Page 51 of Orcs Don’t Fake It

I walk over, wrap both hands around the rough green wood, plant my feet, and I lift.

The beam barely clears the sawhorses before my arms scream. It is heavier than anything I have any business hoisting alone, dense and green and unforgiving, and I get it maybe a foot off the horses before my grip starts to slide.

I do not put it down. I made myself a promise about doing hard things alone from now on, and I am going to keep it if it takes my back with it.

I stagger toward the first post. Sweat stings my eyes. The dust on my face turns to mud.

One step. Then another. Then the far end starts to drop.

CHAPTER 30

OGGAN

Judanna will not let me out of the store.

She has crossed the floor while my back was turned, thrown the deadbolt, flipped the OPEN sign to CLOSED, and planted her considerable self square between me and the only door, tablet raised in both hands like a shield or a warrant.

"Sit," she says.

"I have..."

"An empty cabin and a police report you still will not believe with your own two eyes. Sit down, Oggan, or I will put you down, and one of us bleeds on my clean floor, and I promise you it will not be me."

I lower onto the paint-mixer stool by the counter. It groans under my weight and holds. Judanna sets the tablet on the wood, angles it toward me with the flat of her hand, and taps the screen once.

Jilly fills it.

My spine locks up rigid. But this is not the fireside frame. This is not the grainy stolen thing with the drawn-on heart. This is bright and flat and hard to look at. She sits on an overturned bucket in the middle of the gutted barn, my barn, our barn, with no lamp and no makeup and dark bruised smudges under her eyes she has never once let the whole world get near. A strand of hair sticks to her wet cheek. Drywall dust streaks pale across her jaw.

"I'm not going to caption this cute," she says, and the words reach straight through the glass and into my ribs and take hold with both hands.

Judanna folds her arms. Says not one word.

Jilly talks. She names the camera. She names Patsy out loud, plain, no euphemism. She names the police report, two-fifteen, and the number floating in the corner of the frame matches the one that has been branded behind my eyes since noon. She ends her contract into the lens, out loud, on purpose, so that no one on earth can ever twist it into something small later. Her hands rest steady on her knees the whole time.

Mine are shaking on my thighs.

Then she says my name, and the whole world narrows to the width of a tablet screen.

"His name is Oggan. He builds things to outlast everyone who'll ever touch them. He hates cameras."

The stool creaks. I have gone dead still, the stillness of a man carrying a load too far up a ladder to set down without dropping it straight onto his own boots.

"He told me the very first week, standing in this barn, that the parts of a person that stay private stay private, and I looked him right in the eye and I promised."

She is crying now. And she does not fix it.

That is the thing that guts me clean through. This is the woman who dabbed and blotted and re-shot a sneeze twelve times to catch the flattering light. And here she sits, letting her whole ruined blotchy face hang open in front of half a million strangers, streaked and raw and true, with dust on her jaw and no angle and no light and nothing left to hide behind.

"I got so good at being looked at," she tells them, tells me, tells the empty barn where I should be standing right now, "that I forgot how to just be. And then I met a man who never cared what my numbers were. Who sat down on this floor and asked me who I am when the cameras shut off, and I didn't have an answer, and he waited for one anyway. Nobody ever waited for me before."

My throat closes down like a valve cranked shut.

I waited because there was nothing else in the world I wanted to be doing. I would have waited a year on that cold floor. I would have re-poured the whole foundation an inch at a time, slow as winter, just to keep her sitting there talking on it.

"I lost him today," she says, "because I let a machine into a moment that was only ever supposed to belong to two people. He believes I sold him. And the very worst part is that the girl I used to be would have."

Judanna's eyes are on the side of my face. I keep mine on the screen. Every stubborn wall I ever poured is cracking at the footing, one hairline fracture at a time, and I let them go.