Page 34

My laptop screen swims. I blink it clear. I am so tired that my bones hum.

I built this whole life out of numbers exactly like this one. Follower counts. View minutes. Cost per acquisition, engagement rate, the terrifying green and red arrows that tell me each morning whether I still exist. For six years I have measured my own worth in a dashboard, and for six years the dashboard has been enough, or close enough, or at least loud enough to drown out the quieter question underneath it. Who is Jilly Dulane when the ring light goes dark. I gambled my savings on this barn to stop asking that question. Instead the barn cracked it wide open, because there is a man in it now who only ever meets the dark version of me, and likes her better.

The cursor blinks in the negative cell. Four thousand two hundred and eleven ways this dream falls down. I owe the roofer Friday. I owe the plumber a week after that. I owe the bank every single month for the next thirty years, and the bank does not care one bit how gently an Orc can hold a woman's hip.

Three days. Three days of Oggan turning his back to the lens. Three days of him hanging doors in the north wing like a man serving a sentence, of me laughing my faucet laugh at nothing, of both of us stepping wide around the corner where the air mattress used to sit. The comments have curdled on me now. fumbled the bag, they say. she made him miserable. They have a point.

Patsy's ringtone jackhammers across the folding table.

I answer, because ignoring Patsy is like ignoring a wasp trapped in the car.

"Tell me you love me," she says.

"Patsy."

"Better. Tell me you love the Hearthwell people, because they just tripled the offer."

The spreadsheet cell stops mattering. "Tripled?"

"One-twenty, Jilly. One hundred and twenty thousand dollars, contingent on a six-video series, and they are drooling, they are beside themselves, they cannot get enough of . . ." She pauses for the drama. ". . . the Hot Grumpy Orc."

Of course. Of course they cannot. My stomach drops straight through the folding table and into the subfloor.

"He's not exactly . . ." I drop my volume even though he is forty feet away behind a stud wall. "He's been kind of checked out on camera lately."

"Which is precisely why we're going to un-check him." Papers rustle on her end. "New concept. It tested through the roof with the focus group. Ready? 'Grumpy Goes Bright.' We put him in the Hearthwell capsule collection. The hero piece is this tee, okay, it's neon. Highlighter yellow. Says GLAM SQUAD across the front in rhinestones with a little sparkle emoji. He wears it in all six videos. The whole bit is the contrast. Big scary Orc, tiny bright shirt, deadpan. The people will LOSE. THEIR. MINDS."

I look at the stud wall.

Behind it, faintly, comes the ratchet of a drill driver and the low, off-key hum of a man who has no idea he hums when he works. Oggan Warhip. Who told me Orcs do not fake affection. Who traced a scar and said ask me tomorrow, I'll tell you all of them. Who owns the same three flannel shirts and canvas pants and boots because he settled decades ago on exactly who he is and will not perform for a single soul.

I am about to ask that man to wear a rhinestone tee that says GLAM SQUAD.

"Patsy, he'll never."

"He will if the alternative is you losing the house." Her tone flattens to something precise, the shark surfacing under the chum. "Let me be very clear, sweetheart, because I love you. Hearthwell is the entire ballgame. One-twenty finishes the barn, clears your debt, and re-signs your three biggest sponsors on the strength of the numbers alone. You blow this, the house goes back to the bank, the channel dies, and I have to drop you, because I cannot represent a cautionary tale." A beat. "So you're going to walk back there, and you're going to use whatever . . . leverage . . . you clearly have with the big guy, and you're going to get him in the shirt. Tonight. We shoot tomorrow."

"That's not leverage, that's . . ." My throat closes. "He's a person."

"He's content. Same thing now, welcome to my world." Her tone softens by exactly one degree, the way a knife softens when you turn the flat of the blade toward you. "I like him, Jilly. I do. But liking him doesn't pay for the roof. The shirt does. Get the shirt on the Orc." Click.

The line dies. The spreadsheet cell glows. Negative four thousand, two hundred and eleven dollars. One phone call away, positive one hundred and twenty thousand. And the whole distance between those two numbers is a single neon rhinestone shirt draped across the shoulders of the proudest man I have ever stood beside.

I put my head down on the folding table.

The drill stops behind the wall. The humming stops. Boots cross the subfloor, slow and heavy, and halt at the edge of my little office nook of plywood and folding furniture. I do not lift my head. I cannot look at him and hold the shape of my face at the same time, and right now my face is doing something I would never let a camera catch.

"You've been down here two hours," he says. "You skipped lunch again."

"I'm fine."

A pause. Then the soft thunk of something set on the table beside my ear. I crack one eye. A protein bar. The good kind, the kind he stocks in his truck, left there without comment the way he has left them for weeks. Even angry. Even hiding in the north wing. Even now.

That undoes me completely.

Because that is the whole man, right there in a foil wrapper. Three cold days of him turning his back to my camera, three days of me earning every inch of that cold, and still he tracks whether I have eaten. Still he leaves the good kind. Patsy has managed my career for four years and has never once cared whether I have eaten anything that was not on brand. My last two boyfriends built their whole affection around what I could post about them. And this enormous, grumpy, technologically illiterate Orc, who I wronged, who has every right to let me starve at my own folding table, quietly slides a protein bar into my field of vision and says nothing, because saying something would make it a transaction, and to him it is the opposite of a transaction. It is just care. Plain, unposted, unmonetizable care.

I sit up. My eyes stream and my nose runs and I am one hundred percent not camera-ready, and Oggan takes one look at me and the shutter behind his eyes cracks open.