Page 53

My grip slips and the beam slams down again, this time onto my boot, and a word comes out of my mouth that would get me demonetized on every platform I own.

I sit down on the plywood. Just sit. The master bedroom gapes open to my left, framed but unfinished, and I will not look at it, because I have a very detailed memory of what happened in that room and my body keeps its own record on top of that.

Three weeks. Give or take. I stopped counting the mornings I woke reaching for the other side of an air mattress that isn't there.

My phone buzzes on the workbench. I let it. It buzzes again. On the third buzz I crawl over and check, because some tiny broken part of me still hopes.

It's my mom. How's my famous girl?

Famous. Right. I killed the channel on purpose. Fired Patsy on live air, threatened the lawsuit, cried on camera without a single filter, then went radio silent. The internet moved on to a guy who trains raccoons to do parkour. Good for him. Good for the raccoons.

I type back great! and add a heart, because that is the family brand and I have been performing my whole life.

The beam still has to go up. Load-bearing ridge for the loft. I picked the design myself, back when I had a manager and a schedule and a giant green man who could carry a water heater like a baguette.

I try again. Legs, back, up.

I get it waist high. My whole body screams. I turn toward the sawhorses and my ankle rolls on a scrap of two-by-four, and the beam and I go down together in a heap of splinters and shame.

I lie there. Trusses overhead, bare and honest. I built this. I bet my life savings on it. Pastel dream house, my brand pivot, the thing that was supposed to save me.

It's just wood and echoes now.

The whole build was supposed to be a story. Beginning, middle, triumphant reveal, sponsors weeping into their quarterly reports. Every board I chose, I chose for the camera. Every fixture, every finish, staged for a payoff that had a monetization schedule attached. And somewhere in the middle of it, without a single ring light aimed at us, the story stopped being the point. He stopped being content and turned into the reason I got up. Then I lost him over a leaked twelve seconds, and now I'm alone in a set that turned into a home right when I stopped filming it.

I let myself cry for exactly one minute. I time it. Old habit. When the minute ends I wipe my face on my sleeve and haul myself upright and reach for my water bottle.

Empty. Of course.

A drip starts somewhere in the utility room, slow and steady, a leak I patched twice and lost twice. I limp over and crank the shutoff and the drip surrenders. Small win. I collect them where I can lately. Tighten a screw, sweep a corner, cross one item off a list that never gets shorter. Anchor my hands to something so the rest of me stops spinning.

The hardware store has water. The hardware store also has Judanna, who is technically his ex-wife and his best friend and the single most terrifyingly kind woman in this county. I've been avoiding that store like it owes me money.

But I'm out of water and out of options, so I climb into my car and drive into town with sawdust in my hair and grief lodged behind my sternum.

The bell over the door jingles. Judanna glances up from the register, and her whole face does a complicated thing, softening and sharpening at once.

"Well," she says. "Look what the storm dragged in."

"I need water." My throat is gravel. "And ridge hangers. The heavy gauge."

She comes around the counter. She's built like him, broad and green and solid, and she stops a foot away and studies my face with those amber eyes.

"You look like garbage," she says gently.

"Thank you. I curated it."

She snorts. Then she pulls me into a hug that smells like cedar and motor oil, and I stand there stiff for one second before I crumble into her like a dropped soufflé.

"He's a stubborn idiot," she says into my hair. "You get that, right? A stubborn, prideful, emotionally constipated idiot who has been sanding the same table leg for two weeks because he can't sit still without making something worse."

I pull back. "He's convinced I set him up. The trail camera. He's convinced I sold him out for a sponsorship."

"He's wrong. He's a coward for not asking you straight." She holds me at arm's length. "Did you? Sell him out?"

"No." The word cracks. "I fired the woman who did. I burned my whole career down. I'd burn it down again."

Judanna nods slowly, like something clicks into place behind her eyes. "Yeah," she murmurs. "I suspected as much."