The conversation with Norah was harder.
Norah didn't stop by. Norah lived with the numbers, slept beside them, woke up to them every morning the way Colleen woke up to the smell of the shop.
She came over on a Tuesday evening with a folder she'd been building for weeks. Bank statements, printed expenses highlighted in yellow, the kind of folder that looks calm on the outside but carries a verdict on every page.
"Sit down, Colleen."
They sat at the kitchen table, the same table Emmett had built from white oak thirty years before. The same table where they'd planned the business, raised prices, lowered them again, calculated what they could afford each season the way farmers calculate rain.
Norah opened the folder like a doctor opening a chart.
"After that check to Brier Creek, after the blades, after the fuel to haul those logs, we're down to enough to keep the lights on through February. Maybe March if nothing breaks.
There's no room for another mistake."
Colleen looked at the numbers. She didn't challenge them.
Norah's numbers were always right. That was the cruelest thing about Norah's numbers.
They never gave you the comfort of being wrong.
"You're betting our winter on this. My winter, too, since I put my name next to yours on that shop account last year.
I need you to tell me the truth. Not what you hope.
Not what you feel. The truth."
Colleen sat with that for a moment.
The truth was complicated. The truth was that she'd spent two months failing at something she believed in without being able to explain why she believed in it.
The truth was that eight logs still lay in her yard uncut, waiting, holding whatever they were holding inside grain too twisted for any commercial operation to bother with.
The truth was that she missed Emmett so fiercely some mornings that she started the saw just to fill the shop with noise because silence in that building was the loudest sound she knew.
"I might have made a mistake," she said. "I won't know until I look inside one that holds together.
Give me till spring. If nothing comes of it, I'll go back to cabinets, take whatever work comes in, sell the logs for firewood."
"That's not a plan, Colleen. That's a prayer."
"Sometimes that's all you've got left to work with."
Norah closed the folder.
She didn't agree. She didn't storm out.
She sat there for a long time looking at her older sister across a table built by a dead man they both still loved, trying to decide whether what she was looking at was faith or foolishness or something so close to the line between them that it didn't matter which side it fell on.