“And this helps?” I ask, nodding at the room.
“Sometimes,” he says. “Sometimes I just sit where the walls don’t have stories.”
“I could use that,” I say. I mean it as a joke, but it comes out too sincere to be dismissed.
He turns his hand palm up. It’s unconscious, I think; he does not know he’s offering. I put my paint-streaked fingers in his for one heartbeat. He closes around them, and I feel the way my pulse calms when it has something living to push against that isn’t a wall.
“We can come back here,” he whispers.
“Show me the rest first.” If we stay in this small room I’m going to do something like sit down and tell him the rest of the stairwell story and I don’t know if I want to be that version of myself yet.
He nods. We keep walking. I realize after the third corner that I have lost track of how we’re turning. There’s a map in myhead, but it was made for city blocks and fire escapes, not for a labyrinth built under a house. For a second that makes me angry—that he built a maze I want to navigate and then asked me to trust him as my thread. But when I look, I see signage that’s not for me—small blue dots at ankle height on the baseboards, different patterns for different routes. I follow one and it leads my eye to a door with a painted dog on it. The language here isn’t all numbers. It’s in pictures, textures, and sound. I file that away like a thief collecting keys.
We pass a room where a round-faced man hands a young woman a mug and waits until she takes it before letting go. The girl’s hair is oiled and combed like someone sat for an hour and remembered how to be patient with tangles. In another room I see an older woman, hair buzzed short, pressing her palms rhythmically to a wall as if she’s feeling for a heartbeat in it. A therapist stands close enough to intervene and far enough to not be a mirror.
“Do they know who I am?” I ask as we turn down another corridor.
“They know you’re with me,” he says. “The ones who read the news know more. The ones who don’t, don’t care.”
“You introduce me as Aurora,” I say. “Not as anything else.”
“You picked that fight last night,” he says, and there’s a flicker at his mouth that isn’t quite a smile. “I learned.”
I hear the cello again through the door. It’s a different song this time, and I realize I want to come down here alone and sit for an hour and listen, which is both impossible and exactly the sort of wanting this place creates—soft human ones that don’t make headlines.
We come to a door that isn’t like the others. No glass. Just a narrow window with a privacy film. He keys it open and steps aside so I can go in first. It’s an intake room. I know becauseeverything in it looks temporary: the folding cot with clean sheets, the rolling stool, the cabinet with a lock and a sign that says inventory checked at shift change in neat hand lettering. The fluorescent lights are off; the room is lit by a small lamp that throws a circle of relief on the wall.
“This is where they start?” I ask.
“Sometimes,” he says. “Sometimes they start in a car. Sometimes at a bus station. Sometimes in a church bathroom. Wherever the first safe door is.”
“Who decides who gets in?” I ask. “You?”
“Whoever answers the phone,” he says. “Then me in the morning. Navarro at night. Reid if running a perimeter is the decision.”
“Do you ever say no?” I ask, because I need to press here. I need to know if the word no is a weapon he keeps for other people’s mouths and not for his own.
“Yes,” he says. “If it endangers everyone else. If the person at the door is a man with a badge and a story about concern. If it’s someone who won’t agree to keep the other residents anonymous.” He looks at me. “Yes,” he repeats. “If saying yes would mean letting inside a wolf I don’t have the resources to cage.”
“And me?” I ask before I can soften it. “What am I?”
He doesn’t flinch. “A woman who can blow this apart with one painting,” he says quietly. “And the most likely person to create a record that outlives Caldwell’s career. Both are true. I invited you in anyway.”
“Because you want me,” I say, because we are not going to pretend the heat between us is a footnote.
“Because I want you,” he agrees, not sparing himself the confession. “And because I want what you make when you love something you shouldn’t.”
I look away first. The cot is neatly made. There’s a small card on the pillow with a line in block letters: YOU DO NOT HAVE TO TELL ME YOUR STORY TO STAY. I put my thumb on the corner of the card and feel the paper’s tooth.
“You save them,” I say, because if I don’t say it out loud it will sit in my chest like something I’m trying to swallow whole.
He shakes his head. “We give them a chance,” he says. “Saving is up to them.”
“And the secrecy?” I ask, hearing the lawyer in my voice—Nadia’s measured arguments about NDAs and liquidated damages and arbitration in his state. “Why hide what works?”
He looks up at the small black half-domes in the corners again and then at me. “Because some people would rather burn it down than let it work,” he says. “Because a camera in the wrong place makes a girl into a quote. Because a man like Caldwell will smile while he hands a microphone to a predator and call it oversight.”
I breathe out hard. The hair at the nape of my neck is damp. I feel the echo of last night’s fight in my legs and the way my knees wanted to give when the door rattled and his hand covered my mouth. That memory is not helpful right now. I press my fingers to the edge of the cot until my knuckles pale. “I hate that I understand,” I whisper.
