Her voice drops into my auditory canal like a memory. “Yes, Mr. Ward.”
“Salon in fifteen. Tray with one bottle—Pinot, the Willamette you hid from Reid because he drinks like a dockworker—two glasses, fruit cut in pieces that don’t drip. No cheese. Nothing sticky. No staff after delivery. Latch the corridor door soft.”
“Willamette, no mess, no witnesses,” she says, amused. “Do you want the coaster set that saysdon’tin six languages, or will you behave without reminders?”
“I’ll behave,” I say. “But send the coasters.” She laughs, a quick exhale, and clicks out.
Reid comes on the line a beat later, voice flattened by the encryption router that lives in the rack behind me. “Update,” he says. “Jonah’s in a van with a bucket and a budget. He’s posting stories: wall, donut, cloud. No location tags. He’ll be painting until we tell him not to. Lila is exploring the spa. She keeps filming her own face and then putting the phone down like she remembers rules she hates. I told Simone to flood her with choices of massages, sauna, and yoga at seven.”
“Keep her busy,” I say. “I want the east wing empty by evening so my staff can breathe, and the halls carry one set of footsteps instead of three. Offer her a treatment that ends at eight-twenty. No pressure. Let it feel like her idea.”
“And Ms. Hale?” he asks. He always makes me say what I already decided so he can hear whether my voice has started to run on hunger instead of discipline.
“She comes to me,” I say. “I’ll have a note hand-delivered at six forty-five.”
“She needs that,” he repeats, a marker on the board. “Also: the senator’s office went quiet. Either they’re regrouping or they found a new bone. We’ll know by morning. And the contractor you asked to check the east service road found tire marks from last night but no damage to the fence.”
“Noted,” I say. “Stand down one car from the perimeter. We look twitchy when we don’t need to.”
“You ever need anything you don’t already have,” he says, dry. The line clicks dead when I don’t dignify it.
I look back at the screen that shows the salon in low light. The room reads as invitation without doing the vulgar thing of looking like a seduction set. Velvet holds shadows. Wood centers a man who has to keep his hands on a table so he doesn’t put them somewhere he shouldn’t. I pull up the temperature logs, flick heat to the air register nearest the floor by the chaise, cool to the vent above the two chairs. The effect is small—stand and you’re cooler, sit and you feel you’ve chosen warmth. Choice matters, even when I built both options.
I think about clothes. Donors dress to saylook at me. Patients dress to saydon’t.I’ll wear the thing that says staff and man at once: open collar, no tie, jacket off, sleeves rolled above the wrist. She watched my hands in the corridor at the gala; I watched her dislike that she noticed. If she sees the scars on the knuckles in this room, I want it to be because I reached for a glass and not for her. If I touch her, it will be because she gave me her hand. If I count her pulse, it will be because she put her wrist in mine. I can make vows down here. The room listens better than people.
The wall above the console holds a narrow shelf. On it sits a single keycard I had Simone emboss rag-paper thick, tasteful bordering on ridiculous:A.H.in small type on the top edge. It opens the doors guests are allowed to open. It does nothing to the ones I don’t want them touching. I pick it up and press mythumb against the edge until it bites. The sting is minor, but it’s a clean line through an impulse. I hear my mother’s voice, not sentimental, just practical:If your hands shake, put them to work where they won’t hurt someone.
The picture comes the way memories do when the body is picking its own slides. Basement. Cement painted a color the manufacturer labeledoceanand no one with eyes would. The air the kind of cold that makes breath a visible thing. A woman on a folding cot, knee opened from a flight of stairs that didn’t forgive her hurrying. My hands younger than they are now, gloves too big, tape sticking where it shouldn’t.Breathe with me,I told her, because rhythm calms more than orders. She did. She trembled and she breathed, and she let me press gauze to a place that hurt. Later that night her man found the address because a volunteer wanted to feel helpful on social media and posted a picture of a casserole with our street number painted on a sign behind it. You can map a life to that photograph if you need to explain how a foundation turns into a fortress. I don’t need to explain it anymore. I’m living the answer.
When I set parameters for a room like the salon, it reads to people outside like manipulation. It is. It’s also medicine. The effect is predictable when you learn to read people right. The first time I took a pulse on a stranger, I thought of it as data. Then I learned it’s a language you only get to speak if someone allows your hand to learn the terrain of them. I’m not mistaking a briefing for a bedroom. I’m making a brief feel like initiation into the way we keep people alive, and I’m trust-testing with everything but a needle.
I remember cupping her jaw because the room made it inevitable, because I didn’t like the wordleashin her mouth, because I wanted to know if a kiss would feel like a threat or a fact. It felt like both. The memory hits harder in daylight becauseI can’t hide it under the noise of a crowd. I put the keycard down and let the edge print fade.
Time is a body I can move with. Fifteen minutes. The tray will be in place. The air will be set. Simone will have tucked a white linen into the corner of the table in case a person with paint on her fingers wants proof someone expected mess and didn’t mind. I stand. My jacket stays on the hook. I take the stairs at the back of the room because the private elevator puts me in the hallway at an angle I don’t like.
The service corridor between the control room and the main house is narrow, painted the color of an old envelope, lined with doors that look anonymous even when you know what’s behind them. I pass the electrical closet, the HVAC, the dry goods, the “utility” we built for when utility means detention and the law needs to keep breathing when a lawyer can’t arrive. It’s empty. It almost always is. The point is that it exists. I keep walking until the short flight of steps takes me into the spine of the house.
Simone meets me at the slip door with the tray balanced on her hand and a look that says she knows when a man is about to misuse a room and expects him not to. “The wine you asked,” she says. “Glasses you like. Fruit you won’t regret touching. Coasters that saynowithout saying it.”
“Thank you,” I say.
She glances toward the east wing, then back. “She looked at the garden and called the font on the sign ridiculous,” she says, unable to hide her delight. “I’m going to like her.”
“Don’t collect her,” I say, because we both collect strays and call it work. “Not yet.”
“Not ever,” she says, which is her way of reminding me that I’m the only one in this building who gets to be complicated about Aurora.
“Tonight,” I murmur, “I stop being a voice on the phone and become a hand on her skin.”
Chapter 21 – Aurora
An aide knocks like he’s trying not to wake the house. Two quick touches to the wood, a breath, then the same pattern again. He waits long enough for me to decide if I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear it and then says, quietly through the door, “Ms. Hale? Mr. Ward will see you now.”
Lila is half-asleep on my bed, hair fanned over the pillow, wrapped in a robe she swore she wouldn’t wear becauserobes are for influencersand then accepted it like absolution when Simone put it on the bed with a cup of tea that smelled like something green. She cracks one eye. “Tell him he can see you never,” she mumbles, then sits up. “Do you want me to come?”
“I’m okay,” I say, and make it sound like a sentence and not a question. “Stay. You’ve got that yoga thing at seven.”
“Which might be code forwe remove your bones and replace them with noodles,” she says. “Text me a single letter if you want me to fake a medical emergency. L for ‘Lila is bleeding from the eyebrows.’”
