years of building furniture had taught her not to talk herself out of a feeling before she'd had the chance to test it.
Emmett used to say that about her, actually, that Colleen had a way of listening to wood the way some people listen to music, hearing things in the silence between the notes that nobody else could pick up.
He'd meant it as a compliment, though it sometimes sounded like a warning.
"Give me till spring. If I'm wrong, I'll go back to just cabinets, take whatever orders come in, and never speak of it again."
Norah studied her a long moment across that kitchen table.
She'd sat across from her sister enough times to know that when Colleen got quiet like this, when her voice dropped to that flat, steady register that sounded almost like calm but wasn't, arguing wasted breath.
It was the same tone she'd used the night Emmett died, standing in the emergency room with sawdust still on her boots, telling the attending physician that she understood, that he didn't need to repeat it, that she'd like a moment alone with her husband before anybody moved him.
"You're betting our winter on wood nobody wants," Norah finally said.
"I'm betting they never looked close enough."
She went back to Brier Creek three days later with a check that made her stomach turn a little when she wrote it. Not because the amount was large by most standards, because it wasn't, but because it represented a portion of what was left that she couldn't afford to be wrong about.
Money that was supposed to carry the shop through February if nothing else came in.
She folded the check once before handing it over, the way a person folds something they want to remember the weight of even after it's gone.
Ryland met her at the gate, chewing on the same confusion as everybody else in town.