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"Let them." He picks his crust back up. "I do not care what people say. I never have. It is my only good quality."

Oggan is quiet a long moment. Then: "My father built. Stone, mostly. Retaining walls, chimneys, the slow work." He turns a slice over without eating it. "He used to say a wall you rush is a wall that falls on someone you love. I did not understand him until I was grown." The headlamp glow softens the hard line of his jaw. "Your grandfather and my father would have had nothing to say to each other and understood each other completely."

The idea sits warm in the dark between us.

A laugh bursts out of me a moment later at something dumb he adds under his breath, real and startled and loud in the dark, and he does the thing, the thing I have started living for, the tiny twitch at the corner of his mouth that on any other man would be a full grin.

We finish the pizza in a silence that has stopped being awkward and become something else. Something warm. Something I do not have a brand-safe word for.

At some point I lie back on the plywood to look at the trusses properly, and at some point he lies back too, an arm's length away, both of us staring up at old wood and older stars through the gaps in a roof I have not fixed yet.

"I could reframe that section," he says into the quiet, pointing at the failing corner truss. "Sister the beam. Keep the old wood. It would hold another hundred years."

"You'd do that?"

"It is the job." A pause. Then, lower, so low I almost miss it: "And I would like this barn to become what you wanted before the lights got to it."

I turn my head. In the dark, his profile is a mountain range. My heart does the thing, the terrifying thing, the thing no number can touch.

"Yeah," I whisper. "Me too."

Neither of us moves to turn the power back on.

The plywood is cold through my shirt. His arm radiates heat from a foot away, close enough that the air between us keeps its own weather. A barn owl calls somewhere out past the field. The pizza box sits open and demolished between our feet. I count the trusses to keep from counting how badly I want to close that foot of distance, one, two, three old beams two hundred years old, still holding, still true.

We just lie there in the dark with the trusses and the stars, an influencer with no camera and an orc with no reason to stay, and stay anyway, and I have never in my curated life been less alone.

CHAPTER 10

OGGAN

Patsy arrives at nine sharp in a designer suit and sunglasses she does not take off indoors.

I dislike her within four seconds. This is a record even for me.

She sweeps into the barndominium on heels that stab little craters in the plywood I laid, phone already at her ear, free hand snapping fingers at Jilly like Jilly is a waiter. "The Hearthwell people want deliverables by Friday, so we need product in every shot, hero angles, I'm picturing we open on the orc, big reveal, real thirst-trap energy, where is he, is he here?"

"He's right here," Jilly says, quiet, and the bright act she wears for cameras is nowhere in it. "Patsy, this is Oggan."

Patsy turns. She lowers the sunglasses an inch. She looks up at me, and up, and up, and her painted mouth curves into something that is not a smile so much as a price tag.

"Oh, he's perfect," she says. To Jilly. Never to me. "The shoulders. The scowl. Camera's going to eat him alive." She circles me like I am furniture at an estate sale. "Okay, big guy, here's the vibe. I need you to flex when you lift things. Really pop the arms. And can you hold the sledgehammer even when you're not using it? Just, like, over your shoulder. Brooding. And take the shirt off for the demo, obviously, the shoulders are the whole product."

She is not finished. She rattles on, pacing my clean floor, laying out camera positions and a soft launch of the ship and a merch line with my face on a mug. She wants a segment where I carry Jilly across a threshold. She wants a segment where I get caught staring on purpose. She wants, mercy help me, a scented candle called Freshly Framed that is supposed to smell like sawdust and, in her words, "orc." She narrates my future to Jilly as though I am a mannequin she is dressing for a window, and the mannequin is standing right here, listening, with a heartbeat and a name and a workshop it has wanted for eleven years.

She says all of it to my body. None of it reaches my face.

I set down the level I was using to check the window rough-in. Slow. My jaw goes tight enough to ache.

"The shirt stays on," I say.

Patsy laughs like I made a joke. "Aw, he's shy. Cute. Jilly, tell him the numbers, he'll come around." She scrolls her phone again already. "And the sledgehammer thing, that's non-negotiable, the demo tested through the roof, we're building the whole Hearthwell spot around..."

"I do not carry tools I do not need." My words drop flat and hard into the room. "A sledge over the shoulder for no reason is how a man wrecks his rotator cuff to sell your metrics. I am not a doll. I do not pose."

Patsy finally looks at my face. Her eyes narrow.

"Sweetie," she says, in a tone that has flattened a thousand people smaller than me, "you're a viral clip with good delts. That's the product. The craftsman thing is adorable but nobody's clicking for your joinery. So how about you let the professionals handle strategy, and you handle looking large and mad, which, gift, you're doing right now."