He doesn’t argue. Mara told me once to my face that my control is a kindness until it isn’t. She also told me she’d rather work under a man who knows he’s capable of damage than one who has never considered the possibility.
Reid taps the folder again. “And Hale?”
“I’ll take her.”
“Now?” he asks, not liking it.
“Not tonight,” I say. “Tomorrow. The morning after a gala is when people tell themselves the room meant what it said. I want to get to her before a freelancer does, and beforethe museum thinks she owes them something for handling her correctly. We’ll call it a clarification. We’ll say we want to make sure she understands what the foundation will and won’t do with her name. We’ll say nothing about the canvases until I’m in the room. Then I’ll say what I need to say.”
Reid looks at the screen where the doorway notch sits at the bottom of a painted frame that shouldn’t exist on a canvas at all. “She isn’t going to like that conversation,” he says.
“She doesn’t have to.” I shrug. “She has to hear it.”
“She’ll accuse you of rewriting her,” he points out.
“She can accuse me of whatever she wants. She’ll still be alive next month and the women who use our rooms will still have rooms to use.”
He takes that and lets it sit on the counter next to the folder. He has a tolerance for my worst versions of the job.
“Anything else?” he asks.
“Yes,” I say. “We’ll need a frame for the senator if he keeps sniffing. I want a white paper on what we do that is true without being useful. Jargon heavy. We bury him in proper nouns and citations. He’ll wave it at a camera and say ‘transparency’ and think he won. He’ll get nothing that helps him find the right block.”
“I’ll tell comms to write something boring,” Reid says. “They’ll enjoy it.”
“Good.”
He leaves the folder. He doesn’t need to tell me to try to sleep. He knows what I’ll do instead.
When the elevator closes behind him, the apartment gets that deep quiet only high floors get at night—no sirens carrying like a blade, no club bass crawling through the building skin, just the sound of the server fans downstairs like a sleeping animal. I cross to the desk by the window and open the top drawer to where I keep the things I won’t admit I touch. The photographsits on top of a stack of old ID cards that used to get me into places I shouldn’t have been able to enter.
My mother looks at the camera like she always did—head turned a fraction to one side, a smile small because she thought big smiles were for children. She’s younger than I am now in the picture. Her hands are in the frame because she couldn’t stop moving when someone held a camera up to her. The ring on her left hand is bent out of shape because a woman she tried to pull out of a bathroom door grabbed it and dragged her down with her. The night Lena died is not in this photograph. It’s in my hands. It’s in the way I still watch exits. It’s in every door that locks from the hall instead of the room.
I put the photograph back where it belongs and shut the drawer. I don’t need ghosts to do the work. I need files and a phone.
I sit at the island with the folder and the phone and open the secure contact list. The names are not names to anyone else; they’re numbers in my head. I scroll past the vendors and the counsel and the two or three people who owe me favors I never plan to call in.
I text Mara:Accelerate grant. Add scheduling safeguard. Language attached. No chair.I attach a paragraph I wrote last month and kept in a draft for a day like this:
For the avoidance of doubt, while Foundation funding shall not limit Artist’s creative decisions, Artist agrees to provide the Foundation with reasonable advance notice of any public exhibition of the Works for safety review and coordination with partner organizations to mitigate foreseeable risks to vulnerable populations depicted or alluded to in the Works. Safety review shall not constitutecreative control or prior restraint and is solely for operational planning.
She’ll hate “reasonable.” Legal will hate “solely.” I’ll win where I need to win. She’ll keep me honest where I’d rather not be.
I go back to the screens. The canvas with the doorway sits in the center, patient. I take in small things that people who don’t build rooms miss: the way the shadow width tells you where the light is; the half-inch of unpainted edge that means she was working too fast to tape; the pencil line she left under a corner where she changed her mind about a seam. The red spiral isn’t wrong. It’s precise enough to scare me and imprecise enough to keep the wrong man from using it the first time he looks.
I should be furious. The thing in my chest isn’t fury. It’s a colder thing that runs under anger—fear for a system that keeps women breathing when a city tries to decide who deserves air. I hate that the path to protecting that system runs through a woman who didn’t ask to be put in the middle of it and didn’t agree to become a variable I have to solve to keep other people’s variables from exploding.
Contains her,says the part of me that closes doors.
I don’t like the words. I like the outcome. I can live with hating myself in between if it means a girl in a room with a lock that works doesn’t have to run tonight.
The secure line glows once on the edge of the screen with a notification I set for one sender only. I tap it.Mara:You’re not getting “solely.” You’re getting “exclusively and for safety.” You’re also getting my face at nine with coffee and two objections. I know you’re moving Jonah. Be careful. He’s slippery when he feels managed.
I typeNoted. 9.and close the message. I owe her larger answers in the morning. I can give her something tonight.
I dial a second secure number, this one connected to a mailbox nobody else uses. It rings once and drops to a tone. “It’s Ward,” I say. “We’re accelerating the timeline. She’s closer than I thought.” I hang up and put the phone face down, so I stop looking for a reply. The reply is me on a set of stairs tomorrow and me at a table the day after that with a contract in one hand and a promise I intend to keep in the other.
Containment isn’t cruelty,I tell the empty air, and I don’t try to make it sound kinder than it is. It’s survival.
