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Here is what I do with it.

I go and haul water. Then I split kindling with the back of the knife, badly, because I am no good at it and because it takes both hands. Then I re-lay the smoking rack, which does not need re-laying, and I re-lay it anyway, and the entire time the two sentences go around in my head like a coin in a dryer.

Screening Day 15. Get him ready.

Ready for what, though.

That is the part I keep coming back to, and it is the part that saves me, and by four in the afternoon I have built a very good little house out of it.

The house goes like this.

I have no idea what is in that episode. Nobody does. Neve has been shown something at base camp, or she has read a beat sheet, or she has stood behind an editor and taken a read off the room, and whatever she got was strong enough to move her. Fine. But get him ready is not information. It is a weather warning without a direction.

And what am I supposed to do with it? Walk up to a man who splits wood softer than the wood needs, ever since Day Seven, ever since he worked out he was being written, and tell him that a producer has him down as a man who needs preparing? He would carry that for five days. He would carry it up every hill on this ridge. He would carry it into a challenge and into a family message and into a two person tent, and he would say nothing about it, because saying nothing is the only tool anyone ever handed him, and it is the exact tool they are using to hang him.

Five days of that would take something out of him that I could not put back.

So I hold it. For his sake.

That is the house. It has a roof on it and everything.

And I stand at the woodpile at four in the afternoon with the knife in my hand and I have built it so fast and so well that I do not go anywhere near the thing underneath it, which is that a man who does not have a piece of information cannot ask me a question about it, and I have spent thirty years arranging my life so that nobody asks me questions.

He comes down off the roof at four fifteen.

"You have been at that kindling for an hour."

"It's difficult kindling."

"It is dead alder."

"It's emotionally difficult kindling."

He looks at me. Ten days ago that look went past me like weather. It does not go past me now. He stands there with the shock cord and a fresh pole set in his hands and he takes an inventory of me, slow, the way I do to other people, and I hold absolutely still and give him a face built for holding still, and after a moment he goes back to the tent.

He is getting better at reading me.

I am still better at not being read.

That is the marriage of it, and there is going to be a bill.

Challenge three is at six in the evening and they run it in the dark on purpose.

Cade on his plywood with a headlamp, six teams in a row, and one canvas bag per team on a table.

"Three caches," Cade says. "Marked on a chart. Chart's in the bag, chart's sealed, do not open it until I say."

Coby has his hand up.

"One of the three marks is wrong, Coby."

Coby puts his hand down.

"One mark on every chart is bad. Wrong bearing, wrong distance, wrong side of a creek, that's for you to sort out. All three caches back to this table, and the first team with three wins the challenge outright." He lets that land. "And you get one asset."

He points into the dark at the edge of the Flat.

There is a stump out there with a work light on it, and on the stump there is a man in a poncho with a clipboard, a crew guy, hood up, hands in his sleeves.