Page 49 of Orcs Don’t Fake It

"Every part of me I keep dark. Up on a screen for strangers to paw over and rate." The words scrape out of me raw. "You told me once. Years back. Humans run too soft for the truth of us. You were right the first time and I was a fool to forget it."

Judanna does not blink. Does not flinch. "I said that at twenty-two, spitting mad because you loved the forge more than you loved dancing with me at Karrig's wedding. I was dead wrong then, and you are dead wrong now, and here is the whole difference between the two of us, Oggan Warhip. I own it when I'm wrong. You bury it in the yard and pour a slab on top."

"She profited off..."

"Did she." Judanna straightens to her full considerable height. Reaches under the counter. Slaps her tablet down on the wood between us and spins it hard to face me. "Or did the shark she pays profit, while the girl found out the same rotten hour you did? You even ask her? Or did you just load your truck and run for your hole?"

The screen glows up at me. A frozen frame. Jilly, on my barn floor, firelight on her face, her small hand fisted in the front of my shirt like she is holding on through a storm.

"I am not looking at that."

"You looked plenty the night it happened, from what the tape shows." She taps the glass twice, scrolls with one blunt finger. "There. Read that. Top line. That is the manager. Patsy. That is her signature on the camera order, three weeks back, on the girl's business account, before you two ever so much as held hands over pizza. And that." Another tap. "That is a police report. Filed two-fifteen this afternoon. Against her own manager. You want to take a guess who walked in and filed it, big man?"

The screen sharpens under my stare. A report number in a gray box. A name typed in the complainant field.

Jilly Dulane.

My jaw grinds. "That could be optics. Cover. Damage control. She sells authentic for a living, she said so to my face, proud as a cat."

Judanna's eyebrows climb toward her hairline. "Optics. "You believe a woman files a criminal complaint against her own manager, torches her whole income stream, over a man who peeled out of her driveway three weeks ago, for the optics?" She lets that hang in the air between us until it starts to stink. "Son, I have run a con or two in my day. You do not burn the barn down to sell one horse. That is not a play. That is a woman with nothing left to protect but the truth."

"And you sell grumpy." Judanna's open palm cracks flat on the counter and the whole display of key rings jumps. I stop cold. "You sell this whole town a mean green mountain who lives alone out past the county line because he likes it that way. Is that authentic, Oggan? Or is that just the tallest, thickest wall in the state, built to keep the soft parts of you where nobody can ever reach in and take a squeeze? Do not you lecture me about somebody hiding behind a facing. I stayed married to yours for four years. I can name every stone in it."

The store goes dead quiet. Somewhere over the paint aisle a fluorescent tube hums and gutters.

"You are scared," she says, and she has gone gentle now, which is a great deal worse than the shouting. "You found yourself a woman who wanted the quiet careful man under all that muscle, wanted him bad, and the second it turned dangerous, the second loving her back could actually cost you something you couldn't stand to lose, you grabbed the first excuse that floated by and bolted straight back to the hole where nothing living can ever reach you. And I have let you do that for a lot of lonely years, out of love. I am not letting you do it today."

I hold my eyes on that report number until the digits stop meaning anything at all.

"She let me wait," I say, and I do not fully choose to say it. "On the floor that night. She asked me who I was under all this, and then she gave me the whole rest of the world to answer in. Sat there in the cold and let the silence run as long as it needed to run. Nobody has ever once given me the time to answer."

"Yeah." Judanna's hard mouth tugs at one corner. "That right there is the sound of a man who chucked something out he can still climb down and get back, if he moves quick and stops being a coward about it. So go home. Sit in that empty cabin you can finally afford outright. And find out exactly how the win tastes with nobody to hand it to."

I take my screws. I take one last look at my dead dream workshop, pinned and fading on her corkboard. I take the police report burning white behind my eyes.

At the door I stop with my hand on the cold push bar.

"If she did not do it," I say, low, to the glass.

"Then you left the best woman who ever wandered onto your job site eating your dust in a driveway," Judanna says behind me, picking her tablet back up, "because you were too proud and too scared to turn around and ask her one honest question. Would not be the first heart you buried breathing to keep your own life comfortable and quiet. Drive safe, you enormous coward. I mean every word of that with love."

The bell over the door rings me out into the flat gray afternoon, and I stand on the curb a long moment with a box of screws in my fist and no idea in the world where a man is supposed to go when the quiet he built has finally turned on him.

I get in the truck. I do not start it.

My hands sit on the wheel, big and scarred and useless, and behind my eyes the same picture keeps building itself out of nothing. Her, on that cold floor, letting the silence run long enough for a slow man to find his words. Nobody has ever given me the time. And the one person who did, I loaded my tools on and drove away from at the first hard test, exactly the way Judanna said, exactly the way a coward would.

The listing for the workshop is still folded in my shirt pocket. Forty acres of guaranteed quiet.

I take it out. I look at it a long time.

Then I set it on the passenger seat, face-down, and I do not start the truck yet, because I have one thing left to do first and I need to get it right.

CHAPTER 29

JILLY

The ring light goes in the dumpster.