The whole book turns on the butterfly effect — the idea that one small change ripples outward in ways you never see coming. Fix one thing, something else shifts. Pull one thread, the whole fabric looks different.

Which, naturally, got me thinking about Intertwined. I cannot read a time-travel novel without turning it into a small-business reflection. It's a condition. I've accepted it.

This week I went back and read some old emails from around this time last year. And the year before. There were emails about our handpainted mugs from Guatemala. Emails about leather earrings.

Remember the leather earrings? As my friend Ann would say, "Bless them."

We launched those earrings with such good intentions. Our Afghan friends here in Greensboro — the women I often call A & Z because we can't use their names publicly — needed work. They're incredibly skilled seamstresses who make our amazing pillows and frame our vintage textiles. I wanted to figure out something else they could make. So we made leather earrings. A lot of leather earrings.

In hindsight, if I'd done better market research, I probably would've known the leather earring moment had mostly passed. They were not destined to be our breakout product.

Were they a mistake? Business-wise, maybe. But only a mistake? That's where I get stuck.

Because those earrings also meant paid work for two women who had just arrived in Greensboro after fleeing Afghanistan. They meant dignity. A little more income. A little more footing in a country where everything had changed almost overnight.

If I could go back, would I do some things differently? Yes. I'd test smaller batches. Ask better questions. Listen more carefully to what the market was actually saying instead of what I was hoping was true.

But if I changed that decision, what else changes with it? Do A & Z have less work during a season when they really needed it? Do I learn less about what it means to build something that tries to hold both mission and reality at the same time? Is Intertwined a little more cautious now and maybe a little less itself?

I don't know. That's the thing about the butterfly effect. You don't get to pull one thread without moving the others.

Going back through those old emails reminded me how many lives are woven into this little business. Artisans in Guatemala, Morocco, Nepal, Uganda. Women right here in Greensboro. Products that worked, products that didn't, experiments that surprised me, and a few ideas that made me quietly say, "Well. We won't be doing that again."

But it also reminded me that not every impact shows up in the numbers.

Sometimes it looks like a best-selling blanket. Sometimes it looks like a cooperative getting a meaningful order. Sometimes it looks like a woman being paid for her time and skill, even when the product never quite finds its audience.

I'm trying to hold all of it with more grace. These past few years haven't been a straight line. More like a handwoven textile — uneven in places, beautiful in places, with knots and color changes I didn't fully understand until much later.

Maybe that's true of most good things.

We learn. We adjust. We keep going. We don't get to go back through a time bubble and undo every decision, but we do get to look back honestly. To notice what changed us.

And then keep weaving from here.