Page 45

Management.

Patsy.

"Oggan." His name comes out cracked. "Oggan, there was a camera. In the house. Last night."

He goes very still, the exact stillness from the firelight, except now it's carved from stone instead of warmth.

"Where," he says. And that isn't a question. It's a verdict.

I stumble up, coat flapping, and turn in a slow circle, scanning the raw studs, the exposed beams, the high dark corners I never think to check because they're my corners, my safe unfilmed corners. And there, tucked into the junction of two rafters, angled down at the hearth, a small green weatherproof box with a dead black eye.

A trail camera. The motion-triggered kind hunters strap to trees. The kind that records in the dark.

"She put it there for candid content." My hands shake. "Weeks ago. She said she wanted 'authentic B-roll.' I signed off on B-roll. I never..." The words strangle. "It never once crossed my mind it was recording us. Recording that."

The video has forty thousand views. The counter ticks while I hold it. Forty-one. Forty-three.

Every promise I made him last night. Out loud. No hiding. When you're mine, you're mine out loud or not at all. And the very first night, before I could even keep it my way, on my terms, the internet took it from me and sold it for clicks.

I look up at him. His face has closed completely. The warmth from the fire is gone like it was never there, and behind his eyes something wounded and old is pulling all the way back.

"Oggan, I swear to you, I didn't know." I reach for him. "I would never. My privacy, your privacy, that's the one thing I promised, and I would never..."

"You signed off on it." Flat. Cold. A door closing. "Candid content. Your words."

"For B-roll. Studs and framing. Never this." I gesture at the phone, at the thumbnail, at us. "Never once this."

He stares at the phone. Then up at the little green box in the rafters, its dead eye still pointed at the hearthstone where he told me I was claimed. Something shutters behind his face, brutal and final.

He grabs his tool bag off the floor.

"Oggan. Please. Let me fix this. Let me call her, let me..."

He shoulders past me toward the door, and the morning light swallows him, and I stand alone in the silt-streaked wreck of my beautiful house, holding a phone that will not quit buzzing, the counter climbing behind my thumb.

Fifty thousand views.

I stand in the doorway. The morning is obscenely beautiful. Mist rising off the drowned field, sun cutting gold through the branches, the whole hollow washed clean and glittering, and none of it reaches me. He backs the truck around in a slow arc, tires spitting mud, and stops at the mouth of the driveway where the water has pulled away.

He doesn't glance at the house. He doesn't glance at me.

"Wait." I run out onto the wet gravel in his coat and my bare feet, the cold slick of it shocking my soles. "Oggan, wait, please, thirty seconds, just give me thirty seconds."

The window rolls down. His face is granite. But his eyes, his eyes are the worst part, because behind the shutdown there's a wound so raw it steals the air out of my lungs.

"I told you," he says, low. "Orcs don't fake. When we let somebody in, we mean it. I let you all the way in." He looks at the barndominium then, at the green box still nested in the rafters like a tick. "And there was a camera the whole time."

"That I didn't know about." My words crack down the middle. "Oggan, I fired her in my head the second I found that thing. I'll fire her for real before your truck hits the county line. I'll pull every video. I'll burn the whole channel down. I don't care about the channel. I never cared about it the way I care about..."

"Don't." He holds up one broad hand. "Don't say it now, not with fifty thousand strangers listening in." The word listening lands like a slap on both of us. "That's the whole point. That's what she took. There's no version of us anymore that isn't performed for a crowd. You promised me out loud. She turned it into a broadcast."

I have no answer. Because he's right, and the rightness of it guts me.

"I'll fix it," I whisper. It's all I have.

Something flickers across his face, so fast I almost lose it. Then it's gone, back behind the stone.

"Maybe you will," he says. "But I can't be here while you try."