“It looks like water that remembers it can be a river,” I say. “There’s a difference.” She pretends she didn’t like that, then does the thing with her mouth that means I got under her defenses.
The hour ticks the way good hours do: in a series of small decisions that add up to something that looks, from a distance, like grace. I’m rinsing knives under the tap when my phone buzzes on the table. I don’t check it immediately because part of the discipline of painting around kids is refusing to teach them that every sound from a screen is more important than the color in front of them. When I do pick it up, it’s because I’ve put the knives in their rack and cannot justify a delay to myself as anything other than avoidance.
It is a text from an Unknown number.Are you safe? Reply yes or no.
I stare at the words until the afterimage of them burns into the white behind my eyes. The sentence is an emergency room form stuffed into a text bubble. It’s the kind of message that makes every cell in a body want to go very still and very fast at the same time.
I set the phone face down, count to ten the way Dr. Navarro taught the residents to count when the walls in their heads get too close. When I flip it back over, there’s a second message.
He can’t protect you forever.
My hands sweat so fast the phone is slippery. I wipe them on my jeans. My ears go loud and small, like someone cupped their palms over them and pressed. For a moment I’m twenty-one with a borrowed phone in a bathroom stall and the knowledge that if I don’t choose the next move perfectly the next year of my life won’t belong to me. Then the room comes back and the feeling that someone somewhere is watching me the way a hunter watches a path folds itself into my muscles and waits.
I take a screenshot on autopilot, forward it to no one, then delete the preview because I don’t want to see the sentences a third time. My thumb hovers over the reply field. The old me would answer—ask who, ask how, ask why they had my number, ask if Jonah was involved because a part of me still hurts in the shape of his name. The newer version of me who has been sleeping in a bed that smells like cedar and heat for the last two nights and waking up to the sight of a scar I want to put my hand over does something different. She lifts her gaze and looks around the room at every camera I can’t see and every human I can. She watches Cassian cross the courtyard again two floors below, head bent, listening to the voice on his phone with the expression that means somebody somewhere just made a choice that cost them their job. She puts the device in her pocket and tells herself she will bring it to him and not Reid because she wants the fire, not the blanket.
“Everything okay?” Vera asks, with the exact tone that says if I want to lie she’ll let me.
“Spam,” I say, which is technically true in the way a knife is technically metal. “Kenzie, show me your water.”
Kenzie doesn’t show me anything; she holds up the page like a gladiator holding a sword and says, “It doesn’t look stupid.”
“It looks like a place,” I say, taking it in. “Do you want to name it?”
She glares at me because I’ve made the mistake of asking for a noun before she’s decided she’s allowed to tell anyone she cares enough to own a thing. “No.”
“Then it’s a painting without a name,” I answer lightly, as if that’s a genre and not a temporary state. “Sign it anyway.”
She hesitates. “I’ve never signed anything.”
“That’s why it’s time,” I say, because I remember the power of the first time you put letters that belong to you in wet paint. “You exist.”
She rolls her eyes the way girls roll their eyes when a woman’s voice makes them feel seen and they don’t want to admit it, then sets the knife down and prints K E N Z I E at the bottom with a brush that is two sizes too big. The letters wobble. They read as a decision.
I feel steadier for reasons that have nothing to do with my phone and everything to do with how ownership works when it’s earned. The texts can wait thirty minutes. They can’t burn the house down from inside my pocket without me opening the door.
I’m at the top of the stairs when the phone buzzes once, hard enough to feel like a nudge. I don’t want to look. I look. Another unknown number. Same formatting. Same chill.
We can get you out.
The text is still waiting when I glance down one more time, as if words could grow teeth if you leave them long enough.We can get you out.Maybe they can. Maybe they’re the ones who put people in. Maybe it’s both. I tuck my hair behind my ear, smear paint across my cheekbone by accident, and decide, ruthlessly, to let the sentence sit where it is until I am the one who decides what "out" means.
Across the courtyard, the flash of a black suit moves between hedges, brief and deliberate, and is gone. I lift a knife. I drag light. I breathe. I am useful. And watched. And not running.
Not today.
Chapter 49 – Cassian
I run the meetings standing. The chair at the head of the table is mine; I rarely use it. I prefer to read a room from my feet.
“Start with Haven South,” I say, scanning the line of faces and the materials fanned in front of them. “If Caldwell’s team touched anything, it would be there first.”
An intake coordinator I poached from a county hospital clears her throat, pushes a folder across the table with fingers that still carry tape residue from triaging. “We doubled access checks at two a.m. Comms logs look clean. We did find three failed remote attempts from a Miami IP, spoofed six layers deep. Our firewall flagged and quarantined.”
“Trace?” I ask.
“Inside the sandbox. We’re pulling strings,” she says, quickly and competently. I hired her for that.
“Good,” I say. “South stays on enhanced checks. Move the adolescent group to North Annex to give the Haven staff breathing room.”
