I glance at Cassian. He doesn’t motion me in. He just waits. It should annoy me; it doesn’t. He is learning how to let me move without narrating it.
I slide into the seat. The leather is cool and richer than anything I grew up sitting on. The interior smells faintly like the garage and something clean. The tint makes the courtyard look like a movie. I can see out; the world can barely see in.
Cassian rounds the hood and gets in on my side. Reid stays outside a beat longer, checks his tablet, and closes my door with a soft thud.
“Any questions before we go?” Cassian asks.
“Just one,” I say, and bite down on the part of me that wants to throw Tulsa onto the seat between us like a lit match. Not yet in this car with Reid outside the door, and a morning that was built to be a clean sheet. “What will I see first?”
“Dust. Bad lighting. A room that wants windows where there aren’t any yet.” He tips his head. “Piping. Bones. The parts nobody photographs when they want a ribbon-cutting.”
“Those are my favorite parts,” I say, and it’s true. Anyone can look at a finished face and say pretty. The courage is in the raw.
He nods once, as if that answer belongs to a column only he sees.
Cassian puts the SUV in gear. I feel the small mechanical shiver travel through the chassis into the seat. Reid taps the roof twice like a man sending a ship out. Cassian clicks his seat belt and glances at me. I snap mine into place without being told.
As we roll forward, something in my chest rolls with us. Relief? Dread? It doesn’t matter. I grip my sketchbook and try to make the two halves of me—artist and girl from a file cabinet—line up in the same body. Some days they manage it. Some days the seams show.
I look down at my hands. The bandage on my palm is bright white against the black of my trousers. I press my thumb against it and feel the small ache that says I’m alive and careless. Last night was a border I crossed without a map. Today is a border I’m crossing with an escort who thinks he knows where the road goes.
By tonight,I tell myself,I’ll know everything. The optimism is a coat I put on over a rainstorm. It looks good until the weather remembers itself.
Chapter 57 – Cassian
Aurora sits beside me, seatbelt snug across her blouse, sketchbook balanced on her knees. She holds the pencil like a conductor holds a baton. Every few seconds her hand moves and I hear the soft whisper of graphite on paper. It’s not frantic or the furious carving she does when something is eating her. It’s observational—lines of trees, the curve of a ditch where rain has cut a new seam, the profile of a farmhouse roofline when we pass. Silent, but not tense. I let that wash through me and take it like a good sign.
The morning has warmed into a clean, bright midday. Sun slides over the hood and up the windshield in slow motion. The glass turns it into a thin white river across our laps. I keep one hand on the wheel and rest the other near her knee on the console. I don’t touch her. I don’t need to. The distance between us is smaller than anything that’s been between us for days, and that’s enough.
“This route takes us along the north ridge for a bit,” I say. “We’ll drop into the valley from the back side. South Annex is open to the elements on purpose. Fewer hard corners. Fewer doors you can’t see through.”
She draws another line and looks out her window. The light catches in her hair and makes a halo of the frizz she fights and sometimes lets win. “Fewer doors you can’t see through,” she repeats, neutral. “That’s a choice for the residents or the staff?”
“Both,” I answer. “When you’ve lived with secrets and locks, glass gives you back something. And it keeps us honest.”
“Does it?” she asks.
“It tries,” I say, and watch the line of asphalt stretch under the SUV like a ribbon I’ve untangled. “South Annex is our pilot for a more open model. Fewer restrictions, more outside time,more agency in scheduling. Navarro pushed hard for it. The board hated the early drafts. I compromised on nothing that mattered.”
“Funding?” She says the word like it’s an X-acto knife she knows how to use. “If the board hated it, who paid for the glass?”
“I did,” I say.
“With what?”
“With money that belongs to me,” I say, and let a clipped smile tilt the corner of my mouth. “And with favors owed. Donors care about finished stories and naming rights. I told them they could name a wing, not a person. They wrote checks anyway. I sold a building I didn’t love.”
“At the Sanctuary?” she asks.
“Across town,” I say. “A museum annex that wanted to be a donor magnet more than a refuge. Let the museum be a magnet. I don’t build galleries for people who want to drink around broken girls.”
She looks at me for that, sideways, like she’s trying to measure how that line fits into the Cassian she thinks she knows. She writes something I can’t see in the margin of her sketchbook, then flips a page and draws three rectangles with tick marks along the edges like she’s plotting light.
“Fewer restrictions,” she says. “What does that mean in practice?”
“It means the adolescents don’t have to ask to go into the garden. It means the women can walk the perimeter path without a chaperone,” I say. “It means doors that don’t require keycards inside a resident wing. It means we trust until we have to tighten—not the other way around.”
“Secrecy?” she asks, the other half of the knife. “You keep the locations hidden. You keep the residents sealed to outsiders. You don’t publish success stories unless someone leaves and begs you to. How do you reconcile openness and hiding?”
