Page 47
My knees quit. I catch myself on the mailbox post, the ugly rusted crooked one he offered to replace last Tuesday, no charge, just because a crooked post bothered him on principle. I hang off it and drag air into a body that has forgotten the mechanics of lungs.
Gone.
He is gone, and the last living thing on his face before he turned was a door swinging shut behind his eyes, iron, final, and I put my whole hand flat on that door and it did not so much as rattle in the frame.
A heel clicks behind me on the porch step.
"Well." Patsy. Silky. Entirely unbothered. Both thumbs already flying across her phone. "The engagement on this is going to be biblical. Genuinely career-defining. We ride the drama a week, let it peak, then a soft-launch reconciliation reel, hard cut to the sponsor reveal, and honestly the split-and-reunite arc tests better than a clean romance anyway, so..."
The mailbox comes out from under my hands. I turn around.
She glances up. Catches whatever is happening on my face. Her manicured thumb stops mid-swipe. Smart woman, Patsy. Reads a room like a shark reads a current. Too late this time.
"You put a camera in his home."
"I put a camera in your set." She rallies fast, chin tipping up. "Which is a designated workspace, which I have full creative-access rights to per section four of the management agreement you signed with your own little glitter pen, so let's not..."
"His bedroom. The framed one. Upstairs. Aimed at the floor where we sleep."
"Candid content converts, Jilly. It converts at four times the rate of anything staged, and the two of you were sitting on an actual gold mine and stubbornly refusing to monetize a spark that the entire internet could spot from orbit, so I made an executive..."
I cross the drive. She takes one step back into the porch rail and stops, because the rail is behind her and there is nowhere left to go, and for the first time in three years the woman who taught me to smile through a root canal, through a funeral, through a one-star quarter, has run clean out of fast words.
"You're fired."
A laugh, thin and airless. "You can't afford to fire me. Without me you're a burnt-out craft account with a leaky roof, forty grand in reno debt, and a follower count that lives or dies on whether I feed it. You fire me, you're done. You're a hobby."
"You planted a hidden recording device in a private residence and leaked intimate footage of a man who never consented to a single frame of it." Each word drops out of me flat and clean and level, the way he talks, the way he taught me without ever meaning to teach me a thing. "That's not content, Patsy. That's a felony in this state. I have your texts approving the purchase. I have the receipt on the shared card. And by tonight my lawyer has both of them and a signed statement, so I'd start calling yours."
Her face does the thing faces do when the algorithm stops answering. The gloss cracks. Underneath it, for one flicker, there is real fear.
"You signed a..."
"I signed a management agreement. I did not sign away his privacy, and neither did he, and there is no clause on God's earth that stretches to cover what you did." I put my hand out, palm up, steady. "Key. The storage unit. Now. Then get off his property before I stop being polite about the trespassing too."
She stares at my open hand a long, ugly beat. Then she digs the little brass key out of her designer bag and drops it into my palm without letting her fingers touch me, like the burnt-out craft account might be catching.
"You are lighting your entire career on fire," she says, gathering her purse, her ring light case, her tablet, her poison, "over a grumpy handyman who just peeled out of here and left you eating his dust."
"Yeah." My throat clamps down and I force it back open by sheer stubbornness. "Go ahead and find out how it turns out."
She teeters down the porch steps in heels that were never engineered for gravel, folds herself into her white lease-return SUV, and reverses too fast down the drive with the tires spitting rock. I stand in the wreckage of the afternoon with a brass key biting a red crescent into my fist, and I hold still until her taillights vanish over the exact same hill that ate his.
Then the barn is just a barn again. Big and hollow and echoing and full of his tools that are not here anymore. The half-built kitchen island we made together, four hands moving in sync, his brute strength and my finish work, sits marooned in the middle of the concrete like a headstone for a thing I broke with my own carelessness.
I sink onto the bottom porch step. Splinters bite through my leggings. The phone in my pocket keeps convulsing against my hip, thousands of strangers feasting live on the worst afternoon of my life, and I pull it out and turn it face-down against the wood, and I put both hands over my mouth, and I come apart very quietly. The way you come apart when nobody has cast you as the crying girl, when there is no ring light and no caption and no arc, when it is just you and the wreck and you have to grieve it alone with your own two hands.
He believes I sold him.
That is the part that opens me up down the middle. He stood in that barn, the one man who ever looked straight past the ring light and stayed for whatever was standing behind it, and he ran the numbers exactly the way I taught the whole world to run them, and the math came back and told him I would trade his soul for a home-goods deal.
And here is the part I cannot outrun, the part that will keep me up tonight and every night.
He is not wrong to fear it.
Six months ago I would have. Six months ago I measured my entire worth in reach and retention and eight-second hold rates, and if a leak like this had landed in my lap, I would have wept over the numbers on the dashboard, not the man on the floor.
He is the one who changed it. He sat down on my cold concrete with engine grease under his nails and pizza on his breath and asked me, plain as a plumb line, who I am when the cameras die. And I had no answer for him. And he waited for one anyway, patient as a poured foundation, like the answer was worth the wait, like I was.
