He pulled a folded piece of paper from his jacket.
"I had a number drawn up. You should at least look at it before you decide."
She didn't take the paper. She didn't look at it.
She looked at Wade Prescott the way a woman looks at a man who has just confirmed every suspicion she's ever had about him.
Not with hatred, because hatred takes too much energy, but with a clarity so sharp it could have cut glass.
"The shop's not for sale, Wade. Not this year, not next year, not the year after that.
You can take that number back to whoever drew it up for you."
He held the paper out for another moment, then folded it back into his jacket with the practiced ease of a man who expected this answer but had a longer game in mind.
"I'll ask again when winter comes," he said.
Not a threat exactly. Something worse.
A prediction delivered with the calm certainty of a man who believed the weather was on his side.
He drove off.
Colleen stood in the yard watching the dust settle behind his tires, hands steady at her sides, heart hammering somewhere behind her ribs where steadiness hadn't reached yet.
The shop behind her. The eight uncut logs beside her.
The burn pile in front of her, stacked with proof that she might be wrong about everything.
She went inside, picked up a piece of chalk, and walked to the fourth log, the one she'd been studying longest, the one with the tightest spiral she'd ever seen in forty years of looking at trees.
She ran her hand along the bark one more time, not reading it now, not guessing, just listening the way she'd been listening to wood her whole life, the way Emmett had taught her, the way her own hands had taught her things Emmett never could.
Then she set the chalk down because she realized she wasn't ready yet.
The wood was telling her to wait the same way it had told her to come to the yard that first morning, the same way it had told her which eleven logs to buy out of sixty-three.
Patience wasn't weakness. It was the only language this wood understood.
She closed the shop, turned off the lights, and walked back to the house where Norah was sitting at the kitchen table with the folder still closed in front of her.
Neither of them said what they both knew, which was that spring was a long way off when winter was already sharpening its teeth outside the window.
That night, Colleen lay awake in a bed that was still too wide for one person, listening to the wind push against the west wall of the house.
She heard in it the same sound those trees must have heard for sixty years on an open hillside.
The sound of something that wanted you to fall down.