Page 70 of Single Pucking Orc

“I’m not going to write it down,” she said. “I’m going to write my name on the emergency contact list instead.”

EPILOGUE

Nora had crossed the lawn nine times. Rognar knew it was nine because she’d told him it was nine. She stood in his kitchen doorway with a phone charger in her fist and an expression he’d come to recognize as the one that preceded a reckoning.

“Nine,” she said again.

“I heard nine.”

“The ninth was for a charger. I own three chargers. There are two in one house and one in the other house and I couldn’t tell you which two are in which house, and I crossed the lawn—in November, in socks, because my shoes are also apparently under negotiation—to retrieve a charger that turned out to be this charger.” She held it up. “This charger lives here. I have been storing my charger at your house without my consent.”

“You have a lot of stuff here.”

“I’m aware. That’s the—” She stopped. She set the charger down on the counter like something she might otherwise throw. “Charlie’s bottles are in both kitchens. Her sleep sacks are in both bedrooms. There is a version of the duck sock in each house, Rognar. There are now three duck socks, and I don’t know how that happened, because socks don’t reproduce⁠—”

“You bought a backup.”

“I bought a backup because I could never find the original because it was always in the other house.” She pushed her glasses up. “I’ve been running a two-site operation for six weeks with no logistics plan and it is insane, and I’m a person whose entire career is telling small businesses not to do exactly this.”

Rognar leaned against the counter and let her get there, because she was getting there, and it was better if she arrived without help. Charlie was on the floor between them in the fenced-off safe corner, up on all fours, rocking back and forth. She had the tremendous focused rage of an eight-month-old who had recently discovered that the floor went places and had not yet worked out how to make herself go with it.

He’d rehearsed this in his head. A speech in the shower. Another in the truck. A third at practice, while Fen talked at him about nothing. Every version was cautious to the point of being annoying, because there was one mistake he could not make. One move could wreck the weeks he’d spent taking her name off schedules and fixing her porch light and giving her nothing to be responsible for.

So he did it badly, on purpose, with every exit propped open first.

“I’m not asking you to sell it,” he said.

She looked at him.

“Your house. I’m not asking you to sell it. Or rent it. Or do anything with it. You could keep it exactly as it is, heated, empty, whatever you want, you could keep paying two sets of bills for the rest of your life and I would never once⁠—”

“Rognar.”

“—say a word about it, because it’s your house, it’s the house you’ve lived in for four years and made your own with your effort and your money. I’ve heard the figure, and I would never ask you to give up a single⁠—”

“Rognar.”

“I’m building up to something.”

“You’re building to it very slowly.”

“I’m being careful.”

“You’re being annoying.” But her mouth was doing the little quirk he loved. She folded her arms and leaned against the opposite counter, so they were mirroring each other across the kitchen with a raging immobile baby between them. “Ask the question, Rognar. Whatever it is. I can see you’ve got it wrapped in six inches of packing material.”

He took a breath. He’d known since the truck outside George’s office. He’d said the word on the step ten days ago, and she’d taken it and filed it and added her name back. Even so, this specific, practical, address-level question felt like more of a risk than the mate word had. The mate word was a feeling. This was a lease.

“Move in,” he said. “Properly. One house. Stop crossing the lawn. I’m not asking you to give up being you. I’d never. You keep your office, you keep your quiet, you keep your everything, I just—I want you to only own one duck sock, Nora. I want us to know where the charger lives.”

Silence.

Charlie chose that moment to lunge, and got precisely nowhere, and toppled sideways onto the padded floor with an expression of pure betrayal. Neither of them moved because she wasn’t hurt, just affronted, and they had both knew it.

Nora looked at him for a long moment.

Then she pushed off the counter, walked out of the kitchen, and came back forty seconds later carrying a folder.

It was a real folder with a tab, and a label on the tab in her handwriting. She set it down on the counter between them with the finality of a woman laying down a winning hand. He looked at the label. The label said, in block capitals that were an unmistakable and slightly savage impression of his handwriting: