The willingness to look past what something appears to be and see what it actually is.
Gratitude would have been appropriate. Acknowledgment was enough.
She walked to the nearest log, crouched beside it, and pressed her thumb along the deepest groove in the bark, reading the spiral the way she'd read every piece of wood she'd ever built with.
Every board she'd ever planed. Every surface she'd ever trusted enough to turn into something meant to outlast her.
The bark was still wet from the storm, cold against her skin, rough with the particular roughness of walnut that has spent decades growing harder than it needed to be because the wind gave it no choice.
The bark told her what it always told her.
That the wood beneath it had a story.
That the story was written in a language most people had forgotten how to read.
That reading it required nothing more complicated than patience.
Nothing more expensive than attention.
Nothing more powerful than the willingness to believe that something the rest of the world has given up on might be the most valuable thing in the yard.
She stood and nodded at Ryland.
The same nod she'd given him on that first morning, brief, certain, carrying everything that needed to be carried without a single unnecessary word.
Colleen Ser never did get rich.
Not by the standards most people mean when they use the word.
She didn't buy a bigger shop. She didn't hire a crew.
She didn't put her name on a sign out by the highway where Wade Prescott's trucks passed six times a day on their way to deliver furniture that would need replacing before the payments were finished.
She didn't franchise, diversify, scale, optimize, or do any of the things business magazines tell people they're supposed to do when demand exceeds what a single pair of hands can supply.
What she built instead was something slower, something steadier, something that couldn't be measured on a balance sheet but could be felt in the weight of a table that would still be standing when the children of the people who bought it had children of their own.
A reputation that traveled further than advertising ever could, carried by the hands of people who touched the grain, felt the figure moving under their palms, and understood without being told that what they were touching had been alive for sixty years before it became furniture.
Had survived storm. Had survived wind.
Had survived the slow daily pressure of standing upright in a world that makes falling down so much easier.
She built a timber yard that had learned to look twice before it threw something away.
A sister who had learned to count things that don't fit inside numbers.