Page 48 of Orcs Don’t Fake It

I dig the heels of my hands into my eyes until sparks bloom behind them.

Then I stop.

The lawyer. That is first. Then the camera, out of the truss by its roots, smashed to plastic confetti. Then the storage unit, gutted of every hidden drive Patsy ever squirreled away in the dark.

And then, somehow, a way to reach a man who does not own a working notification, who owes me nothing, who has every honest reason on earth to hate the sight of me, and make him understand that the girl in that stolen grainy video meant every single second of it.

I stand up. My legs hold under me.

For once in my entire adult life, this does not get fixed on camera.

It gets fixed for real, with sweat and a lawyer and a long apology I have no idea how to deliver, and if fixing it costs me the whole shining brand I bled a decade to build, then it costs me the whole shining thing and I will not miss it.

I drag the extension ladder across the concrete, plant its feet, and climb up into the truss. My fingers find the little black eye wedged in the shadow of the beam. I get a nail behind it, and I lever, and I rip it out of my house by its roots, and it comes free with a crack of cheap plastic and a snapped wire.

I close my fist around it and I do not let go the whole climb down.

Then I stand in the middle of the barn we built together, with the ruined camera biting into my palm and the ridge beam waiting on its sawhorses and the whole quiet weight of everything I have to fix, and I make myself a promise, out loud, to an empty house.

"I'm going to earn him back," I tell the studs. "However long it takes."

The house does not answer. It just settles around me, tick and creak, holding.

I get to work.

CHAPTER 28

OGGAN

Iown the workshop now.

I could buy it today. This morning. Cash on the counter, no loan, no signature but mine. Forty isolated acres, a good tight pole barn with a slab already poured, and a gravel road that dead-ends at nothing but tree line and my own quiet. Judanna keeps the listing pinned to the corkboard behind her register, faded now at the corners. I have stood in front of that scrap of paper a thousand times over two years and let myself want it.

I stood in front of it last night too, alone in my cabin, a cold plate of eggs going gray on the table, the number I finally have written on a sticky note beside my keys.

The cabin is exactly the way I always wanted it. No screens. No neighbors close enough to hear a hammer. Just the woodstove ticking and the wind working the pines and forty years of my own careful silence banked up around me like snow against a door.

Nothing moved in me.

A win is supposed to light something. A man scrapes and saves and goes without for two years, and when the last dollar finally lands, something in the chest is supposed to catch and burn. Mine sat there cold. I ate three bites of egg. I slept four hours on top of the covers. I got up in the dark and drove to the only store in the county before the OPEN sign flipped, because the cabin had gone too loud with quiet to stay in.

Now I set a box of three-inch deck screws on the worn wood of Judanna's counter.

She rings them up without looking, because she has rung up my screws for fifteen years and could do it stone blind in a blackout.

"How much you sleeping," she says.

"Enough."

"Liar." She bags the box. Then she plants both forearms on the counter and pins me with the flat green stare that ended our marriage and saved our friendship inside the same brutal afternoon. "You look like a man who fell in a hole and then pulled the dirt down on top of himself for privacy."

"I have work."

"You have no work. You quit the only job in this whole county that got you out of bed with a spring in your step, and do not you dare tell me it was about the money, because you and I go back to when we were both sapling-tall, and you have never once in your life been happy about a dollar."

I pick up my bag. "The girl put a camera on us. Sold me to the whole internet."

"Mm."