When I leave the clinic, I have to pass the door to Interview Three to get back to the control wing. I stop with my hand on the frame and look at the room like it belongs to someone else.
Back upstairs, Mara catches me with a printed sheet. “Hargreaves wants to fund a namedartist track,” she says. “Says we should capitalize on the momentum and package the residency as a program. He wants to call itWard Creative Healing Initiative.”
“No,” I grunt.
“I told him ‘no’ twice,” she says. “He thinks the third time will be your job.”
“Then I’ll tell him ‘no’ in language he understands,” I say. “His name can be on a check and a 990. It can’t be on a person.”
She slides a second piece of paper on top of the first. “Also,” she continues, “the magazine that wanted photos wants a quote from you about ‘mentorship.’”
“Give them the standard,” I say. “Artists in residence receive access to survivor narratives under strict confidentiality protocols and produce work entirely under their own creative control.If they press, tell them our founder does not do quotes about art.”
“You do quotes about doors,” she says.
“I do doors,” I correct. “Quotes are optional.”
She smirks, but it’s brief. “Have you texted her yet?” she asks, not looking at my face when she says it.
I take my phone out, open the draft, read it once to find the soft spots where I might accidentally promise something I can’t deliver, and press send. The bubbles animate for a second and then the status flips to delivered. I don’t wait for a replybecause the version of me that wants to stand there and watch the three dots pulse is the version I don’t let out near rooms that matter.
The screen, black now, gives me my eyes back. They look like mine when I haven’t slept long enough and like my father’s when I’ve been told the truth in a tone I don’t enjoy.
Reid’s voice comes through my earpiece. “Truck is gone,” he reports. “Navarro moved R to bed two. The walk-in is probably grief, not threat. The whistle-blower wants a shower and coffee. She asked for a woman to cut her hair.”
“Simone will do it,” I say. “She’s a better barber than the person who did mine in college.”
“Everyone is a better barber than the person who did yours in college,” he jokes.
My phone buzzes. I don’t need to look, but I do.
Aurora:I’ll attend.
Two words. It shouldn’t hit as hard as it does.
“Simone will brief her at 1330,” I say into the line, because I need to put motion in front of feeling. “Move the second interview to 1630. Pull someone whose story won’t turn into a court case next week. Navarro’sAis out. Give meMif she’s willing. If not, we take the woman from last month who wants to talk about how the wordhomechanged shape.”
“Copy,” Reid says.
I have forty minutes before I need to sit with a kid’s ribs and another hour before I need to be the furniture in a room where a woman decides which version of herself to tell. It would be easy to walk upstairs and stand outside a door I stood outside last night. It would be cheap. I do the other thing: I take off my jacket, roll my sleeves, and go find a mop because the back hallway outside Clinic Three has a scuff I’ve been staring at for a week and I’m tired of looking at it. The staffer assigned tomaintenance sees me with the bucket and tries to take it. I shake my head.
“Five minutes,” I say. “I need them to belong to the part of me that earns the rest.”
He lets me. He knows how leadership works here when it works.
When the floor is clean and my head is clear, I check my watch again. 12:58. Simone will already be assembling the briefing she can give without paper. She is the only person I trust to deliver a list like this in a tone that doesn’t turn boundaries into performance. She will tell Aurora that survivors are not subjects and rooms are not material and stories are not hers to bend. She will say it in a way that doesn’t sound like accusation because she knows Aurora already knows this and needs the rule anyway.
As I start back toward the control wing, my phone buzzes again. Mara.
“Change at the senator’s office,” she says. “They moved their ‘informal inquiry’ to a formal one. Letter in your inbox with letterhead and a deadline. They want names of partners and any clinic that has billed under our umbrella.”
“They can want,” I say. “We give them what we always give—licensed sites, public partners, and nothing else.”
“They’ll push,” she says.
“I’ll push back,” I retort. “Reid can drop a memo to our counsel. They’ll earn their retainer this week.”
“You’re going to enjoy that,” she laughs.
