The easy answer iscontrol. It’s not accurate. The accurate answer is the one that sounds worse when a man says it:outcomes. Doors that close when they should. Press that says what it’s allowed to say and nothing else. A museum that waits their turn and writes the right sentence under a title card. People who go home safe from rooms that like open nights. And under all of that, the thing I haven’t said out loud in this room in a very long time:I want to keep Lena from dying again.
“You want to be seen on your terms,” I reply instead. “I want the same thing. I want people who like breaking things to run out of oxygen before they get to your door. I want to keep the rooms we built off the map. I want you to paint what you promised without asking permission from men who collect women for sport.”
“So are you the man trying to collect me?” she scoffs.
“I am the man who knows how to keep the ones who collect from your door.”
“By coming through mine first.”
“By walking toward the problem,” I say. “Not waiting for it to introduce itself.”
“You’re good at making a cage sound like a seatbelt,” she snorts.
The line goes quiet for a moment that makes me count whether I want to say anything or not. She won’t cry. She won’t hang up in a fit. That isn’t how she’s built. She’ll stay still until she knows what she can use. She’ll leave when she decides stillness is enough. I watch her shoulders on the feed and let her breathe without filling the space with words I can’t take back.
“What happens if I don’t agree?” she asks finally.
“You don’t have to agree,” I say. “You can hang up. You can throw the card away. You can ask your gallery to move the preview to a room without windows and still photographers. You can decide you don’t want the museum’s interest. I will still keep my people between you and men who aren’t afraid of doors.”
“You will do that because you’re a protector,” she says, and the word reads like she picked it up with two fingers. “Or because you want to prove you can.”
“Because my work is closing doors,” I say. “And because you just painted a room where we learned that open doors get women killed.”
The shelter memory is a weak joint in my own frame. When I find my voice again it is steady.
“I’m not going to break your studio,” I promise. “I’m not going to use your work to sell our mission. I’m not going to let a foundation press officer put your face in a slide deck and call it partnership. I will put a body where a camera wants to be if that camera means you can’t keep your rules. I will do it in a way that makes the person holding the camera think they chose to move. You will never know most of its happening. That is the point.”
“What do I call you?”
“You don’t have to call me anything.”
“Wrong,” she counters. “I’m on a phone. Names are the price of entry.”
She’s right. I leave a card that saysFor your safetyand a number, then tell her she owes me nothing, then ask her to stay on a line with a voice and no handle. That’s a game. I know better than to pretend it isn’t.
“Call me Ward,” I say.
“Like the foundation.”
“Like the job.”
“Like the place where you keep people when they can’t leave,” she mutters.
“That too.”
“That’s not a name,” she says. “It’s a wall.”
“I’m not offering intimacy,” I say. “I’m offering outcomes.”
“Did you tell your people to put their hands on my belongings and my life?” she asks.
“I told my people to keep yours intact,” I tell her. “One of them moved something they shouldn’t have. He won’t again.”
“They’ll come back.”
“We’ll check your doors. We’ll watch the alley. We’ll run the route from your studio to the gallery tomorrow morning before you leave for the call. We’ll be where you don’t have to look.”
“You are in my studio now aren’t you?”
