“That’s my girl,” she says. “I told Simone we’ll eat at five. I asked for something that looks like we’re going to war, and she nodded like a general. She said Mr. Ward will join us later, but not for dinner unless we request it.”
“I don’t request it,” I say too fast.
“Obviously. If he shows up anyway, I will drop a fork in his lap and call it research.”
“Please don’t,” I say, and picture the fountain pen I saw in his hand last time. It’s ridiculous that the memory of a pen makes my pulse tick. I put the plate down and go to the easel because if I don’t put something on this paper, this room will start to feel like it owns me.
I pick up a pencil and draw a vertical line, then another, evenly spaced, both darkened until they read as edges. A horizontal bar near the top. Another near the bottom. Lila cocks her head. “Rory,” she says, soft now.
“A cage,” I say. “Or a ladder. Depends on how you look.”
“Or both,” she says. “Because we’re artists and we rudely insist on multiple meanings.”
“Because he built something that helps and hurts,” I say, dragging the pencil once more to thicken the right side. My hand steadies as the shape appears. I set the pencil down and step back. The outline is clean. The air between the bars feels heavier than the bars.
“I’m going to unpack,” Lila says. “Which means I’m going to put my charger in the same place three times and then forgetwhere that place is.” She moves to the door and then stops, fingertip hovering an inch from the brass panel on the wall. “Humming,” she says.
“I felt it,” I say. “Hidden lock. Probably an RFID. Maybe a fallback if power goes.”
“Of course you know,” she says, a little proud.
When she leaves, I pull the chair to the window and sit with my back against it for a minute like a person who wants to watch for cars and keep out of sight. It’s a stupid posture in a house like this. I change it—chair square to the easel, feet flat, pencil balanced across my fingers. The act of behaving like I belong gives me access to the part of my brain that knows how to look without flinching.
The desk drawer to the right opens smoothly, too smoothly for old furniture. Inside: stationery withWard Foundationat the top, envelopes, two good pens, a little card with a number printed in small type—Concierge, 24/7—and beneath it, another card with the wordEmergencyand a different number. If you didn’t know how to read philanthropy, you’d think both led to the same place. They don’t. I put the drawer back gently and stand, because the urge to rearrange it into a mess to see who comes to fix it is stronger than is wise on day one.
I step closer to the door and then away, deciding I don’t need to play cat-and-mouse with a wall.
“Okay,” I tell the room. “We’ll play along.”
I cap the jar of linseed. I set the brush flat on the paper to make a mark that saysstart.The harbor lifts and falls. The black SUV’s shadow moves across the drive again, a slow orbit. Somewhere in the house a door whispers closed.
Inside, I feel the walls breathing. Outside, the gulls keep telling the sky their version of the truth. I dip the brush in black and put the first line down clean.
Chapter 20 – Cassian
In a house like this, the walls have nerves.
You can tell by the way the building hums when it’s paying attention with the kind of sound a person would chalk up to old wiring. Down here it’s not wiring. It’s intention. A seam of cold air runs along the floor at my feet; the servers like their world a degree cooler than mine. The control room sits under the east wing on a poured slab my architect called “structural overkill”, and I called “sleep at night.” The ceiling is low enough to make men bow their heads and remember they’re not gods. The monitors are set in two rows, matte-finished to drink light. I keep a single lamp on the console. No overheads. No glow that leaks up the ducts.
She’s on the second screen from the left, third row: a threshold camera angled to read the line of her door and a slice of the room beyond when it’s open. There isn’t a camerainher room. I don’t record sleep or showers. The lens lives in the hall molding, watching a rectangle of air where a person has to pass to enter or leave. When a door swings wide, the camera takes whatever the room gives it. Right now, it’s giving me Aurora standing with her shoulder to the door jamb, her fingers hovering just beside the brass panel we fitted as a reader. She doesn’t touch it at first. Clever girl. She lets the back of her hand catch a hum from the plate without pressing skin to metal. Then she touches: two fingertips, quick, the way you test a kettle you don’t trust.
“Clever girl,” I murmur again, not for an audience, just to mark the moment so I remember how I felt when I watched it later and ask myself why.
Chapter Twenty-FourI roll footage back ten seconds, then again, scrubbing sharply enough to make the thin white play head jump. On the monitor to the right, another thresholdview clocks Lila moving between rooms—her shoulder, then her profile, then nothing but a blur of bright fabric as she spins for her own amusement and stops the motion because she remembers a rule she says aloud like a prayer:confidential.She has good instincts. She also has a performer’s itch. The spa will scratch it.
I switch the center screen to a picture-in-picture of the east hall camera and the salon outside the library. The programs are my own. On the far right, a blueprint of the Residency House runs live: each door a dot that shifts from green to amber to red depending on state, each thermostat a number I can move two degrees without anyone wondering why they’re suddenly more aware of their skin.
I cue the clip where she opens the envelope on the bedside table, the one with my handwriting on paper that costs more than a person needs. The room isn’t mic’d, but I can read a mouth from an angle. Her bottom lip catches under her teeth onYou’re safe here.I let the clip play again, slower, then still at the precise frame where her eyes are off the note and on the middle distance: the place in the air where people put meaning when they don’t want to put it in their chest. I hold it long enough to imprint it and then I kill the loop. Obsession is useful when it teaches you something. It’s a liability when it turns into a reel you watch because the watching is easier than doing the next right thing.
Daylight changes her. Paint on the fingers. Hair slightly damp from coastal air. Clothes simple—black tank, fitted blazer, boots that could run. The artifacts of a person who makes things with her hands and refuses to let silk turn her into a puppet. She stands like she owns a corner of the frame without asking permission from the wall. She also scans, eyes cutting to the places that matter: locks disguised as décor, seams that aren’t seams, the single board in the hall that protests exactly once aday, so a woman learns the house isn’t perfect and trusts it more. She is in my space and reading it fast. I built it to be read and to survive being read. The part of me that likes clean design feels pride. The part that lives under it feels something I don’t dress in nicer words anymore: anticipation.
Enough looking. I lean back and let my head hit leather. My jacket is on the hook behind me; I didn’t pretend I needed it down here. Tie loose, collar open, cuffs rolled. Fingers steepled under my chin until my muscles remember they know how to be still. I breathe twice, count the seconds on the inhale, and ask myself the only question that matters in rooms like this:What happens next and why?
What I’m planning is still what I call it: orientation. But I’m honest enough in this room to level the rest of the sentence. I want proximity and tactile data. Not sex yet, but the kind of closeness that sets the tone of a ward: you don’t flinch when the medic reaches for your wrist; you let him count, and in the counting you learn that the hand knows the difference between force and steadiness.
I bring up the house blueprint and flick to the studio salon with a finger. The room lives off the library on the west side, a space meant for conversations donors think are intimate and staff know are staged. Dark wood. A velvet chaise a shade too flattering for daylight cameras. Two chairs that look like someone thought about long spines and tense shoulders. One table low enough to force a bend when you reach. I dim the lights two points. The bulbs are warm by default; I pull them toward neutral. The thermostat sits at 70. I take it to 68. Two degrees is all the body needs to remember itself. Skin pebbling. A breath a fraction shallower and more aware. I won’t make her cold. I’ll keep her present.
“Simone,” I say into the bone-conduction unit that sits just forward of my ear. No visible wires. No mouthpiece. My techs don’t get to sell their work to men who like toys.
