Page 14 of Orcs Don’t Fake It

He holds my eyes one beat longer. Then he steps back, picks up his ear protection, and returns to the saw without another word.

But he does not turn the saw on.

He just stands there, huge and still, staring at the wall, and I get the distinct and deeply uncomfortable sense that the grumpiest man I have ever met just added me to a list.

A list of things he intends to fix.

I switch the bright act back on and reach for the tripod, and I ignore the warm, terrifying pull behind my ribs that has nothing at all to do with the numbers.

CHAPTER 8

OGGAN

She skips lunch again.

I clock it the way I clock a joist that has started to sag, slow at first, then all at once. Day one, she nibbles a granola bar and calls it a meal. Day two, nothing but coffee until three in the afternoon. Day three, I set a wrapped sandwich beside her laptop while she edits and come back an hour later to find it untouched, condensation pooling on the wax paper, her fingers still flying across the keys.

Her wrists have gone thin. Her cheekbones cut sharper than they did the day I ripped out her cabinets. When she stands too fast she grabs the nearest stud and waits for the room to settle, then smiles at no one and keeps going.

Nobody else says a word about it. The sponsors do not. The fast-talking manager who screams through the phone does not. The millions of strangers typing hearts under her face do not. They eat the bright, buzzing version of her and ask for seconds and never once wonder what it costs to make.

It costs everything. I have paid that exact bill.

Eleven years ago I worked a bridge job through a whole winter on cold coffee and spite, chasing a bonus that would buy me out of a bad contract. I got the bonus. I also got a collapse in the site trailer, flat on the floor, heart slamming sideways, the medic asking me when I last ate and me unable to answer him. The ceiling of that trailer has stayed behind my eyes ever since. Water stains shaped like continents. I look at it in my head every time I skip a meal now, which is why I never skip a meal now.

I have not handed anyone that story. Judanna has half of it. My mother has none. A man does not walk around giving strangers the shape of the night his own body quit on him. But standing here, in the ruins of this human's beautiful barn, as she chases a number until her hands shake, the whole memory sits right at the front of my skull, water stains and all, and I will burn a bridge before I let her learn that ceiling for herself.

So I start leaving food.

Nothing she can wave off to my face, because she waves off everything to my face. I leave it where she will find it alone. A hard-boiled egg on a paper towel beside the mouse. Two of them. A fistful of almonds in a folded napkin balanced on her camera bag. Jerky, the good kind, from Judanna's cousin who smokes it out past the county line. Cheese cut into cubes because a whole block asks too much of a person who treats food as optional.

I never mention it. I set it down when she steps out to charge a battery, and I am back at the saw before she returns, and I do not turn around when the small crinkle of the napkin reaches me, the pause, the quiet crunch.

It becomes a ritual neither of us admits to running. I leave. She eats. Neither of us speaks of it. By day three she has started leaving me things back, an energy bar in my toolbox, a cold water sweating on the sawhorse at the exact hour my throat goes dry, and I understand that we are feeding each other now, two people too stubborn to say the words out loud, saying them in eggs and jerky instead.

Day two of this, I come back from the truck to find a sticky note pressed to the table saw fence.

Was this you? it says. A little drawing of an egg with a question mark.

I take the note. I fold it into my shirt pocket where it stays. I do not answer.

The next morning there are two eggs waiting for me on the saw, and a note that says fine. thank you. eat your own eggs weirdo.

Something warm moves through my ribs and I have to stand still until it passes.

Judanna catches me buying the good jerky in bulk, three bags of it, and a wheel of cheese, and a case of the electrolyte drinks that taste like chalk but keep a body upright. She rings me up slow. She has the grin she gets right before she ruins my week.

"So," she says. "Groceries."

"For the site."

"For the site." She scans the cheese. "The site is eating a lot of protein lately."

"The site works long hours."

"Mm." She bags it. "Does the site have brown hair and a little camera and a smile you keep pretending you do not look at?"

I take my bags. I leave money on the counter. I do not answer her, which she takes, correctly, as the loudest answer I own.