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"For who?"

He goes very still. Something crosses his face, careful and enormous.

"There's something I have to show you," he says. "Tomorrow. Something I did. Before I was sure you'd take me back."

"Oggan." My pulse trips. "What did you do?"

He kisses my brow, and won't say another word, and the man is a vault when he wants to be.

I fall asleep against him that night in our real bed in our real house, and for the first time in my adult life, I don't set an alarm.

CHAPTER 34

OGGAN

Ihave the deed in my truck's glove box. I've had it eleven days.

I bought the workshop the week I left her. Isolated commercial lot, forty minutes out, exactly what I'd been saving toward since before I ever heard the words live stream. Metal building, three bays, a loft office. My dream, cash on the barrel, hollow as a rotted log the second I signed for it.

Because I'd built a whole life around getting away from people. And then one loud, curated, warm-hearted human blew a hole clean through that plan, and the quiet I'd chased my whole life just sounded like the space where she used to be.

So eleven days ago I made a second call. And I bought a second piece of land.

My father would have understood it in about two seconds. A man builds his shop where he can see his home, he used to say, or he builds it to hide from one. I spent fifteen years building to hide. Then a curated human with paint under her nails wrecked the whole strategy, and the math changed. Distance stopped reading as safety and started reading as loss. So I ran the numbers one more time, the only calculation that ever mattered, and every answer put her closer, not farther.

Judanna signed the closing papers as my witness and cried, which she'll deny to her grave. She also handed me the ring across the counter, wrapped in a shop rag, and told me to stop stalling before I talked myself out of the whole life. I told her I wasn't stalling. I was building foundation first. You don't set the frame before the footings cure.

I drive her out in the truck with a bandana over her eyes, which she complains about the entire way.

"If you're taking me to a murder barn," she says, "I want it on record that I suspected nothing until this exact moment."

"Quiet."

"Kidnapper's confidence. Noted."

She keeps up the running commentary the whole drive. Narrates every turn. Guesses our destination a dozen times, each guess more unhinged than the last. A cursed antique mall. An artisanal goat farm. A second, secret, better girlfriend she'll have to fight. I let her run. Her chatter used to grate against my quiet like a saw against a nail. Now the cab goes wrong when she stops, so I steer one-handed and let her fill the truck with noise, and something in me settles that was rattling loose for weeks.

"You're smiling," she accuses, though she can't see a thing under that bandana. "I can hear it. Your breathing changed. What's happening. Oggan. What are you smiling about."

"Nothing." I am smiling. I have no defense.

I pull off the county road onto fresh gravel. I kill the engine. I come around and lift her down myself, and I untie the bandana.

She blinks in the light.

The workshop stands in front of us. Big steel building, my name already on the sign, sawdust drifting out the open bay where I've been setting up my tools this week. She takes it in, her mouth curving.

"Oggan. You bought it. The dream workshop, you actually did it. This is huge."

"It is." I turn her ninety degrees by the shoulders. "Now look there."

She looks.

Across a short stretch of cleared land, maybe two hundred yards, sits the back edge of a barndominium. Sage trim on the east window. Brass glinting in the afternoon sun.

Her whole body goes rigid.

"That's." She takes a step forward. "That's our house. That's the back of our house."