Page 59 of Orcs Don’t Fake It

"The workshop lot butted right up against your property line." I clear my throat, which has gone tight. "I bought the strip in between. Both parcels. Deeded together." I dig the paperwork out of my jacket and hold it out to her, both our names printed on it, side by side. "So I'd never be more than a two-minute walk from you. Even when I'm working. Even on the days you need your quiet and I need mine, I'd still be close enough to hear you call."

She stares at the paper. Her hand comes up over her mouth. Her shoulders start to shake.

"You did this before you were sure I'd take you back," she whispers.

"I did." My throat works. "Judanna asked me why. Why sink everything into a strip of gravel between two lots when I hadn't so much as knocked on your door. I told her I couldn't buy my dream and leave the middle of it empty. A workshop forty minutes from you isn't a dream. It's a longer version of the same mistake I already made once."

"I couldn't picture a future that didn't have you in the frame." The word tastes strange in my mouth and lands exactly right. "Camera or no camera. You're the fixed point. Everything else, I build around you."

She launches at me. I catch her, because I will always catch her, and she wraps around me and cries into my neck and laughs at the same time, that particular sound she makes that I would level mountains to hear.

"You bought me a house-adjacent workshop," she says, muffled. "You romantic. You absolute disaster. I can't. That's the best thing anyone has ever done for me and it's a real estate transaction."

"Practical," I say. "Orcs are practical."

She pulls back. Her eyes are wet and shining, and there's sawdust in her hair, my sawdust now, our sawdust, and I have never wanted to keep anything more.

"Show me the inside," she says.

I carry her over the threshold of the workshop, because I couldn't do it at the house yet, not without a ring, and a ring is next. I already commissioned it. Judanna is holding it in the store safe, machined from reclaimed brass and a chip off the first beam we raised together. But that's a surprise for another day.

Today I set my mate down in the middle of my finished dream and she spins in a slow circle, taking in the workbenches, the tool wall, the loft, the wide bay door that opens toward our home.

"I love it," she says. "I love that it's yours. I love that I can see our kitchen window from your table saw."

"That was the point."

I walk her through it. The dust collection I plumbed myself. The bench my father built, the one thing I hauled out of storage and sanded smooth again. The blank wall where her sketches will hang, because she draws better joinery freehand than most men measure. She trails her fingers over every surface, and the steel building I bought to be alone in fills up with her humming and her questions and her small delighted noises, and it stops sounding like exile and starts sounding like a beginning.

She stops at the loft ladder and cranes her neck up. "What's up there?"

"Office. For now." I climb up ahead of her and reach down to swing her up beside me. From the loft window the whole sightline runs clean across the gravel to our kitchen window, the sage trim, the brass, the fire I banked before we left. She goes quiet, taking it in, and her hand finds mine on the sill.

"You planned the window," she says. Half a question.

"Framed it myself. Set it exactly at the height of your sink." I clear my throat. "So I'd look up from the saw and find you there. Doing dishes. Ignoring me. Whatever you're doing."

She laughs, wet and startled, and swipes at her eyes with the heel of her hand. "You built a workshop with a line of sight to me doing dishes."

"Load-bearing decision," I say. "Everything else in the plan hung off it."

She crosses to me and slides her arms around my middle and looks up, all the way up.

"No cameras," she says. "No sponsors. No Patsy. Just this. Just us and a couple hundred yards of gravel."

"Just us." I fold her against me. "For a hundred years. I built everything to last."

The ring waits in Judanna's safe, wrapped in a shop rag, and I turn the shape of tomorrow over in my head while I hold her. I'll do it at the house, not here. On the hearth she helped me lay. I'll get down on one knee, which will still put me nearly at her eye level, and I'll say the whole thing plain, no contract, no clauses, the way an Orc claims for good. She'll cry and call me a disaster and say yes before I finish the sentence. I run the numbers on it a hundred times a day. Every answer comes out the same.

Outside, the sun drops behind our house, and the sage trim goes gold, and I hold the loud, brilliant, curated woman who taught a solitary orc that being perceived by exactly one person is the finest thing in the world. The workshop I bought to be alone in has a window aimed straight at her. I'll never use it to hide again.

CHAPTER 35

JILLY

Six months later, I turn the camera on for the last time.

It sits on a tripod in the finished great room, one small unblinking eye, and for the first time in my career my hands hold steady picking it up. The house glows around me. Sage and brass and honey oak, sunlight pouring through windows he squared with his own hands, a fire snapping in the hearth he laid stone by stone.