“You’re not,” I say, smiling because she needs it. “Lock the door behind me.”
She does, dramatic click like a stage cue. I pull on a cardigan over my tank, tug the sleeves down to my wrists out of habit. I stand still long enough to take a breath that doesn’t sound like one, then open the door.
The aide looks exactly like the sort of person who says things likeMr. Ward will see you now: quiet shoes, a grey suit that fits, a face you could describe to a sketch artist, and they’d draw ten thousand other faces just like it. “Good evening,” he says. “If you’ll follow me.”
He sets a pace that lets me choose to keep up or fall behind and never looks back to check which I pick. We take the east hall to the turn, pass the landing where the wind rattles the stainedglass just enough to remind you there’s weather, then angle left into a smaller corridor with built-in shelves and a rug that’s been chosen for the sound it doesn’t make. The house is quieter now. The kind of quiet that makes you think of libraries and vaults and anesthetized rooms.
He stops at a carved door with a brass lever shaped like someone designed it after touching a violin too long. “Studio salon,” he says, as if that phrase means anything to anyone who doesn’t staff a foundation. His hand doesn’t touch the latch. He gestures for me to go ahead.
I stand there long enough to hear a faint click from somewhere I can’t see and decide it’s not a lock, it’s a timer in my body. I push the door open and step inside.
The room is lower than the rest of the house. Bookshelves hug the dark wood walls. There’s a fire behind glass in a fireplace that looks original but whispers new because of the way it draws. The light is deliberate: lamps, not overheads, all pointed down and toward, not up and out. The velvet chaise is the color red turns when you take all the saturation out of it and leave only the idea. A low table holds a tray: a bottle, two glasses, and fruit cut into obedient pieces. The windows show blackness reflected back at me.
The door closes behind me. The sound lands like a line I just crossed.
He’s at the far end of the room, not sitting. Jacket off, sleeves rolled above the wrist, shirt open at the throat. Hands in his pockets to keep them from looking like the weapon I know they are. He doesn’t move to greet me. He just watches the room watch me.
“Ms. Hale,” he says. There’s warmth and control in it. There’s a careful distance he won’t let me mistake for kindness.
“Mr. Ward,” I say, matching his tone because that’s how you keep your feet under you on a floor designed to tilt. I look at the tray. “Is this a briefing or a date?”
“That depends,” he says with a slow smile the shape of a knife laid flat on a table. “On what you do with it.”
I pick the chair that faces the door because my body votes before my brain. He watches the choice and hides the satisfaction, but I see it anyway. He angles himself in the other chair, not across from me exactly. A degree to the side. Close enough that if he leaned a fraction, his knee would brush mine. He doesn’t. He takes the corkscrew, opens the wine without looking at his hands, and pours. The bottle makes that small exhale that says someone knows how to treat it.
“I’m here to talk about the Sanctuaries,” I say, my head high, fingers flat on my knees so I don’t touch the stem he slides toward me. “Not to be seduced by good lighting.”
“You’re here,” he says, “because you asked for answers. I’ll give you mine.” He sets his glass down without drinking. “You’ll give me yours when you’re ready.”
“You already have my answers,” I say. “You’ve been taking them without asking.”
“That’s one answer,” he says. “But not the ones I want tonight.”
He begins like a man reading a chart out loud to a family member who hates hospitals. “We run a network,” he says. “Some licensed shelters, some unlicensed clinics. We don’t call them clinics or shelters. We call them Sanctuaries because the word fits the work better than the others do and because we control our own language. We do at least four kinds of things: triage, extraction, stabilization, and transfer. Triage is done to get a woman out of immediate danger, right now, with whoever will go with her. Extraction is to move her from a place she can be found to a place she can’t. Stabilization is basically food,sleep, and the kind of medical attention anyone would need but people like us aren’t supposed to talk about. Transfer is to get her somewhere that isn’t us. The last is the most important. You do not let a person become a lifetime case because you like how it makes you feel.”
“‘People like us,’” I say. “You mean men with money who think they own the wordsafety.”
“I mean people who believe good intentions are enough,” he says, and the way he says it makes me think of a basement and something on the other side of it that didn’t listen when someone whisperedwe’re safe now.
“Why the secrecy?” I ask, sharp and clean because my voice sounds like a person who practiced this in a mirror. “Why the NDA? Why the private car and the cameras that don’t want to be seen? Why invite me here if all you intend to do is shut my mouth?”
“We don’t invite press to trauma,” he says. “We don’t make content out of women’s lives. We operate in a space where visibility can turn into coordinates. One photograph can equal an address. One well-meaning sentence can equal a map. You think secrecy is a leash. It’s a door.”
“A door you lock,” I accuse.
“Yes,” he says. “When locking it means someone lives.”
I hate how clean that sounds. I hate that it rhymes with something I learned very young and pretend I unlearned. I hate that he knows what he’s doing with his voice in this room. The temperature is what it was when I walked in. The air changes anyway.
“Then why bring me here?” I press. “If my art is a risk, if my questions threaten your doors, why give me more to paint?”
He lets the question travel across the table without chasing it. “Because you’re already inside,” he replies. “Your work put you there. Better in my hands than in theirs.”
“Whose?” I ask. It comes out smaller than I want it and I hate that.
He doesn’t soften it. “Men who don’t spellprotectionwith a promise,” he says. “Women who spill more than they save because they like the feeling of being listened to. Politicians who smell votes. Reporters who know how to make an angle look like a life. Me, if I forget what walls are for.”
He saysmelike he means it and not like he’s performing a confession to make me forgive him in advance. It doesn’t make me like him. It makes me look at his hands.
