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I feel him the way you feel weather change—pressure dropping, air thickening, the wrongness of being seen when you didn’t consent to it. My shoulders tense before I can stop them. Muscles locking down out of old habit. Out of knowing.

“Post’s fine,” Malek says. “Doesn’t need another brace.”

His voice lands low and rough, like it grew out of the dirt instead of a throat. It slides under my skin and settles somewhere it doesn’t belong. Somewhere close. Somewhere dangerous.

“I didn’t ask.”

I drive the staple in anyway. Too hard. The wood splits with a dry crack. The vibration jolts up my arm, rattles my teeth. Blood beads bright and immediate where the wire cuts me—hot, red, undeniable.

Good.

He’s inside the fence line now. I can feel it without looking—the heat of him at my back, the way the day seems to lean warmer where he stands. Like the sun learned his shape.

“You’re going to break it.”

“Then it’ll match the rest of the place.”

The laugh that slips out of me sounds wrong—thin, sharp, brittle. Like glass under pressure.

That’s what we’ve become. Proximity and restraint. Shared air. Unspoken rules.

Some mornings he doesn’t show up at all. Vanishes back to his old place like he’s guarding a grave only he’s earned the right to stand over. Other days he’s here before dawn—jaw bruised yellow and purple, ribs taped tight, knuckles split like someone tried to pry violence out of him with their bare hands and lost.

He never explains. I never ask.

What I notice—no matter how hard I try not to—is that the fence has never failed. Not once. Nothing crosses it. Not Hollowborn. Not zealots. Not the wrong kind of silence that smells like teeth and patience. Not even on the days he isn’t here to watch it.

That truth needles under my skin now, sharp and unwelcome, like my body knows something my mouth refuses to admit.

“You should go home.”

The hammer slips from my fingers and thuds into the dirt between us. Solid. Final. Like a choice I can’t take back.

Silence opens wide.

“Ninety-three days.” Malek’s voice is quiet. Too quiet. “And that’s what you’ve got?”

I turn.

He’s wearing the same black shirt he wore the day Scarlett died. Damp at the collar now, clinging to his ribs like the fabric remembers everything. There’s a faint yellow bruise blooming under his jaw. Fresh. He didn’t have it yesterday.

“So that’s it?” he asks, and something rough slips through before he can bury it. “You want me gone?” “Yes.”

The word comes clean. It surprises me with how little it shakes.

Something in his face locks down.

“So you can rot here alone?”

My pulse slams hot and fast against my throat.

“No,” I say. “So I can breathe.”

That lands. I feel it hit him before I see it—the flicker he never buries fast enough. The crack in the armor he pretends doesn’t exist.

“You hover,” I say, stepping closer instead of back. My hands shake. I let them. “You fix shit that isn’t broken. Gates. Posts. Latches that already hold. You stand in my yard like I’m something about to cave in.”

His throat works once.