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where's my grumpy king. this is grumpy IMPOSTER.
the way he wouldn't even LOOK at her yesterday. something's wrong in paradise
unfollowing till the yearning comes back tbh
Numbers ride under the newest video. Down. The little arrow points the wrong way for the first time since a shirtless clip crashed her app. I set the phone face-down on the counter and grip the edge of the sink until the porcelain creaks under my hands.
Strangers. Thousands of them, ten thousand, more, all of them reading the exact truth off two faces on a screen and typing it back at us in real time. They have no names for us and no stake in our lives, and they have diagnosed in one afternoon what took me thirty-five years to let anyone close enough to break. Wrong in paradise. Dead behind the eyes. They are correct. That is the unbearable part. The one thing I guarded most fiercely, the private country of what runs between me and Jilly, has become a spectator sport with a leaderboard, and the crowd wants a refund.
Good, some ugly corner of me mutters. Let it drop. Let the whole viral machine sputter and die. Let it all go back to just us.
Except it will never go back to just us. That is the lesson I have earned the hard way. There is no just us as long as there is a camera, and there is always a camera, and the woman I want lives inside the lens the way I live inside a job. I have no map for how to reach her through the glass.
Judanna texts again.
call me. i can hear you brooding from clear across town.
I call her. She picks up chewing something loud.
"Talk," she says.
"There's nothing to talk about."
"The whole county can see there's plenty to talk about. Your girl looks like she got hit by a truck, and you look like you're the truck." A crunch. "What did you do?"
"I didn't do anything."
"Uh-huh. And I run a scrapbooking store." She swallows. "Oggan. I was married to you. You don't go stone-quiet like this over nothing. You went quiet exactly like this twice in all our years. When your dad passed, and when you got it in your head I was leaving you for the feed-store guy."
"You did leave me."
"For the feed-store guy? I most certainly did not, we simply worked out that we were siblings who'd made a scheduling error." She sighs down the line. "Point is, you only turtle up this hard when you're scared of losing something. So. What are you scared of losing?"
Sawdust. A striped morning. A small warm weight over the drum of my heart, telling me she had it, she believed it.
"Nothing," I say.
"Liar." Gentle, though. "Go fix it before the numbers do the fixing for you. Because I promise you, big guy, the second that algorithm calls your love story done, that manager of hers manufactures a new one, and you'll be standing off to the side while your sunshine girl fake-dates some influencer with abs and a podcast."
The line goes dead quiet on my end.
"There it is," Judanna says, softer now. "That's the sound of you landing on the truth. Go to work, Oggan. Hang your doors. But quit hiding in the north bedroom like a scolded dog. It's beneath you."
She hangs up.
I stand in my too-quiet kitchen with a too-flat bed behind me and a phone full of comments in front of me, and I run the one calculation I dodged all night. Every hour I spend stone-silent to guard myself, I hand the machine one more reason to invent a story uglier than the true one.
I grab my tool belt.
I have no idea yet what I will say when I get there. I only have this: I am done being the safe, silent appliance shoved to the back of the frame. If I am going to lose her, I will not lose her by hiding.
CHAPTER 19
JILLY
Ihave been glaring at the same spreadsheet cell for nine minutes, and the number in it will not change no matter how hard I stare.
Negative four thousand, two hundred and eleven dollars. That is the roof. That is what the roof costs beyond what the roof budget holds, and the roof budget is what survives the plumbing overrun, and the plumbing overrun is what happens when you gamble your whole life savings on a barn, a dream, and a grumpy Orc you managed to lose in a single sunrise.
