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"Then why hasn't he come back?" The question tears out unbidden. "If you believe me, if you always believed me, why is he still out there sanding a table leg into sawdust instead of driving over here and asking me himself?"

"Because that man would rather nurse a bruise than risk making it worse." She thumbs a fleck of dried sage paint off my sleeve, a ghost of the branded life I used to sell. "He's got a hundred years of Orc pride and about four minutes of practice being wrong. He's terrified that if he shows up and you turn him away, he'll have earned it. So he stays out there where it can't hurt him." She snorts. "Coward, like I said. But the good kind. The kind that comes around."

She loads me up with ridge hangers and a case of water and refuses my money, waving me off with a threat about breaking my fingers if I try to pay. She rings up a tube of grip tape for my gloves too, unasked, and drops it in the bag.

"He rigs a redirect line for a lift like that," she says, tapping the hangers. "You loop it straight over the truss, you'll pull the beam down on your own skull. Redirect it. Let the wood carry the wood."

"How can you tell what I'm lifting?"

She gives me a flat look. "Honey. I've been staring at that barn from my loading dock for a month. I can tell exactly where you are on that build. So does he, if he'd stop sulking long enough to admit it."

At the door she calls after me.

"Jilly."

I turn.

"That house you're building." She taps the counter. "Build it like he's coming back. Build it like he's already on the road. Oh and He was just here. He saw your video, and he's on his way back to the barn right now." "

My mouth drops. “Why didn’t you just start with that? Damn!”

I drive home with my hands steady for the first time in weeks.

Back at the barndominium the beam still lies on the subfloor, mocking me. But I look at it differently now. I look at the whole ambitious mess of it differently.

I re-tape my gloves. I clamp the ridge hangers where they belong. I rig a redirect line over the truss the way Judanna said, the way he taught me the very first week, and I run the tail down to a cleat so physics does what my biceps can't. I lift. The beam creaks upward, inch by inch, and my shoulders burn and my grip screams and I do not let go.

Halfway up, the rope slips.

The beam lurches. My heart stops. I lunge to catch it, and there is no possible way my body holds this, no way, it's four hundred pounds of engineered lumber and I am one hundred and thirty pounds of stubbornness and regret.

And then it stops falling.

It just stops, suspended, and the load vanishes from my hands like something reached down and lifted the weight of the world off me.

I turn.

He blots out the doorway. Drywall dust hangs in the light behind him. One massive hand wraps around the beam, holding it like a broomstick. Green skin, tusks, that permanent scowl, and under all of it a thing cracked wide open, something raw pinned on me.

"You rigged the redirect too high," Oggan says.

The beam holds. My hands are empty. My pulse slams so hard it fills my ears.

"You came back," I whisper.

CHAPTER 32

OGGAN

She rigged the redirect too high. Loop set above the load point, the whole weight dragging her forward with every pull. Amateur mistake. Dangerous mistake. She could have brought the beam down on her own skull.

That idea drove me across three counties in under an hour.

I set the beam into the hangers one-handed and drive the bolts home with my other palm, and only then do I let myself take her in properly.

She's a wreck. Sawdust in her hair, dark circles bruising the skin under her eyes, a fresh scrape blooming across one cheekbone where something caught her. Her hands are raw. She's been out here alone. Fighting my job. Losing.

Guilt sits in my gut like swallowed gravel.