“And the unknown heel print at the back door?” I ask.
“Not ours,” he says. “We pulled shoe size and probable brand from the partial—men’s dress, European, size between 42 and 44. Rained before the mark dried; tread didn’t show. No repeat since.”
“Did you find the print on the building camera?” I ask.
“Hallway camera is ours. Exterior angle at the corner caught a shadow at 19:21 the night of the show. Could be anyone in a dark coat. No gait we can use. We’re enhancing.”
“Priority,” I say.
He nods once. “Other risk factors,” he continues. He opens the folder and turns a page with his left hand while his right writes on the legal pad—an old habit that never slowed him down. He lays down a sheet that reads JONAH AMARI in the header. It’s a one-pager with clean lines:Muralist. Known to asset. Brief relationship two years prior. Communicates via text. Known to be kind and impulsive.He moves on quickly. “High proximity risk,” he says aloud. “Not because he’s a threat vector in the traditional sense. Because he is male, visible, and inattentive to detail. Cameras see him near her door, we get chatter. Press sees him near her at the gala, we get a headline.”
“Is he touching anything we care about?” I ask.
“Walls,” Reid says. “Not ours. He’s on the roster for the side-hall installation at the gala. He doesn’t know that what hecalls the ‘community wall’ runs parallel to our donors’ money wall. He’s fine until he isn’t.”
“Vet him,” I say. “No rough play. If he’s clean, he stays clean. If he’s not, I want to know before he does.”
“Copy,” Reid says, making a note.
He slides the next page across the table. It’s a clipped memo with an official letterhead that pretends not to be political.Senator Hatch — Inquiry: “Unregulated Clinics” / “Public-Private Partnerships”.The language is the kind people use when they want to sound careful while digging holes. “He’s sniffing,” Reid says. “Staff assistant called three known shelters and one of our partner clinics yesterday asking for ‘definitions’ and ‘qualifications.’ He asked, on background, if any local artists had ‘documented’ the movement of persons in and out of unlicensed spaces.”
“He wants a scandal he can ride,” Mara says, glancing at the memo. “He’s been soft on the committee. Election season is a small god with a loud mouth.”
“Don’t give him a scandal to ride,” I say. “If his staff calls again, they get our public line:The foundation supports legal services, transitional housing, and licensed therapy. We do not comment on security.No one says the wordSanctuary.If anyone uses the wordunderground, I want their name in this folder by end of day.”
Reid nods. “Media training refresh?” he asks Mara.
“Already scheduled for noon,” she says. “Press office can do it in their sleep.”
Reid flips his legal pad and adds a bulleted list. “Additional: anonymous chatter in two discord servers about ‘the mural code’ after Block 17. Troll level, but it means we should scrub language on the program page to avoid unintentional overlap. IT is on it.” He taps another page. “Anda final: asset received a glossy invitation to the gala via gallery channel. We were not the senders.”
Mara’s head comes up. “We weren’t?”
“No,” Reid says. “Events sent a batch of standard invitations to Block 17’s master list. Someone on the gallery side put Hale’s envelope on top when they ran the stack to the desk. Not malicious. Helpful, but unscheduled.”
My eyes go to the mock-ups on the table.
“She’s going,” Mara says, reading my face. “If Lila is anywhere near her calendar, she’s going.”
Mara rests her forearms on the table. “I need to put the ethics on the record,” she says. “We are monitoring a grant recipient’s movements and communications. We placed hardware in her studio during a permitted repair. We intercepted a press line for an outlet that might have printed a rumor. We are about to engineer a ‘chance’ invitation to an event we host and plan to manage her experience in that space. While all of this is good for risk management, it isn’t exactly clean.”
“Nothing is clean,” I say evenly. “Clean is a press word. Safe is the real word. I built this to be safe.”
“At what point,” she asks, “does safe start looking like control?”
“We can’t protect what we can’t control,” I say. The sentence leaves my mouth with the finality of a rule. I don’t raise my voice or apologize. I’ve apologized enough in rooms with white sheets and names written on toe tags. There are men who will never apologize for what they take. I’m not interested in pretending I’m their opposite. I’m a different type.
Mara doesn’t argue to win. She argues to make me say what I’m already doing. “Then say it,” she urges.
“I’m going to keep her alive,” I say. “And I’m going to keep the rooms safe that let other women keep going. If that requirescontrol, then I will build it into the plan. We can litigate my bedside manner later.”
“That’s the thing,” she says. “You don’t have a bedside manner anymore.”
“I never wanted one,” I say. The lie is small and easy. The truth is a woman named Lena who bled out on a floor that smelled like tea and disinfectant while my mother whispered, “we’re safe now” after the man had already found the door. I catalog risks like a medic triaging a field because the first time I tried to create safety with soft hands I watched a life leave a room because I didn’t close the hinge.
Reid pays attention to tone like he reads threat vectors. He lets it sit, then opens another page. “Orders?”
“Tighten the perimeter,” I say. “I want one more set of eyes at her building—no pattern, no shadowing, no contact. Move the cross-street watch to a rotation that doesn’t sit longer than forty minutes. Anyone they log more than twice gets profiled and then ignored unless they stop being boring.”
