He wasn't holding a clipboard.
His hands were in his jacket pockets, the way a person stands when they're trying to look casual about something that isn't casual at all.
Something they've been thinking about since before dawn. Something they did in the dark before anyone else arrived because they wanted it finished by the time the person it was meant for showed up.
He didn't say much.
Ryland had learned something about saying less over the past two years.
Had discovered what Colleen had known for decades, what Emmett had known before her, what every person who works with their hands eventually learns if they work long enough with materials that don't talk back.
That silence isn't the absence of communication.
It's the form communication takes when words would only get in the way of what's actually being said.
"Figured you'd want first look."
Colleen stood at the edge of the pallets.
Eleven logs. Twisted, torqued bark spiraled tight enough to tell her without touching them that these trees had spent their lives on an exposed ridge, leaning into wind that never let up.
Growing denser with every year, stronger with every storm.
Building inside themselves a record of endurance that no one would ever see unless someone decided it was worth cutting open.
She looked at the logs, then at Ryland.
A young man who'd once stood in the same yard with a half-caught laugh stuck in his throat, watching a woman he didn't understand pay good money for wood he'd been taught was worthless.
A young man who'd handed over the check that day with visible discomfort, who'd asked why those particular logs and not the others, who'd received an answer that wasn't really an answer because the truth was too early in its own becoming to be spoken aloud.
He was older now.
Not by much. By enough.
By the amount of time it takes to watch someone prove you wrong in a way that doesn't make you feel stupid, but makes you feel like you've been given something.
A new way of seeing a material you've handled every day of your working life without once considering the possibility that handling it, grading it, pricing it, and shipping it are not the same as understanding it.
She didn't say thank you.
Thank you would have turned the gesture into a transaction, which would have diminished it, because what Ryland had done wasn't a favor.
It was recognition.
The same recognition she'd given the wood on that first morning.