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"He has been on this mountain for eight days making himself smaller in a place where there is no one to be smaller for. That's the man. That's the whole man. And you are going to put a sound under him.

"And the reason I gave you the nine words is that it was four degrees and I hadn't eaten and the easy sentence was right there. So that's mine. I own that one.

"Here's the other thing." She stops. It goes on long enough that any editor alive would have cut it. "On Day 1 he asked me to name one thing I got wrong. Every night. Out loud, before anybody sleeps under what we built. It's a thing his people do. He said it like it was a torque spec.

"I have lied to him every single night since. Every one. Little ones, tiny ones, the tarp corner, the knot, whatever's cheap. And he takes them and he never checks the metal and I have started to hate the sound of my own name coming out of my mouth.

"And I'm going to keep doing it. Right? That's the part. I've got thirteen days left up here and I'm going to keep handing him counterfeit every night at that fire, because the alternative is that he gets a proper look at me, and he would. He's the only person I have met in twenty-three years who could sit through the whole thing and describe me accurately at the end of it. My mother couldn't. My backer couldn't and he owns me. And I have built my entire life so that nobody could, and now there's a man on this mountain who could do it in about a week if I let him, and I have absolutely no idea how a person survives that.

"So. That's the confessional." She puts her hood up. "Nine words, up top. That's yours. This part's mine."

Then she takes a breath and says, "Ninety seconds. Sorry. You can bin it."

And she gets up out of frame, and the picture runs eleven more seconds on an empty wet log, and stops.

Vessik puts her hand out and shuts the laptop.

Neither of us says anything for a while. In the hall above us water goes into a bucket from a sky that has been dry for four days.

"Well," Vessik says. "She's a piece of work."

"Yes."

"You'd want to marry that."

"Gran."

"I'm eighty-four, I don't have time for the long way around." She gets up and takes the plates. "How many days are left on that mountain?"

"Two."

"Then why are you cutting a sill."

The letter comes by email an hour later, which is how I find out that there is a letter, because my phone has been in a bag since Day minus two and I have finally taken it out.

It is from a firm the network uses. It is four paragraphs and it is very courteous.

Paragraph one confirms my voluntary withdrawal at 0612 on Day 17 pursuant to 14(c). Paragraph two confirms the forfeiture. Paragraph three confirms that my former partner has elected to complete the term solo, that she is ineligible to place, and that upon her completion both appearance fees will be paid in full, which is the first anyone has told me and which I have to read three times standing at the kitchen counter.

She stayed. She stayed for six days on a mountain with nothing at the end of it for her, and the only number that comes out of it is mine.

Paragraph four says that as a withdrawn contestant I am barred from the production location, the staging perimeter, and all controlled areas for the remaining term, that presence at the Flat on Day 21 would constitute breach, and that breach carries a liquidated damages provision of one hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

I put the phone face down on the counter.

Then I go out to the barn and stand in it for a while.

Thirty feet of clear span. Slate floor. A hundred and ten years of hay dust in the tie beams and my grandfather's mortise chisels in a rack by the north wall, and a woman I have spent nineteen days beside is nine miles up a ridge in the rain right now doing a practice alone that only works when there are two people, and there is a hundred and fifty thousand dollar fence around her.

I come back in at dusk.

Vessik is at the kitchen table with the seed catalogue closed, which she has not done in two days.

She does not look up. She puts her hand out flat on the table and slides something across it toward me and takes her hand away.

The keys to the truck.

"It's nine hours," she says. "You'll want to leave now."