The screen on the far wall pings, a soft tone that reads as a medical device more than technology. Dr. Navarro’s face resolves into the frame. Her background shows white tile and a bulletin board with too many forms, which means she’s calling from an outer office, not a therapy room. She’s in her fifties, hair close-cropped with a mouth that learned how to make pain sit down without pretending it didn’t exist. We’ve worked together long enough that she does not bother with preface.
“Morning,” she says. “We had five new arrivals last night. Two women with children from the north transfer—safe, hungry, and nobody bleeding. One adolescent boy from a trafficking case we pulled from the port with bruised ribs anddehydration. He’s awake and refuses to take off his shoes. One woman who may be the whistle-blower we flagged in last week’s call. She won’t confirm and I won’t push until she sleeps. One walk-in we’re still vetting.”
“Names?” I ask.
“Initials only on this line,” she says. “M and J with kids. R is the boy. A is the probable whistle-blower. S is the walk-in, holding in intake two until I get a read. R won’t meet anyone’s eyes on entry. He looked at the floor, then the ceiling, then the door. His knuckles are raw. He says he wasn’t hit. The story doesn’t fit the skin.”
“Protocol,” I say to Reid without taking my eyes off Navarro. He’s already writing.
“Clinic room one,” Navarro continues. “I can manage vitals and ribs. We need a soft bed, a hard door, and food he can eat without asking. He doesn’t want to use our bathroom. That’s trauma, not obstinance.”
“I’ll come down,” I say. “We’ll keep him on-site until this afternoon. If he’ll tolerate a shower, we’ll make the water his idea.”
Navarro nods once. “The whistle-blower,” she says. “If she’s who we think she is, we need a plan that gets her quiet before the senator’s office uses her to make a point. She wants to talk. She also wants to feel like she’s not helping the men who paid her salary. She will need a witness who isn’t me.”
“I’ll take her,” Mara says immediately.
“You will,” I say. “With Simone sitting in. Two sets of ears, one note-taker, and no recordings. We own the paper trail.”
“Copy,” Mara says.
Navarro looks past her screen, eyes narrowing, then back to me. “Truck in the alley,” she says. “I don’t recognize the plate.”
“Already on it,” Reid says. His phone buzzes once. “City service work order. Legit. They’re patching asphalt that doesn’t need it.”
“Then they’re waiting to see who walks out,” Navarro says. “We’ll feed them water and no faces.”
“Good,” I say. “Anything else?”
She glances down. “A note about the arts pilot. Since we are pretending to call it that. If yourresidentis going to be in hearing range of clinical, I want her prepped for what she might see. Not the gallery version. The hallway version.”
“She will be,” I say.
Navarro holds my eyes an extra second because she’s earned it. “Prep her,” she says. “Don’t groom her.”
“I know the difference,” I clarify.
“Sometimes you pretend you don’t,” she says. “That’s when you’re least useful to me.”
She ends the call without a goodbye because that’s who she is. The screen goes dark, reflecting me for just a moment. I look like a man who can be trusted to make a plan and hate himself for what he likes about the parts of it no one else should see.
Mara flips to another page. “Legal,” she says, moving us forward before I can step backward. “One skirmish with the city about grant language for the Harbor Shelter. They want us to addfaith-based partnersto the acknowledgment slate. We can name them without naming our clinics. It would give them cover in their district.”
“Fine. List their public programs. Not their pastors.”
“We also have a residency contract to finalize,” she adds, sliding a folder across the table. The tab readsHale — Residency Pilot.The language is the version we last agreed to, with my notes added in the margin.
I open it and skim without really needing to. The clauses I care about hold: time-bound safety review, interview consent under my staff’s protocols, ownership of her work remains hers, no creative oversight dressed as care. There’s a schedule block forresident interviews with survivorsthat we left asweek twoin the outline because I wanted to see what kind of breath she has when the room is full of someone else’s story.
“Move her up,” I say, closing the folder. “Today. Two interviews instead of one. Navarro gets to veto if a case is too fresh. Simone moderates. I’m in the room.”
Mara’s eyebrows go up a degree. “That’s not how we’ve done it.”
“It’s how we’re doing it,” I snap.
“Any particular reason?” she asks, too flat to be defiance.
“Yes,” I say. I don’t elaborate.
