"Spring," Norah said, one word, the way you say the name of a place you're not sure you'll reach.
Two weeks later, on a morning cold enough to see her breath in the shop, Colleen heard the sound of a truck pulling into the drive.
Not a customer's truck. She knew the sound of Wade Prescott's diesel before she ever saw the black dually through the window, the way a person learns to recognize a headache before the pain fully arrives.
He came alone this time. No crew behind him, no audience to perform for.
He stepped out wearing a jacket that cost more than Colleen's best saw, boots clean enough to prove he hadn't walked through mud to get anywhere that mattered in quite some time.
He stood at the edge of the yard looking at the eight remaining logs, the ruined boards stacked by the burn pile, the shop with its paint peeling along the south wall where the weather hit hardest.
Colleen came out to meet him because not coming out would have given him the satisfaction of thinking she was hiding.
She stood on her side of the yard the way a person stands on their own land when they know somebody is about to try to take it from them.
"Colleen."
He said her name like he owned the first syllable.
"I'm going to be straight with you because I respected Emmett even if we didn't always see eye to eye on business."
"Emmett didn't see eye to eye with you because you undercut his suppliers twice before he stopped doing business with your outfit entirely. But go ahead.
Be straight."
The directness caught him off guard for about half a second.
He recovered the way men like Wade always recover, by pretending the hit hadn't landed.
"I'm expanding the mill, buying property along Keller Road for a drying operation. Your lot sits right where I need it.
I'm prepared to make you a fair offer. More than fair, considering..."
He gestured at the shop, the logs, the burn pile.
"Considering how things are going."
Colleen felt the ground shift under her in a way that had nothing to do with the mud.
He wasn't here to gloat about the timber yard. He wasn't here to laugh at her twisted logs.
He was here to take the shop, the building Emmett had framed with his own hands, the property her father-in-law had cleared before Emmett was born, the last physical thing in the world that still smelled like her husband when she opened it up on a cold morning.
"The shop's not for sale."
"Everything's for sale, Colleen. That's not cynicism.
That's just how the world works when the bills come due."