I take one step back and look for other small wrongs. The cloths I folded at noon sit off by one edge. The pencil sharpener on the side table turned to face the wall. The movement is precise, like someone measured and put things almost back. Almost like a walk-through.
The violation rush hits late. Heat in my face, cold in my arms, that awful slick feeling at the back of the neck that makes you want to turn around fast and never turn your back on a door again. I hold the table to stop myself from teaching my knees a language I don’t want to practice tonight. I breathe until the shaking slips into a smaller register, not gone, but manageable.
I step to the back door and crouch to read the floor. The print is partial. It’s a heel and half an arch, not a tread. Dress shoe, not sneaker. No mud, just wet. The rain started after nine. I left at six. Someone came in after that, while I was at the gallery, or right after I left tonight. The deadbolt is engaged. The latch is down. The frame is old, and small hands can learn old wood. Mine did. I don’t like that thought. I back away from the door and put my hands on the nearest canvas like I can steady myself on work.
The plastic under my fingers is banished hospital. It crinkles. I hate bubble wrap, even though it keeps paint from rubbing off on the inside of a crate and making me curse later. It hides the work and makes you trust your own memory of what’s under there. Right now, it makes the room feel like a storage unit, not a place where I draw breath.
I go to the sink and wash my hands. The blue under my left nail catches the light. I dry my fingers on a clean rag and put the rag in the metal can with the lid because solvent rags start fires and I won’t be the person who learns that lesson the hard way.
I take a blank canvas from the stack and unroll it. I lay it over the cluster of brushes and the shelf and the tray like a sheet. It’s an old instinct, older than this address.Hide the parts that tell the story you don’t want someone else to read. Protect what can’t defend itself.It’s silly because the person who touched the brush is gone, and if they wanted to break something, it would be broken. It still helps. The studio looks less exposed with the blank covering the small wrongs.
The lamp over the sketchbook presses a circle of light onto the page and turns the room around it into shapes. My shadow wipes part of the graphite jaw where my wrist rests. The white card glows like it knows it doesn’t belong. I sit at the table. Mylegs feel hollow, like they borrowed strength from the standing part of me and now want it back with interest.
The card is a trigger, and I hate that it has that kind of weight in this room. I flip it so the number is up. It’s written by someone who doesn’t want to show himself. It could be the foundation. It could be a man who wants to call himself a protector. It could be the dark coat on the mezzanine. It could be all of them. I think about the kids I knew who learned early that gifts are tests, that someone gives you a thing to see if you’ll take it and then writes your answer down to use later. A soda, a ride, or a hand on your shoulder. A door held open and a “we’re the same.”
There’s a photograph in my head I don’t want right now. A boy from one of the houses when I was thirteen, quiet in the good way, always reading the rules posted near the office like they were poetry. He went missing two days after a man came around on “inspection.” We told the night staff. No one called anybody until morning. By then, the trail was three streets cold. I don’t know where he went. I never knew his last name. If someone had called when it mattered, maybe the ending would sit different in my chest.
Not calling can be passive or it can be survival. I know both truths. I hate the position the card puts me in: pick a lane or turn a switch. Either way, something in me is going to be wrong after. I tilt my head back and stare at the ceiling because sometimes my eyes need something boring to look at while my brain does its work.
What do I know?Someone watched me tonight. Someone with enough access to place a card where I’d find it. Someone with the ability to make the gallery staff pretend nothing happened. Someone who touched my studio and put things almost back where they found them. Someone who either wants me to feel safe or wants me to feel watched. Both read as control.
What do I need?Security and actual help if something is about to get loud. Not a man-sized promise. Not a donor who wants his name on a wall card. Not a critic who wants me to turn my work into a quote he can hang a headline on. I need someone who understands that no means no, that women don’t owe men their fear, that safety has to be built, not announced.
Who has that?Not many. Who has the nerve to plant a card in a locked room and the politeness to write neatly?
I look at the faint shoe print by the back door again. I look at the brush bristles, still damp. I look at the cloth I covered them with like I can take the seeing back from whoever used my things.
“Okay,” I say to the empty studio. “Okay.”
If this is a trap, it wants compliance. If it’s help, it wants a reply. Either way, silence lets the other party keep the timing. I find that I hate the idea of being timetabled more than I hate the idea of dialing a number I might regret. It is not courage. It is control. I can’t stop the world from poking at me. I can decide when to look it in the eye.
My phone sits next to the card like it knows what I’m about to do. I pick it up and unlock it. The screen glow pulls the rest of the room back a step. The rain taps hard enough now that I can hear the pattern change when a bus goes by. I type the number into a new contact field and stop. I don’t want it living with names I chose. I back out. I open the keypad and type it in there instead. The digits look the same on the screen as they looked on the card. My thumb hovers over the green circle.
I don’t want to be a person who runs every time someone looks at me like property. I don’t want to be a person who lets fear write the rules. I also don’t want to be a person who refuses help because my pride learned a hard shape too young. There’s a middle ground that looks like choosing the dangerous thingon purpose because the other option is being repositioned on someone else’s board. I won’t be easy to move.
I stand to walk that nervous energy out of my legs. I make one more pass around the room. I think of the man in the office who didn’t give a name and warned me about speed, like he thinks he’s the only one who understands how fast a reputation can turn into a leash. I think of the mezzanine coat that felt like a weight on the top of my head. I think of the boy who disappeared because the adults decided to wait for morning.
I sit again. The chair creaks the way old chairs do when they are honest about their age. My thumb finds the call button and pauses. I press the corner of the card into my palm with my other hand until the edge bites. It reminds me where I am: at a table in a room I pay for with work, next to a sink I scrub, under a lamp I bought at a thrift store, in a city that didn’t hand me a key so much as dared me to make one.
“I’m not prey,” I say, just to calibrate my mouth and my lungs.
I inhale once, sharp and deliberate, and press Call.
The dial tone fills the loft like a held breath. It beats against the rain for space and wins. I keep my eyes on the card while it rings, because I don’t want to watch my own face in the dark window across the room. The second ring is longer. The third is short. The fourth doesn’t come.
“If you’re watching me,” I murmur into the dark, “then hear this: I’m not running.”
Chapter 6 – Cassian
The ocean looks like glass when it’s angry.
From my office window the water is black and flat, the kind of surface that swallows light and offers nothing back. The wind has swung around since I left the gallery; it comes off the bay low and steady, pushing salt through the cracked service door at the end of the hall and into the stairwell.
I sit, rub the bridge of my nose with my thumb and forefinger, and try to force the night to settle into lines. I run it again, the way I run an operation after the fact: entrance, timing, points of failure, and points of control.
The secure phone vibrates on the right side of the desk. It’s face down on purpose. It rattles against the polished wood like a heartbeat you can’t ignore. I watch her on the feed; she lifts her phone, types a number from a card, and sits with her thumb over the green circle. Her mouth moves. Then her mouth stops moving and her thumb drops.
I pick up on the second ring. I don’t look at the caller ID. I press the phone to my ear with my left hand and keep my right hand on the desk.
