“I don’t,” I say. “I hold both. We are open inside and hidden outside. The world isn’t safe enough to give us the luxury of only one.”
She nods thoughtfully. The pencil stops then starts again. The quiet we’re in is the kind I can breathe in.
The car’s comm light flicks orange on the dash. I tap the button and Reid’s voice comes through clean, threaded with road and wind. “Update on the route,” he says, too casually. “Crew doing emergency work on the switchback past Mile 18. Flaggers say an hour delay. I can send you around east. Adds ten minutes if you don’t mind a detour.”
I glance at the nav. There’s nothing showing on the map—no red line for traffic, no hazard icon—but our maps don’t touch public data by design. If there’s a crew, my feed won’t show it unless a guard enters it in the system. I check the clock. Ten minutes is nothing. Aurora isn’t rolling her eyes. I could push through, sit, let the engine idle, and watch her sketch flaggers for an hour, or I could move and keep this day what I promised her it would be.
“Send it,” I say. “We’ll take the east route.”
“Copy,” Reid says. “Two clicks you’ll see a side road on your right. Newly paved. Past the gray water tower. Should be a clean drop into the valley.”
I tap off and look at the trees. My shoulders twitch with the reflex to verify everything myself. I let it go. I am not alone today. I am also not perfect. I promised myself this drive would not be a surveillance exercise with a woman beside me; it would be a drive with a woman beside me during which I refuse to turn the road into a chessboard. Reid can clear a detour.
Aurora watches my mouth like she’s trying to read which choice I made. I keep my hands steady on the wheel and let the calm that’s new to me stay a little longer.
“This is the part,” I say lightly, “where you ask me if I’m a control freak for insisting on driving you myself.”
She doesn’t smile but her eyes soften. “No. I wondered if you needed to remember what it feels like to move toward something without asking.”
I let out a breath I didn’t know I had. “That too,” I concur.
We pass the gray water tower. The side road appears on the right, as promised, with a new asphalt sheen that says it’s been laid by a crew that knows their grade and didn’t skimp on the base. I turn the wheel. The SUV hums its approval. The pines lift and we enter a corridor of sunlight and shadow.
“South Annex started as a safehouse,” I say, keeping my voice easy. “We bought the land cheap, not because it was worthless but because it was quiet. We kept the original lodge, knocked out half the interior walls, poured a glass spine down the center, planted three acres of garden beds because Navarro swears hands in dirt heal parts of the mind trauma can’t reach.”
Aurora glances at me. “You believe that?”
“I believe anything that works,” I say. “If sunlight and basil do more than a pill, I’ll put glass in the roof and plant rosemary in every corner. I’m not sentimental about means.”
She looks down at her hands. I want to reach over and press my thumb to the center of that bandage until I feel heat and pulse. I keep both hands where they belong and let that want become a line of energy back into the road.
“Who’s there now?” she asks.
“Twenty-one residents,” I say. “Eight adolescents. Thirteen women. Two of the adolescents will be there on a short-term rotation while we transition them to families in the county. The rest are in longer arcs.”
“And staff?”
“Six full-time therapy,” I say. “Three medical. Four security on daylight and the same at night, plus floaters.Teachers, cooks, gardeners. Volunteers we keep very close until we know where their loyalties live.”
“You watch the volunteers more than the residents,” she says.
“I watch whoever has power they didn’t earn by surviving,” I say, and meet her eyes for that one beat. She holds my look and then returns her gaze to the moving air outside the glass.
We crest a small hill. The valley opens and the compound reveals itself like it knows how to make an entrance without showing off. Three long rectangular buildings in a stagger down the slope, all glass and pale wood. The oldest structure sits back under the pines. The central walkway has the gentle slope of a ramp, not steps, so nobody has to decide whether to hide a limp or a fear of stairs. There’s a small playground and a white-painted shed with doors thrown wide to a wall of tools hung in parallel like a diagram on a test that teaches order.
Aurora goes very still.
I cut the engine and the sudden quiet makes the birds sound loud. We sit there. For a second I don’t open the doors. I let her look. It’s the closest thing to a prayer I say:that the first impression lands where it needs to.
“It’s beautiful,” she says finally. Then softer, as if beauty is a cost she’s not sure she should pay for, “It doesn’t look like a secret.”
“It is,” I say. “But it doesn’t look like one from inside.”
I open my door and step out. The air has a sweetness up here it doesn’t have in the city. When I come around her side, she’s already out, hand on the roof, eyes tracking the lines of the nearest building. I watch her watching. It unlocks something in my chest I didn’t plan for.
A guard approaches from the gatehouse. He’s in our gray and he wears it right. He’s not one of mine. Or he is, but new. I clock his face, file it, and raise a hand in greeting.
“Mr. Ward,” he says. “Welcome.”
