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"I do not flex." I lift the wrecked cabinet run one-handed to prove I could throw it out the window if I wanted, then set it back down because that would be childish. "I work."

Her laughter finally winds down into little hiccups. She looks at the mess, then at me, then at the camera, and something clicks behind her eyes. She lunges for the tripod and swings the lens around to capture the destruction, the plume of settling dust, my boots buried in the wreckage.

"That," she breathes. "That is the whole video. Forget the tutorial. That is the video."

"You said no lies." My jaw sets. "That was real. That is how you take out a dead cabinet."

"I get that it's real." The bright influencer voice snaps back on like a light switch, but a live wire hums under it now, genuine and electric. "Besties. New plan. My contractor just DELETED an entire kitchen with his bare hands and I think I need to sit down."

She does the little wave. She kills the recording. The red light dies.

And then, quiet, just to me, she says: "That's going to save my whole channel. You get that, right?"

I have no answer for that. I can hang a door. I can read a stud finder and pour a footing and shim a beam dead level. I have no idea how to be the reason a stranger's face lights up like a struck match.

So I grunt and reach for my crowbar to start on the lower cabinets.

"Oggan." She catches my sleeve. Her small fingers on the canvas. "Thank you. For not letting it fall on me."

Heat crawls up the back of my neck. I stare at the dead cabinets instead of at her.

"Anchors were pulling," I say again, because it is the only true thing I have. "Anyone would."

"No." She lets go, and steps back, and gathers up her clipboard and her ridiculous ergonomic crowbar. "They really wouldn't."

She walks off to charge a battery, humming, dust in her hair like she wears it on purpose.

I stand alone in the wreckage. My sleeve stays warm where her hand was. I set my palm over the spot, then curse myself, and get back to work before I do something truly stupid, like ask her to stay in the room while I do it.

The lower cabinets take me four minutes. I count it. Counting minutes is safer than counting anything else.

CHAPTER 7

JILLY

The clip hits two million views before I finish my second cup of coffee.

I sit cross-legged on the plywood floor of the barndominium at six in the morning, laptop balanced on an overturned bucket, and the numbers climb so fast the counter can barely keep up. Two million. Two point four. Two point nine. My phone buzzes across the floor like a trapped hornet and I let it.

The comments scroll faster than I can read them.

ma'am your contractor just committed a crime against that cabinet and I am the only witness.

the way he said MOVE. one word. I have never been so respectfully relocated in my life.

not the ergonomic crowbar sitting there useless while he goes full demolition mode

jilly babe blink twice if the orc is single

I laugh out loud, alone, in an unfinished house. My own laugh startles me. It sounds real, which is strange, because I have spent three years training every laugh I make to hit the algorithm at the right frequency.

The video is perfect and I did almost nothing to it. That is the part that stings and sings at the same time.

I built this channel one obsessive frame at a time. Color-graded every clip until the whites glowed and the pastels sang. Scripted my banter down to the syllable. Reshot a thirty-second segment eleven times because my smile looked forty percent instead of a hundred. And none of it, not one polished second of it, ever landed like nine seconds of a grumpy orc ripping a cabinet off a wall and telling me crowbars are for tired men.

I should be thrilled. I am thrilled. Something in my ribs is doing a thing that might be joy or might be a panic attack; lately they wear the same coat and I stopped checking the label.

By seven the clip has jumped platforms. Someone stitched it with a slow-motion zoom on his hands around the cabinet, scored to dramatic strings, and that version has its own million views. A woodworking account reposts it with the caption actually incredible grip strength, this man could crush a watermelon. A cooking creator uses it as a metaphor for ripping toxic people out of your life. A pastor, somewhere, apparently worked it into a sermon. My little barn build has escaped me entirely and gone feral on the internet, and I built none of it. He did. In nine seconds. Without a script.