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"This morning. I am driving out there after this."

The grin comes creeping back onto her broad face, slow and dangerous. "Oggan Warhip. You drove out to have a conversation."

"To say no in person. It is polite."

"Mm," says Judanna, in a sound that contains an entire paragraph.

I leave before she can speak the paragraph out loud. The bell jingles over the door. My truck waits in the gravel lot, and past it the road runs out toward a barn full of exposed studs and one small, loud, sleepless human who broke her own sentence in half at two in the morning as though her ideas were sprinting away from her.

I am going to say no.

I climb into the truck and sit a moment, both hands on the wheel, the bag of screws sliding across the bench seat, and I do not turn the key, because a truthful man does not lie to himself with the key already in his hand.

I want the workshop.

She is the road to the workshop.

And the honest, unwelcome center of me, the part Judanna just pried open with a tablet and a tube of adhesive, does not entirely dread the drive back out to that barn.

I turn the key.

I am going to say no.

I am almost sure of it.

Almost is a word I have never once accepted from a load-bearing beam. Almost level. Almost square. Almost holding. A man builds his whole life on the gap between almost and certain, and here I sit, backing out of a gravel lot, resting the entire weight of my quiet future on almost.

I do not care for the sensation at all.

I drive out to the barn anyway.

CHAPTER 5

JILLY

He is going to say no. The refusal sits in the set of his jaw the way weather sits in a sky.

We stand in the middle of my ruined barn. Patsy is banished to her car to "make calls" after Warhip stared at her until she left. I have talked for eleven straight minutes, and he has offered nothing back, and now I am out of runway and he is reaching for his keys.

"So that's the whole thing," I finish, breathless. "The sponsors, the series, the money. You'd work the way you already work. I'd film around it. You wouldn't have to talk, or pose, or smile, or..."

"No."

He says it gently this time, which is somehow worse. He turns toward the door. His truck gleams in the gravel, and the morning light catches the bag of hardware on the seat, and he is leaving, he is actually leaving, and every sponsor and every dollar and every last thing I own is walking out my barn door in steel-toed boots.

My body moves before my brain signs the paperwork.

I sprint. I skid across the subfloor, out the sliding door, and I plant myself in the gravel directly in front of his truck, both arms flung wide, one small pastel woman against a wall of Detroit steel.

He halts on the threshold. His head tilts. "Move."

"No."

"You are standing in front of my truck."

"I am standing in front of your truck," I agree, heart slamming my ribs. "And I am going to keep standing in front of your truck, because you have not heard the actual number yet, and I cannot let you drive off before you hear the actual number."

Something flickers across his face. The steel door behind his eyes cracks, a hair.