The third log she ruined outright, cracked clean through from tension nobody could have seen until the saw released it.
The way a bone breaks along a fracture that was always there, waiting for exactly the wrong kind of pressure.
Weeks of patience gone to kindling in about four seconds flat.
She stood over that third log for a long while without saying anything, hands at her sides, sawdust settling on her boots like snow falling on a grave.
Three logs down, three failures. The check she'd written at Brier Creek now converted into broken boards stacked by the burn pile, worth less than the diesel it would take to haul them away.
Eight logs remaining. Savings account thinner than it had been in twenty years.
Shop still quiet. Phone still not ringing.
A neighbor stopped by that week the way neighbors in that part of the country stopped by, which is without calling first and without bringing a reason.
Just showing up at the edge of the property with a coffee thermos because standing near someone who's struggling is sometimes the only useful thing a person can do.
Furman Odell was seventy-four years old, a retired contractor who'd known Colleen's father, watched her grow up, and stood at the back of the church the day she married Emmett with a look on his face that said he approved but wasn't going to embarrass anybody by saying so out loud.
He'd built half the barns in the county during his working years. He understood wood the way most people understand weather, as something that happens to you whether you're ready for it or not.
He stood looking over the ruined boards stacked by the burn pile, hands wrapped around his thermos, saying nothing for long enough that the silence became its own kind of statement.
"Might be the storm did more than twist those trees, Colleen."
His voice carried the careful weight of a man who'd earned the right to say hard things by spending a lifetime saying very few things at all.
"Some things aren't worth the trouble they cost. Your daddy would have known that."
Colleen didn't argue. She didn't have much to argue with yet.
Good money gone. Two months of work gone.
Nothing to show for it but broken boards, dull blades, and a yard that smelled like failure dressed up in walnut dust.
She respected Furman too much to pretend the evidence was on her side.
"Might be right," she said. "Won't know till one holds together."
Furman looked at her the way he'd looked at her father thirty years ago when the old man had decided to clear a field everybody told him was too rocky to plow.
The old man had cleared it anyway, broken two plows doing it, planted corn in soil that was more gravel than dirt, and harvested a crop that surprised everybody, including himself.
Furman had never forgotten that.
He wondered, standing there in the sawdust, whether Colleen had forgotten it either.
He left without giving advice, which was the kindest thing he could have done.