Page 46 of Orcs Don’t Fake It
The window rolls up. The truck pulls out. I stand in the middle of the drowned road in a coat that smells like cedar and sawdust and him, and I don't chase it, because chasing it would be one more thing the camera could sell.
For one full minute I stand there and let the sun warm the top of my head and the mud go cold between my toes, and I understand something I've dodged for four years: the crowd was never the point. He was. This drowned, half-built house was. The person I am with nobody recording was.
Inside, my phone buzzes against the bucket lid.
Sixty thousand views.
The truck engine fades down the valley until the birds swallow it whole.
CHAPTER 26
OGGAN
The silence in the barn is deafening after she steps aside. I bend to my tools instead.
I gather my drills into their case, seat each one in its foam cradle. I coil the heavy extension cord over my forearm, elbow to thumb, elbow to thumb, a loop older than she has been alive. My father's loop. His father's before that. The steel latches on the case snap shut, one, then the other, loud as gunshots in the ringing quiet.
"Oggan, stop, look at me, I fired her on the spot, I am calling a lawyer tonight, I am going to bury her, I would never in a thousand years..."
"I gave you the dark parts of me." The tool case clacks closed. "That was the one thing in this world I still owned outright. And now it lives in six million strangers' pockets with a heart drawn on my hand and music underneath."
"Please." She steps into my path, small and fierce, both hands out like she means to physically stop four hundred pounds of loaded orc. "One hour. Give me one hour with a lawyer and I will prove to you I did not do this. I will show you the account. The purchase order. The date. Please, Oggan, do not walk out that door until you have looked at the proof, because if you leave right now believing this about me, I do not believe either of us survives it."
"Move." The word comes out gravel-low, and it costs me everything I have left to say it and mean nothing tender by it.
She holds her ground one heartbeat longer. Two. Then her hands drop, and she steps aside, and that surrender is worse than any fight she could have given me.
Her mouth works. Nothing else comes out of it.
I shoulder the case, hook the water heater box under my other arm, sling the coiled cord across my back, and I walk past her. Close enough to catch sawdust and drywall and the lemon thing she twists into her hair every morning. Close enough that my forearm brushes her shoulder in passing, and she makes a sound like a struck animal, low and awful.
At the door I keep my eyes forward.
If I turn around I will store her face. That is how I am built. I hold grain patterns and joist spans and the exact torque on a fitting for decades without trying. If I turn and take in that wet, wrecked, pleading face, I will carry it to my grave, and I have grief enough coming without adding a mural of it.
So I look at my truck. At the honest gray sky. At the tailgate I drop and the tools I load one careful piece at a time while behind me a woman I would have framed a hundred-year house for keeps saying my name into a barn that no longer holds me.
I climb in. The engine catches on the first crank. It always does. I built it to.
I pull out onto the county road, and the barndominium shrinks in my mirror, exposed studs and half a roof and half a dream, until the hill swallows the whole of it, the house and the girl and the fat yellow banner all at once.
The quiet comes back into the cab.
The quiet I like.
It sounds like nothing at all now. It sounds like the inside of a nailed-shut box.
I drive.
CHAPTER 27
JILLY
Gravel spits against my shins. I am running before my brain signs off on it, out the barn door, across the plywood ramp, down the drive, one arm flung out toward a truck that is already a red smear at the tree line.
"Oggan!"
His tailgate crests the hill. Then the cab roof. Then nothing at all but dust hanging gold in the afternoon light and the wet tick of my own pulse slamming in my ears.
