“I’m very good at keeping people alive,” he says. “Names are a luxury in that business.”
He steps into my space and still doesn’t touch me. The brush drags and leaves a streak too thick to ignore. I have to fix it. He knows he’s making me fix it. I hate that I admire the economy of it.
The second stroke wants to skip. I stop, mid-air. His hand comes over mine. Palm to my knuckles, fingers along the wood. He doesn’t take the brush; he makes it ours. The bristles kiss the canvas, and I feel his breath at the angle of my jaw. “Don’t fight the drag,” he murmurs. “Lean with it. Let it give you the weight you need.”
The sentence is a trick and a truth. I follow the pull and correct the line. The mark settles into the surface like it wanted this all along. I hate that I feel the small thrill I always feel when a correction works. He feels it too, because the hand on mine eases a fraction, not to leave, but to tell me the lesson landed.
“This isn’t how residencies work.” If I let the silence expand, it will turn into something I don’t want to name. I bring the brush low on the canvas and make a shadow that could be a footrest or a closed door.
“This isn’t a residency,” he replies. “It’s a sanctuary. And you’re already inside.”
He guides my hand down through a darker swath of paint, the drag satisfying in a way that makes my ribcage feel too small.Color smears on my wrist where the brush kisses skin instead of canvas. I should pull away. I don’t. I want information. I want the part of me that isn’t hungry to win. It’s damned hard to keep score when my pulse is a drum in my throat.
“How do survivors find you?” I ask, pushing words in front of feeling. “You said no maps. You said no addresses. You pretend you’re a rumor. How do they find your rumor before someone else does?”
“Through people who survived before them,” he says. “Through a number that isn’t a number but won’t disappear when a woman throws a phone into a storm drain. Through the back door of a clinic that is pretending to be a hardware store until noon. Through a kitchen that looks like a bad restaurant and isn’t. Through a painting.”
“A painting,” I echo, because the word lands somewhere my ribs keep for secrets.
He nods. “Sometimes a room needs a sign that doesn’t read like a sign. A shape on a wall. A curve that saysthis wayto someone who’s walked the curve before. You’ve seen them. You’ve painted them.”
My hand tightens. The brush stutters. He covers my hand more firmly, not a correction this time but a reminder that I’m not going to hide from the way I already know his corridors. “If your work becomes a map,” he says, soft, low, the way people talk in rooms where grief sleeps, “you’ll help the wrong men find us. I’m not telling you to stop painting. I’m telling you to paint like you know people will follow your lines.”
Anger rises like heat from a lamp I didn’t know was on. “And I’m telling you not to use my work like a fence you control.”
“I’m not,” he says. He slides the brush free of our fingers and sets it across the palette's edge. I think he’s going to step back. He doesn’t. He stays behind me. His fingers touch the streak of black paint on my wrist. He traces it up along the innerline of my forearm, slow enough that the skin under the paint examines the sensation like a fact it didn’t ask for. When he reaches the fold of my elbow he doesn’t stop. He draws the line across my collarbone with two fingers, the way you’d paint a key on a child’s paper and hope they find the door later. He stops at the edge of my throat. Not pressing. Not exactly. His breath is close enough to feel like a question.
I gasp because my lungs remember they exist, not because he surprised me. His hands are warm. The room was set two degrees cooler than comfort, and now my whole body knows it.
“You’re trembling,” he murmurs.
“I’m not afraid of you,” I whisper back, and I mean it. In this room, I am afraid of me.
He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t do the thing men do when they win a battle. Something flickers in his face, too fast to name. Not just hunger. Something older. Old pain has a look, a small pull at the corner of the mouth that doesn’t belong to the words it’s saying. I’ve seen it in kids who learned bad lessons young and in women who forgot what rest feels like. It disarms me before I can decide whether it should. For a second I don’t want to hit him with another question; I want to ask one he won't answer on paper:Who taught you to build walls like this?I don’t ask. The question would become a doorway. Doorways are currency here, and I’m not ready to spend.
“I need air,” I say, because if I stay I’ll let him put his hand on mine again and I don’t know which of us I’ll be afterward.
He doesn’t block the way to the door. He doesn’t saystay. He just nods once, a standing-down motion. “Tomorrow,” he says quietly. “We go deeper.”
“Into what?” I ask, hating the way the worddeepermoves in my body.
“Process,” he says, like we’re talking about a mural and not his hands. “Protocol. Paint.”
“That order,” I say.
“That order,” he confirms.
I turn and make myself walk, trying not to hurry. My legs feel wrong, like I’m walking through water. The heavy door opens under my hand without a fight. The corridor is cooler, empty, and clean. I realize I still have the brush in my hand, the hog bristle, the handle warm where our fingers both touched it. I don’t put it back.
The hall gives me back the sound of my own footsteps. It’s a relief and a warning.
I don’t go straight up. I take the long way, past the library where the ladder’s wheels squeak once because someone left it that way on purpose. Past a side hall where a door that looks like a closet smells like toner and new paper. Past a small window that frames a square of night so perfect it looks painted. I put my forehead against the cool glass for a second and force air into my chest and out again until my hands stop feeling like someone else’s.
By the time I reach the landing, the music behind me has moved into a track I can’t hear. The house’s hum takes over. When I push into the east wing, Lila’s door cracks open like it knows my footfall and not just my name.
Her hair is pulled up, her face clean. She reads my mouth before she reads my eyes. “Okay,” she says softly, no joke attached. “Soup. Then sleep. Then war.”
“Soup,” I say. It comes out hoarse. “Then a list.”
