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I go to work.

The rhinestones drag at every stitch across my shoulders. The neon glows so bright it throws faint yellow light back up under my jaw. A month ago I would have driven off the property sooner than let a stranger see me in it, and here I stand offering it up to ten thousand of them on purpose. Strange, the things a man will wear once he stops confusing his armor for his home.

I do exactly what I do every single day, which is take a room apart and put it back together correctly, except now I do it in highlighter yellow with GLAM SQUAD across the front, and I say nothing, and I let my scowl sit at its deepest and most honest, and apparently the contrast is the funniest thing the internet has ever borne witness to. Jilly narrates in her bright faucet chirp. I hang a door. I lay a bead of caulk. I lift a header into place one-handed while a sparkle emoji glints off my shoulder, and behind the tablet Jilly makes a small broken sound caught halfway between a laugh and a sob.

We shoot for two hours. The footage, she tells me quietly during a battery swap, is going to shatter every record she owns.

"Good," I say.

"Oggan." She lowers the tablet. The red light dies. In the gap between takes she is only Jilly again, the real one, sawdust on her cheek and the whole weight of three cold days sitting in her eyes. "Why. After everything I did. The tarp. The pizza box. Making you a secret. Why put this on for me now."

I set down the header. I look at the rhinestone monstrosity stretched across the wall of me, and then at her.

"Because the shirt is fake," I say. "The shirt is a costume I peel off at the end of the day. It costs me nothing that lasts." I step closer. The subfloor groans. "You were never the costume, Jilly. You made me a secret because you were scared, and I let three days go cold because I was proud, and both of us dressed the true thing up as something it isn't. That's what costs. No rhinestone shirt ever will." I flick a plastic gem. It sparkles. "This is only yellow."

Her mouth trembles. She sets the tablet on the sawhorse, careful, final, screen gone dark.

"I'm sorry," she whispers. "For the tarp. For all of it. I got so good at hiding the real me that I hid you too, and you're the realest thing I've got."

Something in the great room shifts, quiet and enormous, like a load-bearing wall finding true at last.

I open my arms. Yellow shirt, sparkle emoji, thirty-five years of keeping to the far edge of every room, and I open my arms in the dead center of one and wait to learn whether she will cross the floor.

She crosses the floor.

She hits me at a run and I catch her, all of her, up off her feet, and she buries her face against the wall of me and the ridiculous rhinestones, and I hold her while the generator ticks outside and the morning light lays its stripes across a room we built together.

Over her shoulder, on the sawhorse, the dark tablet buzzes once.

I do not reach for it. Neither does she. For one long minute, in a barn full of raw pine and second chances, the camera stays off, and the two of us stand inside the realest thing either of us owns, and nobody in the whole wide gawking world gets a single frame of it.

The tablet buzzes again. Patsy, surely. The machine, calling us back to the glass.

Jilly tips her head up. Wet eyes, real smile, no faucet in it anywhere.

"Let it buzz," she says.

I let it buzz.

CHAPTER 21

JILLY

The barometric pressure drops like a stone into my stomach.

I know that heaviness. My grandmother used to name it before the sky ever bruised. Storm coming, she'd say, and she'd start filling milk jugs with tap water. I ignore the ache building in my temples and nudge the ring light two degrees to the left. The exposed studs behind me catch the glow at exactly the wrong angle, throwing skeletal shadows across the frame.

"Take twelve," I whisper to nobody.

My phone perches on its little tripod, red dot pulsing. Behind the camera, the barndominium yawns open and unfinished, a cathedral of raw pine and possibility that has eaten every dollar I own. In front of the camera, I smile. The smile that pays my rent. The smile that keeps four sponsors from bolting.

"So, guys, today we are tackling the accent wall, and honestly? The vibes in here are immaculate."

Thunder cracks the sky in half.

The lights die.

Every screen, every glowing rectangle, every hum of electricity in the building blinks out at once. My ring light collapses into a dead gray circle. The red dot on my phone vanishes as the app crashes, and the signal bars empty one by one until a tiny gray triangle sits where my connection used to live.