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By the time the rental SUV rolls up the gravel, the great room is spotless and staged, my hair is curled, my smile is bright enough to power the ring light on its own, and the only crack in the whole performance is a bruise on my hip in the shape of joy, hidden under denim, aching every single time I move.

CHAPTER 18

OGGAN

The home-goods people arrive in a rental SUV with three matching duffels of "authentic reclaimed accent pieces," and I hang a door in the north bedroom with my back to every one of them.

The door hangs plumb inside ten minutes. I hang it three times anyway. Shim, check, adjust. Shim, check, adjust. My hands crave a task big enough to swallow the whole of me, and a door will not do it, and I keep hearing the crush of a pizza box under a small furious hand.

Jilly's laugh carries down the hall. Bright. Weightless. The faucet laugh. She flips it on for the sponsor and the sponsor lights up and buys every drop of it, and I drive a screw home hard enough to strip the head clean off.

"Ogg-Dog." Patsy leans in the framed doorway, phone up, filming me sideways without asking. "Give me a flex. Little over-the-shoulder for the fans. They eat that up with a spoon."

"I'm working."

"That IS the work, big guy." She keeps filming. "You're the beefcake. Beef the cake."

I set down the drill. Slow. I turn and give her the full weight of a look that has cleared bar rooms across three counties, and she takes one step back before she catches herself against the doorframe.

"Off camera," I tell her. "The deal today is off camera."

"The deal is whatever moves engagement." She lowers the phone with a pout. "You two have zero chemistry this morning, you clock that? Yesterday the fancams wrote themselves. Today you're a cardboard cutout of yourself. Did something happen?"

Something happened. I laid a woman down on an air mattress and swore to her it was real, and she folded me up in a tarp before the coffee went cold.

"No," I say.

"Well, un-happen it. The vibe shift is murdering my metrics." She waggles the phone. "The people want the yearning. Bring back the yearning."

She clacks off down the hall on her ridiculous shoes. I pick the drill back up.

The people want the yearning. As if it lives in a tap I twist shut to punish her. As if what runs between Jilly and me is a special effect I hoard. I have no words for what I would say to Patsy Johnson, and even if the words came, saying them would land in a video, and the video would become the product, and the product would become one more pane of glass between me and a woman I would tear my own dream workshop apart for.

So I do the only honest thing left to a man in my position. I go quiet.

Quiet is the one language I have always trusted. My father built forty years of houses and wasted maybe forty words a day doing it. He taught me that a level does not lie, that a plumb line settles every argument, that a man says what he means by the joints he cuts and leaves the rest alone. Quiet has never once betrayed me. A board is square or it is not. A weld holds or it does not. There is a comfort in a world where the answer sits right there in front of you, measurable, and never has to be guessed at across the wet fog of another person's feelings.

Jilly's world runs on the opposite fuel. In her world the truest thing you own is the version of it you can perform, and the performance is the product, and the product is the only currency that pays a mortgage. I have no coin for that economy. I never will.

I hang the door. I run the wiring. I frame the closet. When Jilly needs a shot of "her handyman" in the background, I give her exactly that and nothing more. No rip-the-cabinet flourish. No glance over the shoulder. I keep my back turned and my head down, a large green appliance that lifts heavy things, and I let the camera have that man, because that man has nothing soft left in him to bruise.

By noon the sponsor is thrilled with the reclaimed accent pieces and gone. Jilly stands dead center in the great room with her ring light dark and her shoulders low. She looks at me across forty feet of subfloor.

I look back.

Neither of us crosses it.

That night I go home to my quiet rental and my quiet dog and I do not sleep. I lie on a real bed that has somehow gone too flat and too still, and I miss an air mattress the size of a bath towel, and I hate that I miss it. I run the whole morning again behind my eyelids. Her hands, small on my forearms, pulling instead of pushing. Then the tarp. The bag. The word see aimed at me like a nail gun.

By morning the internet has caught the scent.

Judanna texts me a screenshot at 6 a.m., because Judanna wakes at 5 and treats my personal life as a public utility.

BABE. the comments. read the comments.

I read the comments.

is it me or did the orc go dead behind the eyes