My hand grips the door edge so hard the wood bites into my palm.
"I found boot prints," Flynn says. "Dress shoes. Smooth soles. Silverleaf pollen in the grass. The damage pattern was directional. Upward. Not radial. Not an explosion. Not fertilizer." His jaw works. The laptop trembles in his grip. "I should have looked before I opened my mouth. I should have tracked it first. I know how to track. It's the one thing I'm supposed to be good at, and instead I stood in my yard and screamed at the only person who?—"
He breaks. Just. Snaps. Like a green branch twisted past its tolerance.
He stares at the three-inch gap between us. The laptop lowers to his side. His bloody knuckles hang loose.
"You made me feel alive. You told me that mattered. And the first time something went wrong, I turned you into the enemy because enemies are easier than?—"
He stops. Swallows. The muscles in his throat work like rope under tension.
"Than what?"
"Than admitting I need someone."
The chain rattles. My fingers are on it. The brass is warm from the door's absorbed heat, and it slides free of the track with a single soft click.
I open the door all the way.
Flynn stands outside, seven feet of rigid, rule-obsessed, lawn-worshipping orc, and his eyes are wet.
I reach for the front of his ruined shirt and pull him inside.
He stumbles through the doorway. Not because I'm strong enough to move him. Because he lets me. Six hundred pounds of orc muscle choosing to be pulled by a five-foot-six woman in peanut butter-stained overalls, and somehow that act of surrender hits harder than anything he's ever done with his fists.
The laptop clatters onto my coffee table. His boot catches the toppled fern. Soil scatters across the rug. He flinches, already bending to clean it up.
"Leave it."
He freezes mid-crouch. His eyes come up to mine. Green irises ringed with copper, bloodshot, wide.
I crouch down to his level. The bruised knuckles hang between his knees. Two of them are split clean, dried blood crusted dark against the moss of his skin. He punched something. A wall, judging by the drywall dust. His own wall. In his own perfect house.
"Show me your hands."
He doesn't move.
"Flynn."
He extends them. Palms up. They're enormous. Each one could wrap around my entire ribcage with room to spare. The calluses are thick from shovels and shears and axe handles, a topography of labor I've memorized with my fingertips. And there, across the first and second knuckles of his right hand, twin gashes weeping fresh red.
I pull a bandana from my pocket. Bright yellow. Sunflower print. I wrap it around his knuckles without asking permission and tie it tight.
"Ow."
"Good."
His breath stutters. Almost a laugh. Almost a sob. The sound lands somewhere between the two and dies in him.
"I don't forgive easily," I say. "I grew up with three older brothers who broke everything I ever grew. Every seedling, every window box. They'd tell me it was my fault for putting something fragile in a place where a football could reach it. And I believed them for a long time."
His jaw tightens.
"What you said this morning sounded exactly like that."
"Junia—"
"I'm not done." I tighten the bandana. He hisses. "You stood in your yard and told me my chaos finally ruined something worth keeping. And it hit me right here." I press my fist against my own sternum. "Because for about six hours I actually believed we'd built something worth keeping too."
