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"Are we still talking about insulation?"

He goes rigid behind me. Every muscle in that enormous frame locks up like a bank vault. For one long, humming second neither of us breathes, and the work light buzzes, and somewhere far below a bird got into the rafters and flaps around being an idiot.

Then he clears his throat, a sound like a truck downshifting, and reclaims his hands. Cold rushes into the space they leave.

"Next cavity," he says.

We work down the line. He hands, I hold, he corrects. My rhythm smooths out. Third batt goes up clean. Fifth batt goes up perfect. I whoop, and he almost smiles, and the almost is worth more than the whoop.

Every third correction he forgets himself and steadies my hips to keep me from tipping off the plank, and every third correction my brain short-circuits into static. His hands could span my whole waist. They don't grab. They cradle, careful, like I'm made of the cabinet glass he rips off walls for fun.

"Why do you do it by hand?" I ask, wedging the eighth batt. "The blow-in stuff is faster. Patsy priced it. Half a day, one machine."

"The machine leaves gaps you cannot see." He staples above my head, the whole platform absorbing the recoil through his frame. "In winter, a gap is a cold spot. A cold spot is mold. Mold is a house eating itself from the inside while everyone stands around admiring the paint." He pauses. "Fast is how you build something that looks finished. Slow is how you build something that lasts a hundred years."

"You really think about the hundred years."

"I will not be here for them." He says it plainly, no drama. "The house will. Someone's grandchildren will sleep warm under this ceiling and never know my name. That is enough."

I stop with the staple gun halfway raised. My eyes sting, which I blame entirely on fiberglass. Nobody in my whole polished pastel career has ever said a single thing that true into one of my cameras, and this man just said it to a batt of insulation like it cost him nothing.

"Okay, philosopher," I say, wedging the ninth batt to cover how hard that landed. "Hand me the next one before I get emotional about a barn."

He passes it up. Our fingers brush on the handoff. Neither of us hurries the brush along.

"You are quieter," he observes. "This is new. Usually you narrate. 'And now we staple, so cute, don't forget to like and subscribe.'"

"I do not sound like that."

"You sound exactly like that. It is a good sound. But it is a sound you make at the camera." He staples above my head, the recoil rolling through his whole frame. "Up here there is no camera. Up here you are just a woman with fiberglass in her teeth. I prefer her."

My hands go still on the batt. Down below, the ring lights sit dark and folded. Up here it is only the buzzing work light and the pine smell and a man twice my size telling me he likes the version of me I keep hidden behind a filter.

"She's a mess," I say. "That version. She doesn't photograph well."

"Neither does a load-bearing wall." He shrugs, and the whole platform shifts with it. "You do not photograph the thing holding the roof up. You just sleep soundly because it is there."

I have to look very hard at the insulation for a moment.

An hour bleeds by. Twelve cavities done. My arms scream. Sawdust glues itself to the sweat on my neck.

"Break," he says, and lowers himself to sit on the platform with his back to a rafter and his boots dangling into open air. He pats the plank beside him.

I sit. Our shoulders touch. Mine barely reaches his bicep.

He pulls a granola bar from his pocket, the good kind, the twelve-grams-of-protein kind, and holds it out. No remark about how he clocked me skipping lunch. Just the bar, resting in his open palm like an offering.

My throat tightens, and not from fiberglass.

"Thank you," I say, small.

He grunts. We sit in the pine-smelling quiet, twelve feet above my collapsing dream, and I chew, and his heat radiates into my side like a woodstove, and I understand with total clarity that I am in enormous trouble. The kind of trouble a ring light cannot fix. The kind of trouble that does not photograph well and does not clip well and will absolutely not fit inside my brand.

"You have fiberglass in your hair," he says.

"I have fiberglass in my soul."

His hand comes up, slow, telegraphed, giving me every chance to pull away. Two fingers, gentle as a whisper, pick a golden strand from the mess above my ear. He holds it up to the work light like evidence. Then he flicks it off into the dark, and his knuckle grazes my cheekbone on the way down, and the graze lasts one heartbeat too long to be an accident.