East hall. The hum in the brass plates at each door reads like a cat purring if you know how to press your hand to it. Nora once called these platescomforting.She meant the way a controlled system feels like a blanket to a woman who has known chaos. For me, it’s a different comfort: a perimeter’s heartbeat I can test on demand.
Her door is the second on the right. The small sigh in the floorboard three paces back does its job: tells me no one stands behind me and no one approaches from the far end unless they want me to hear them.
I stop. I listen because sleep has a sound. People think it’s even. It isn’t. Not for those of us who learned to rest in places where doors didn’t lock well. Aurora’s breath comes slow, then hitches, then finds the count again. I’ve sat in rooms with this rhythm more nights than a decent man should admit. It never gets easier to hear. It always tells me the truth.
I put my hand to the latch and pause long enough to decide whether I need to see her to believe she’s lying on a bed in a house with my name on the funding paperwork. I don’t need to. I do it anyway. I press the handle down a fraction. The latch kisses the strike without protesting, and the door moves a finger-width. The air changes. I look.
The room is darker than the salon. She is curled on top of the covers. Her hair is a spill of black across the white like inkthat ran out of time. One hand rests near her mouth. The other is clenched around a square of pale—my note. She could have torn it and didn’t. She could have hidden it and didn’t. She could have thrown it away and never will.
I stand long enough to let the thought that always tries to rocket up my spine at moments like this burn itself out before it makes me a person I refuse to be. I do not step over the threshold. I do not advance a single inch. She breathes. I listen. I let the sound do what it evolved to do: make a man responsible.
“Tomorrow we stop pretending,” I whisper to the seam I’m not crossing. The words belong to me. The decision will belong to both of us.
Chapter 23 – Aurora
The door to the immersion studio looks like it belongs on a vault, not inside a house that pretends to be a retreat. Heavy wood, iron strap hinges, a handle that makes your palm feel small. Someone carved a shallow arch in the top panel to soften the weight, but weight doesn’t care about decoration. I set my hand on the latch and let my breath even out until the pulse in my throat stops arguing with the parts of me that want to run.Get the answers, keep your distance.I repeat it twice, like I’m priming a brush.
I told myself I’d record everything later in my journal with bullet points I can force into shape when the house is quiet, and Lila is snoring softly through a door we’ve both started locking.
I press down and step inside.
It’s not a conference room. It’s a sanctum. Low amber lights, not warm enough to be cozy, not cool enough to feel clinical. The big easel is already set up in the best place to catch indirect light. A glass palette holds color like a careful plate: black, titanium white, raw umber, burnt sienna, ultramarine, a touch of cadmium that knows it’s dangerous and shows off anyway. The knives lie in a row, sizes stepping down like a ladder. Brushes are arranged by width, bristles matched to viscosity as if a surgeon sorted instruments for a hand he hasn’t met yet. A carafe of water beads with condensation on a side table next to a bottle of wine and two glasses that haven’t been used. Soft instrumental music plays low, just above the noise in my head.
The windows are blacked out. The doors are heavy enough that if you pushed them closed with courage, they’d reward you with a sound you could mistake for safety.
He’s at the palette, sleeves rolled, forearms bare. There’s a spatter of ultramarine close to his wrist and a ghost of umberalong the heel of his hand, as if he carried the palette before he washed and either missed a spot or wanted to remember. He turns when I enter, eyes going to my face and then, briefly, to my hands, as if he needs proof I came to work and not to argue. Jacket off. Shirt open at the throat. The same clothes that made him look like a man in a shelter, not a donor at a dinner: functional, chosen, careful.
“Tonight you learn how we begin,” he says, and holds out a smock like he’s offering an oath.
I hesitate. Then I slip the smock over my clothes. It smells faintly of soap, cedar, and a mineral tang that belongs to turpentine. For two seconds it feels like I’ve put on armor. Then the fabric warms on my skin and reminds me armor is a lie.
He doesn’t close the distance with his body. He comes at me with process. “Each Sanctuary has a different first room,” he says, voice low, the tone he used last night when he saidleaveand somehow made it sound likedecide.“Some start in kitchens. Some start in triage rooms that pretend to be art therapy spaces because bright rooms make people tell truths they don’t want to put in official notes. Some start in offices that claim not to be offices because paperwork feels like betrayal. But they all begin with a question.”
He picks up a flat brush and turns it in his fingers once. The bristles are new enough to be defiant. He holds it out to me, handle first. I take it because refusing a tool is a speech I’m not ready to give. The balance is good. The weight sits where it should.
“Paint what you remember of your first safe place,” he says, stepping until he stands at my back. He doesn’t touch me. He doesn’t have to. His voice comes next to my ear, close enough to feel, far enough to claim he was never there. “Not what you wanted. Not what someone told you it should look like. What you remember.”
Safe place. The phrase scrapes. I look at the blank canvas and think of every time someone in a foster house saidyou’re safe nowbecause it’s easier than sayingwe’re trying.I reach for the palette with my left hand, scoop white with the knife and pull it into the ultramarine until the color turns into the kind of blue you can put on a wall and call sky without lying. I mix a little raw umber into the black because nothing is ever just one thing.
He waits.
“Safe wasn’t a room,” I say, my voice steady because I make my voice do what I want it to do. “Safe was the two hours between shift changes when the new staffer hadn’t learned names yet. Safe was a chair under a sink light. Safe was a girl who didn’t like me sharing her blanket but did it anyway.”
“Paint that,” he says.
I load the brush and make the first stroke. I drag it in a line that reads like a table edge when you squint and like a horizon when you don’t. I pull verticals up from it. They could be chair legs. They could be bars. I add a square in the top left corner that could be a light if a person who never felt warm stood under it.
He’s closer now. My skin knows the difference between space and heat, and the room is full of heat that belongs to him.
“How many Sanctuaries?” If I don’t say the question now, my body will answer with something else. I load black on the brush, pull a shadow under the table edge, then soften it with my thumb.
“Enough to be useful,” he says. “Too few to be comfortable. The number changes. It has to.”
“Who funds them?” I ask, choosing umber to muddy a corner and make it look like a floor that’s been cleaned by different hands. “And don’t saywe do.Names matter. Paper trails matter.”
“Foundations,” he says. “Some men who think they’ll sleep better if they write checks. Some women who know they won’t sleep better but write them anyway. Some churches. Some people with no churches left. The rest is revenue from contracts we don’t brag about because bragging is an address.”
“You’re very good at talking without saying anything,” I say, and drag a line of blue across the top edge of the square I’m pretending is a light.
