Page 52

On the tablet, the comments have stopped being cruel. They have turned into a single wall of the same three words, thousands deep, scrolling too fast to read but impossible to miss. Strangers who have never met either of us, all shouting the same thing at a woman falling apart on a bucket. Go get him. Go get him. Go get him. Even the internet, the thing I hate, the thing that stole from me, is on her side.

"She sold you nothing," Judanna says, low and even. "She stood up and set herself on fire in front of everyone she has left in this world and called it an apology. You still want to sit on my stool and tell me humans run too soft for the likes of us?"

On the screen Jilly drags her wrist across her face and leaves the dust smeared where it is. She says she is done curating. Says the house gets finished by hand now, mistakes and all, cameras or none, and she cannot bring herself to care which. Says if the smiling girl's followers want to walk, they should let her go, because that girl was so tired.

Then she looks straight down the barrel of the lens. And even flattened into pixels, even a full day too late, it lands on me like a wide hand closing slow around my sternum and squeezing.

"And Oggan. If this ever finds you, somehow. I'm sorry. You handed me the one dark thing you had left, and I let it get taken, and I would tear this entire brand down to the bare studs to hand it back to you. I already am. Come look for yourself."

The stream ends. The screen holds on her frozen face, mid-word, dust on her cheek, one hand still lifted toward the lens.

The store hums around me. The gutting fluorescent tube. The cooler in the back. My own blood dragging loud through my ears.

I have built a whole life out of reading raw material. Grain and grade and load and grade stamp. A man learns to tell honest oak from a pretty veneer by the weight of it in his palm, by the way it takes a nail, by whether it splits clean and true along the run or crumbles into lies. I have never once in forty years been fooled by a facing. It is the one thing in this world I trust myself to do.

That was no facing.

I stand up. The stool clatters over backward on the concrete and I leave it lying there.

"How far behind me did she file that report," I say.

Judanna's hard mouth curls up slow and fierce and proud. "Three weeks, near enough. Give or take one coward's drive home with his tail between his legs."

"The beam." The words come out of me half-formed, running ahead of sense. "The ridge beam. In the great room. It is up on the sawhorses waiting to go on the posts, and she cannot set that alone, four hundred pounds green, she will get her own body under it to lift the far end, she will absolutely do exactly that, that beautiful stubborn maniac, and there is no living soul out there to spot the other end when it comes down."

"Then why," Judanna says, already crossing to throw the deadbolt, already hauling the door wide so the flat gray day pours cold across the floor, "are you still standing in the middle of my hardware store, you enormous fool?"

I am already moving.

I take the steps two at a time. My truck fires on the first crank, the way it always does, the way I built it to. I drop it into gear with a hand that has finally, at long last, stopped shaking, and I point the nose at the hill that swallowed me whole this afternoon, and this time I mean to come out clean on the far side of it.

Gravel sprays behind me as I swing out of the lot. Judanna stands in her open doorway with her arms crossed and her chin lifted, and in the mirror I catch her mouth shaping two words at my taillights. Go. Get. And I do not need to hear the third.

The county road unspools gray and empty ahead of me. I push the old truck harder than I have any right to, past the mile markers, past the tree line, up toward the hill.

Every promise I ever made myself about being alone, about being safe, about being unreachable out past the county line, I leave on the shoulder one by one as I climb.

She waited for me on a cold floor.

Now I run for her.

The quiet in the cab is gone.

Good.

I am done with quiet.

CHAPTER 31

JILLY

The beam wins the first three rounds.

I get one end onto the sawhorse, sweat stinging my eyes, and the other end drops with a crack that rattles my molars. Dust puffs up from the subfloor. My gloves are too big. My arms shake. The barndominium stretches out around me, half-finished and enormous, and the only sound is my own ragged breathing bouncing off bare studs.

Round four. I crouch. I lift with my legs, the way he showed me.

The way he showed me.