"You're serious, then?"
"Dead serious."
"I've hauled walnut twenty years. Never seen anybody pay good money for wood twisted up like that."
Colleen looked at him the way she looked at most people who told her what couldn't be done, which was without any anger at all. Just a kind of quiet patience that made the other person feel like they'd missed a step somewhere without knowing where.
"You've hauled trees, Ryland. I'm looking for furniture."
He didn't have an answer for that.
They settled on a price that made him visibly uncomfortable taking, low enough that he kept glancing at the check like he expected her to ask for it back.
Colleen didn't haggle, but she didn't buy all sixty-three either.
She walked the row a second time, slower now, stopping at each of the eleven she'd marked in her memory three days before.
The ones with the tightest, angriest twist, the ones that had clearly fought the hardest against the wind long before any storm arrived to finish the argument.
That was when the black dually pulled through the gate.
Wade Prescott drove the way he did everything, which was with more engine than the situation required. He was forty-five years old, built like a man who'd once done physical labor but had spent the last decade supervising other people doing it instead.
He owned Prescott Millworks out on Route 9, the biggest lumber operation in the county, the kind of business that had started as a family sawmill two generations back but had grown into something that sold more particle board than solid wood these days.
Wade's trucks supplied the cabinet stock for every big-box retailer within a hundred miles.
He'd been buying up the best timber from Brier Creek for years at prices nobody else could match because nobody else moved the volume he did.
He stepped out of that truck already talking, the way powerful men in small counties learn to do, filling up the silence before anybody else has a chance to put something in it.
Two of his crew climbed out behind him and started walking the rows of straight timber stacked near the road. The good stuff, the logs that would run clean through a band saw without complaint.
Wade spotted Colleen's truck backed up to the far row. Spotted her standing beside the reject pile with a borrowed flatbed already half loaded with twisted logs.
He stopped walking, looked at the logs on her trailer, then looked at her.
The expression that crossed his face wasn't surprise exactly. It was the look of a man who's just been handed a joke he didn't have to write.
"Well, now."
His voice carried across the yard, reaching the loader operators, Ryland, and two drivers waiting for their rigs.
"Colleen Ser buying salvaged timber. Emmett would have had the sense to walk on past that pile."
He turned to Ryland with a grin that was meant for everyone within earshot.
"She's buying my scrap, Teague. Make sure she gets a receipt so she can write it off when it all splits to kindling."