The restroom is white tile, white sink, and silver fixtures that don’t try to be art. I lock the door. The click is a small relief. I set my clutch on the counter and run cold water. I splash my wrists and the back of my neck. I breath in through my nose and out through my mouth. The light is bright but not cruel. The mirror shows me a face that could belong to someone who belongs here. Late twenties, hair pulled into a low knot that won’t fall apart for an hour if I’m lucky, and makeup that looks like my skin on a day with better sleep.
There’s a plain white card next to the soap.
It isn’t gallery stock. It isn’t the size they use for wall labels or for shelf talkers. It’s a business card cut from a sheet with no logo, gloss, or smart design tricks. I stand still and watch myself not reach for it. Then I pick it up.
The front is blank. The back has neat bold letters in black ink.
For your safety
and a number.
My first reaction is defensive: I don’t take orders. My second is practical: if someone wanted to scare me, they’d do it loud. This is quiet. It’s meant to read as help. It could be a threat in a cardigan. It could be a man in a dark coat who doesn’t want to say his name. It could be the foundation, smoothing its new relationship by pretending to be generous in ways people who don’t know me think women need.
I set the card down, face up, then turn it over and set it face down, then pick it up and slide it into my clutch anyway. My phone is already in my hand. I type the number into a new contact with no name and no notes, then stop before I hit save. I delete the entry. I open a new text and type the number into the To field and let the cursor blink. I close the window and lock the screen. I haven’t called. I haven’t stored it. The card is still there. That’s enough.
I run water again and let it go longer. I hold my wrists under the tap. The cold is a reset switch when my chest gets tight. I’ve learned what helps. The first night I had a solo show, I stood in a bathroom stall and stared at graffiti until my vision focused again. Tonight the tile is clean, which is worse in a way. Clean hides a lot. I set my palms flat against the counter and push, then let go.
The mirror gives me back a face that tells the truth if I ask for it. Flushed, a little wild-eyed, and shoulders higher than they need to be. I roll them down and they go half an inch lower, then stop. Good enough. I press the corner of the card into my palm until the skin dents and bites. The pain is small and private. It tells my brain there’s a body to come back to.
“I am not prey,” I say to the woman in the glass who looks like me.
The words taste like a dare. That’s fine. I’ve done harder dares for less.
Chapter 4 – Cassian
From the second-floor mezzanine, behind the smoked-glass rail, I can see the whole first gallery: black tile reflecting everything, glass walls facing the harbor, a clean line of canvases broken in two spots to give the largest piece air. The crowd below is a moving grid of critics with notebooks, donors pretending not to posture, socialites angling for the right angle, and interns flying cover.
I dress the way money expects: tailored charcoal suit, white shirt, and narrow tie. Hair down and slicked back out of my eyes. On my lapel, a bland rectangle reads: “Mr. Ward — Ward Foundation.” The name tag is accurate enough to pass and boring enough to forget. It lets me stand at the rail and watch without being watched back. Two of my people stand ten feet off my shoulder in plain clothes, heads tilted at a polite angle that passes for interest in art. Tiny coiled cords run under their collars and into their sleeves. Close enough to be useful, not close enough to alert the room that they exist for anything more than escort duty.
I hold a glass of sparkling water in my right hand and keep my left free. I don’t drink at these events. I don’t need the warmth, and I don’t like dull edges. I use the glass the way people use a watchband, to keep from clenching my hand when I count. The glass helps me pass for someone who came here to be seen.
She stands at the second canvas from the west wall talking to a museum man with a badge that cost as much as his tie. I saw a black slip under wool when she walked in; her coat now gone with a coat-check tag in her clutch. Hair in a low knot that will hold because she pinned it to. There’s paint under her left thumbnail. She didn’t scrub it out with solvent. That kind of detail tells me more truth than a résumé. Her posture is work-ready: one foot angled for movement, knees unlocked so the body can change direction. She keeps her phone in her hand until someone asks a question that matters; then she puts it away so both hands show, so they see she’s giving them the room without handing over the keys.
My brain runs the same loop here that it runs in an ER: observe, record, decide, act. It translates automatically. Her vitals by observation: breathing even through the first twenty minutes; pulse not visible until the first camera flash hits too close; a small tremor in her champagne hand that stops when she switches to water; pupils normal under gallery light; blink pattern changes when a question veers from craft into exposure—two quick blinks, one slower. That slow blink is her threshold. You learn people’s thresholds if you watch long enough without thinking you own the outcome.
My vantage point looks straight down onto the largest canvas at the far end. The room hung it clean, out from the wall just enough that the shadow line gives it depth. I study it the way I would study a wound I have to deride by hand to know what I’m dealing with. The composition is frontal. The face fills the field without crowding it. The palette is honest and limited, close to the value range where real flesh lives when you take it out of the Instagram filter: umbers, ochres, grays warmed just enough, and white used sparingly in the eye, not as decoration. The brushwork is decisive without flourish. Edges are cleaned where they need to be and left soft in two places where movement has to read. She’s taken the band from the therapy wing and translated it into paint without copying it. The curve along the bottom that is muted, two degrees off the actual color, sits like a factual line, not a story. If you’ve walked that corridor, you feel it. If you haven’t, it reads as a design choice. She took the stairs that turn up behind the group room door and implied their angle in the upper right. It isn’t obvious.
It hits two parts of me at once. Pride, because she saw the exact thing we work to make invisible to everyone but the people who need it. Panic, because codes don’t stay codes when rooms like this decide they mean something else. Visibility moves faster than consent. I watch the museum people read the baseline and keep their faces blank because they’ve practiced, and I look for anyone who doesn’t know they’re not supposed to recognize it. Two women in the front—one in green with her arms folded look at the band and then at each other. They know. They’ll leave without drawing attention and sleep with their phones in the same place they put them every night, next to a glass of water and a door propped in a way no one who didn’t live like that would understand.
On the main floor, a critic leans into Aurora’s space. He’s the type who turns a question into a performance for the person standing behind him. His mouth moves too much. His sleeves are two inches too short because he believes a wrist bone is a résumé. He’s close enough that the camera behind him will put her into a frame she didn’t consent to. The urge to step in spikes the way it spikes when a nurse’s hand hovers over a tray the wrong way. I don’t move. I don’t need to. “Left-side photographer adjusting,” I murmur. “Redirect the critic three feet back. Do it so he thinks it was his idea.”
“Copy,” my left-side aide responds. He drifts along the rail and down the back stair. Thirty seconds later the critic steps back, laughing, and turns to a donor who wants to be told he saw a moment. Aurora tips her chin once and fields the next question from the smaller-paper journalist who asks about the baseline without trying to trap her.
“Sir?” my right-side aide calls out a few minutes later. “Two men by the north column. One moved toward Hale, the other cut to the anchor. They’re talking and voice recognition tags the byline as a critic with a history of bait questions.”
“Peel him off,” I say. “Redirect to the dessert table. Tell him the PR head has the Ledger title for tomorrow. Make it sound like he can beat them by writing a smarter angle.”
“Yes, sir.”
If you want to move a man like that, give him a larger mirror.
I go back to the card.
Two hours ago, from the back stairs, I sent a message from a slim phone that lives in the inside pocket of this jacket. It’s not my primary line and it holds eight numbers and one app that isn’t on any store. I typed a simple instruction to a staffer we placed in the gallery months ago to handle things that look like hospitality and function as security.Washroom. Counter, right of soap. White card. Black block letters: “For your safety.” Number below. No name.
She replied with a photo of the card on the neutral counter next to the chrome pump and the folded paper towel stack. The light level is correct. The placement is where a hand going for water will see it. No fingerprints. It isn’t a threat. It’s an experiment. But I don’t lie to myself. Experiments have hypotheses. Mine is that she’ll take it.
I watch Aurora study the mezzanine without moving her head. She felt the pressure. She makes herself breathe evenly, the way a medic does when a patient watches your face to decide if they’re dying. She scanned the exits earlier. Now she checks the top rail where the shadows have weight. She sees me. She doesn’t see my face. She sees the coat and the height. She files it. She looks away as if she didn’t and moves to the side gallery instead of coming up.
