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Eleven years of swallowing exactly this. Foremen who took one look at the green skin and the tusks and ruled that was all the information they needed. Clients who spoke to me like a piece of equipment that happened to grunt. I have eaten it and eaten it because the work was the thing, the work was always the thing, and a man does not have to be respected to build a wall.

But I have not forgotten a single one. The foreman who called me "the forklift" for a whole summer and never once used my name. The homeowner who looked at me setting forty feet of tile on my knees and then asked Judanna, standing beside me, whether "it" spoke English. The bank that made me bring a human co-signer to buy my own truck. I built their walls and their patios and their additions, flawless, level, lasting, and I stayed "it," stayed "the forklift," stayed a pair of green arms attached to nothing they cared to look at.

But I am done. I reach for my tool belt to pack it.

"That's enough."

The words cut across the room, sharp and cold and absolutely nothing like hey besties.

Jilly steps between me and Patsy. She stands a foot and a half shorter than her manager, dwarfed, dust in her hair, dark circles under her eyes, and she plants herself there like a fence post set in concrete.

"Jilly, honey, I'm working, if you could just..."

"I said that's enough, Patsy." Jilly does not raise her volume. She does not need to. Every word lands like a nail driven flush. "You do not talk to him like that. Never on my site. Never on my build. Never, ever again."

Patsy blinks. The sunglasses come all the way off now.

"That man," Jilly says, and she points at me without looking away from Patsy, "has more skill in one hand than this entire industry has in its whole body. He read the rot in a wall I couldn't. He's sistering a hundred-year-old truss by hand because he will not let old-growth fir go to a landfill. He is a master craftsman, and you will address him like one, or you will get off my property."

The room goes dead silent. Even the crickets outside seem to pause.

I stand there, tool belt half-buckled, and I have no idea what to do with my hands or my face or the enormous thing swelling under my ribs.

No one has ever done that. In eleven years. No one has ever stepped in front of me.

My whole life I have been the thing that steps in front. The wall, the shield, the muscle that goes first into the dangerous part. I am built for it. I am shaped for it. And this small human with dust in her hair and a sponsor's knife at her throat just put her body between me and the blade like it was the most obvious move in the world, like a foot-and-a-half height difference means nothing, like I am worth standing in front of.

Something in me that has stood locked for eleven years slides a half inch open.

Patsy recovers fast, the way sharks do. "Jilly. Babe. I get it, you like him, it's very cute, but the Hearthwell deal is four hundred thousand dollars and it does not close if he won't play ball, so let's all be adults about..."

"Then I'll play ball." Jilly lifts her chin. "Me. On camera. His work, my hands, my face, my words. He builds it his way, uncut, no flexing, no shirtless demos, no props. If Hearthwell wants the real thing, they get the real thing. And if they don't..." She exhales, and three years of terror crosses her face and get shoved aside by something braver. "Then we lose Hearthwell. I'd rather lose a sponsor than treat him like a prop."

Patsy stares at her. Something recalculates behind the manager's eyes, some cold arithmetic about who holds what leverage in this room, and comes up short.

"We'll talk about this in the car," Patsy says finally, tight.

"We'll talk about it never," Jilly says. "Go pitch them the honest version. That's the pitch. Take it or leave it."

Patsy jams the sunglasses back on, spins on a heel that gouges my floor one last time, and clicks out the door muttering into her phone.

The barndominium exhales.

Jilly stands with her back to me, shoulders rising and falling too fast, and it lands on me all at once that she just gambled four hundred thousand dollars and her whole channel's future on the word of an orc who rips cabinets off walls.

For me.

"You did not have to do that," I say. My words come out rough.

She turns around. The brave face wobbles. Underneath it she is terrified, and exhausted, and absolutely certain she just torched her career, and she does it anyway, she grins up at me anyway, dust and dark circles and all.

"Yeah," she says. "I did."

She says it like it costs nothing, and I understand exactly what it cost. Four hundred thousand dollars. A sponsor with her name in all caps. Three years of a machine she built one aching frame at a time, wagered on a man who owns two good shirts and a truck with a cracked seat. For the right to call my joinery a craft out loud. For me.

The thing under my ribs cracks wide open, and I have to look up at the trusses so I do not do something reckless, like cross the room and lift her clean off the floor and swear to never set her down.

CHAPTER 11