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The sawdust hangs in the light between us. Neither of us moves. Her eyes are enormous and shining and locked on mine, and her chin trembles once, and she wraps both arms around her own ribs like the barndominium got cold.

"Oggan." My name in her mouth is barely sound.

"There is a second thing," I make myself say, because a coward stops at the safe truth. "You should know it, then choose."

"Okay."

"I cannot fake it with you." My hand is still in the air between us, and I let it drop, slow, until one knuckle rests against her jaw, and her whole body stills. "Because with you it would not be faking. That is the danger, Jilly. The risk is not that I would lie for the camera. It is that I would forget it was there."

Her lips part. Her pulse jumps under my knuckle, wild, quick, a bird against a window.

"That is my answer," I say, and I pull my hand back before it does something the elders would tell stories about. "Tell the small woman no. Tell her we will build the table instead, and if the internet wants a love story, it can find one in the grain of the wood, where I put it, where it cannot be un-sold."

I turn to the wall so she cannot map my face, and I pick the block plane back up, and I run it down the windowsill in one long stroke because my hands need to prove they can still do a thing that is simple and true.

Behind me her breath keeps coming quick and uneven. She does not leave. She does not argue. She does not pick up her phone to tell Patsy the answer is no.

"Oggan." Her footsteps, soft on the plywood, coming toward my turned back. "What if I said the sponsorship was never really why I asked."

The plane stops mid-stroke. A curl of pine hangs off the edge, refusing to fall.

"Then I would say," I answer, without turning, because if I turn now the elders will have a new story, "that you should be very careful what you build with a man whose hands cannot lie. Because he will take you at your word. And he will keep it forever."

The curl of pine drops to the floor.

Neither of us moves. That silence is louder than any yes I have ever been given, and I stand inside it, holding a plane, waiting to learn which of us is brave enough to speak into it first.

CHAPTER 15

JILLY

We compromise the way scared people always do. We split the difference and pretend it's a plan.

No fake dating. Patsy takes the news like a woman losing a limb, then rallies inside of ninety seconds because HearthGlow, it turns out, will settle for a build. A statement piece. "The heart of the whole home," the VP calls it on the phone, and Patsy repeats it to me with her hand over the mic and stars in her eyes.

So we build.

"A live-edge dining table," I tell the camera, chipper, ring light haloing me gold. "From scratch, by hand, right here, start to finish, with the one and only Oggan Warhip."

Off-camera he grunts. On-camera he is a monolith in a canvas apron, and the chat is already a waterfall of green hearts and people typing BASIL in all caps for reasons the algorithm will never understand.

The slab is a monster. Black walnut, nine feet, one live curved edge like a coastline. It took two men and a forklift to get it off the delivery truck, except it took Oggan and a slightly winded intern, because Oggan does not believe in the forklift when he owns two arms and a grudge against inefficiency.

We work for three days. The camera runs. I have never edited so little footage in my life, because nothing needs saving. Every second of it is charged, humming, the kind of tension you cannot fake and cannot buy and definitely cannot license to a furniture brand.

Day one: the planing. He teaches me to read the grain with my fingertips, to find the direction the wood wants to be smoothed. Then he stands behind me and closes his enormous hand over mine, guiding the block plane down the length of the walnut, and a curl of wood peels up thin as ribbon and the whole slab releases a smell like church. His heat soaks into my spine. My breath forgets its schedule entirely.

"Steady," he murmurs, right against my ear. "Long strokes. Do not fight it. The wood is not your enemy."

"You keep saying that."

"You keep fighting it."

I laugh, shaky, and the plane skips, and his grip corrects mine before I gouge a two-hundred-year-old masterpiece, and for one second we are just two people welded together over a piece of tree, and I forget the lens exists, forget Patsy exists, forget I am a brand and not a woman.

The chat notices. The chat always notices. "HAND. THING. HAPPENING." "sir that is a PLANE not a SLOW DANCE." I glance at the monitor and there are nineteen thousand people along for the ride while I fall in love in real time, and I cannot even be mad, because so am I.

"Tell them what it's for," I manage, gesturing at the lens, trying to steer us back to something I can control. "The audience. Say a sentence. Patsy will frame it and hang it in her office."