My pulse jumps. If she keeps painting like this and someone with the wrong appetite reads it right, we won’t keep women safe. We will be drawing a door for the men who like doors.
The door chimes once on the private elevator. Only two people outside my head have the code to reach this floor. Reid is one. He knows the timing here: show ends, debrief in the office, let the building empty, give me one hour alone with the noise, then bring me the rest.
He steps in without bringing the hall with him. Suit off, shirt clean, sleeves up one turn, folder in hand. He glances once at the canvases on my wall of glass and doesn’t ask why I’m looking at them when I could look at the real ones any time I want. He knows better.
“Report,” I say.
He sets the folder on the island and slides it with two fingers until it’s square to the edge. He does that when he’s about to put words in my ear he knows I won’t like. He opens the folder and the first page catches the pendant light. It reads like a press kit if press kits were honest. He lays a second document on top. I recognize the letterhead before I read the text. Senator Hatch’s office. “Staffer sent two more inquiries,” Reid says. “One to a shelter that isn’t ours, one to a clinic that is but doesn’t use our name. The words ‘unregulated’ and ‘whisper-clinic’ appear five times. He wants a story before the weekend.”
“He won’t get one here,” I say.
Reid nods. He taps another sheet forward. “And this came in an hour ago. Intercepted from Hale’s gallery account to her personal, CC’d to a freelancer. The freelancer is the guy who asked the Rumor Question at her show and wrote the blog that died in the comments. Subject line:follow-up on ‘underground wards’. He wants a coffee. He wants ‘color’ for a piece on ‘unseen care’ in the city. He includes a line that reads, ‘off the record until you say otherwise.’ He is lying.”
I read fast. The body of the email is slick with “your agency” and “your story,” padded around the parts that matter:What are you hearing? Where are the doors? Who knows who’s paying?He references a rumor about a therapy wing motif and calls it “the mural code.”
“He got that term from the discord chatter,” Reid says, anticipating the question. “Same two servers. We shut one down with a DMCA the way we do when kids think torrents are brave and copyrights are for other people. The other one’s admin is careful. IT is watching.”
“Who’s the freelancer’s outlet?” I ask.
“None yet.” Reid sighs. “He’s shopping. If she opens the door, a mid-level paper or a click site pays him to write something irresponsible, then a senator holds up the printout like proof a thing exists that he should regulate. We end up in a hearing room with a plan we don’t share and a budget we don’t get. Then we explain why secrecy saves lives to men who think headlines do the same job.”
I close the folder. The pressure behind my eyes is an old sensation I usually outrun. Tonight it gains ground. “Did she answer him/”
“Not yet,” comes the ready response. “Lila probably saw the subject line and walked it off the table. She’s good.”
“She’s efficient,” I observe.
He nods toward the monitors. “The new canvases worry me. Not because they aren’t good. Because someone who knows about us can read them as coordinates. Someone who shouldn’t know can get lucky and read them as myth, then start looking for where myth becomes truth.”
He knows how to talk to me. He doesn’t useexposurelike a donor would. He usescoordinate. He usestruth. He puts hands in the conversation where he means hands.
“Your read?”.
“She’s not doing it on purpose,” he says. “She’s pulling from memory. She watched something when somebody let her close enough to see a pattern. She’s good enough to translate the pattern without the map. Her audience doesn’t know the pattern is a map. Most won’t. The ones who will are the ones we fight.”
He doesn’t sayyou. He sayswe. He means the doctors who run their hands over women they call patients and the women who call the clinic a room where nobody asks who they were last time. He means my mother, in a photograph tucked in a drawer in my desk that I pretend I don’t open. He means the night Lena bled on a floor where we thought we built safety and I learned the difference between building a door and closing one.
I look back at the canvas with the red spiral and see the basement bath where my mother kept extra towels and a drawer with a lock we pretended was broken when men asked for it.
“If she publishes before the press cycle on the gala ends,” Reid says, “she draws heat in our direction we can’t divert with a rope and a coffee cup. If she publishes later, same. The only difference is where the cameras look first.”
“You want her silenced.” I need to hear the word out loud.
“No.” I shake my head. “I want her insulated. And I want you to want it enough to do the thing you hate.”
“Handle Jonah first,” I continue, the decision landing as smoothly as if I made it yesterday. “Quiet. No theater. He’s notthe leak. He’s the amplifier. If a freelancer uses him to get to her, I want the freelancer to find a different wall to knock on. If Jonah knows anything about our rooms, I want to know how. He doesn’t get hurt. He doesn’t get scared. He gets re-routed.”
“Copy,” Reid pauses before speaking again. “What doesquietmean tonight?”
“It means I don’t want a story I have to fix,” I say. “Buy him two days. Pull a contract he wants but can’t sign until Monday. Offer him a commission that requires a site visit tomorrow at eleven, in a building where the only camera is ours. Use a curator he respects. Make it look like his idea. If he meets the freelancer, the freelancer waits an hour in a place that makes him feel like the bad luck was his.”
Reid writes three lines in a notebook that nobody else sees him carry. “Mara,” he says.
“Mara gets a text in the morning.” I reach for the phone on the counter and tapping the screen awake. “She fast-tracks the grant contract. We keep the language we promised, but we add a new section that gives us a scheduling hand on any exhibition that uses the new series. The board will likesafeguard.Legal can writesafeguardso it reads likeseatbeltand works likeairbag.”
“She’ll push back,” Reid says, meaning Mara, not legal.
“I know.” It doesn’t change anything.
