There’s a difference between steady work and steady strain. The first wears you like a good coat—the seams hold and the warmth is reliable. The second is a slow pressure: a constant weight that asks for more of your attention than you sometimes have to give. The Collins mill project had handed us both kinds. It also handed us a lesson we could not afford to learn in theory: you can plan for risk on paper and still be caught by the live, messy kind.
It began, as many crises do, with one small miscalculation.
We were a month into the full mill rotation. The city crew ran like a second heart to our operation—Mateo had the on-site discipline, Jonah had grown into a man who could call a crew together and be listened to, and Rosa’s eye for detail stopped a dozen tiny problems before they swell
