“Not the same,” he says, his voice lower. His gaze flicks to my wrist, where charcoal dust clings in the crease because I turned a page with a dirty finger. He reaches slowly. His thumb brushes the smudge away. It’s the same gesture as last night, but daylight drains it of theater. That should make it easier. It doesn’t. The small contact is a shock like when you find a live wire you thought was dead.
“You’re still manipulating me,” I say. My voice is steadier than I feel. I hear Lila in my head, words rehearsed in a bathroom mirror when we were nineteen:name the behavior; set the boundary; own the door.I keep my back to the file wall so I can look him dead on and not in profile, which is how men like him prefer to be seen.
“If I were,” he murmurs, “would you be trembling like that?”
My body betrays me by obeying him and trembling harder because he said it and now I can feel it. I hate the flush. I hate that he sees it. I hate how good I am at noticing that he steps in, one more inch, and then stops. The silence between us takes form. I’m the one who gives it a shape by breathing too fast and then forcing it to slow.
“I’m here for my work,” I say, and it comes out thin enough to make me angrier.
“Then we’ll work.” He takes a breath like he’s about to say something softer and refuses it in favor of something useful. “Simone will debrief you after lunch,” he says. “You’ll getboundaries again, because repetition saves lives. This afternoon, interviews if you want them. Tonight, studio. If you don’t come, the studio will still be there.”
“You made the room,” I say. “Of course it will be there.”
“And you chose the door,” he says.
I clutch my sketchbook tighter, a ridiculous shield, paper in a place made of locks. “I could tell the senator everything,” I say. It’s ugly, and I’m proud I said it.
“You could,” he says. “And then the boy in that room would have to run again.”
That shuts me up. It also makes me want to throw the pencil at him just to see if he’ll catch it. I put the pencil down on the desk instead, too hard, so it rolls and taps the edge like a metronome. He picks it up and sets it still. His hand is steady. I understand suddenly why steady is the thing that seduces me more than any line he’s used.
“I’ll meet Simone,” I sigh.
“Tell her if you don’t want to be in the room for the second case. You don’t get points for staying. You get to leave if leaving keeps you honest.”
“I don’t need you to tell me how to be ethical,” I say.
“No,” he says. “But you asked to be in my house, and my house runs on rules.”
“I asked to see the truth,” I say. “You invited me to your script.”
He doesn’t smile. “Both can be true,” he says.
He moves, just a fraction, and I feel it like it’s a wind. He isn’t touching me. It feels like he is. I hate that my body understands him before my brain can decide if it wants to.
“I’m going,” I say, because the next thing I say will sound like a confession if I don’t leave.
He steps aside immediately, as if my sentence has weight he is trained to respect.
I leave the office with my jaw tight and my heart doing a stupid, loud thing against the inside of my throat. I don’t know if I want the elevator or the stairs until I reach the corridor, and then the choice is made for me by the sight through another panel of glass: that same boy, sitting with Imani’s warm blanket over his knees, cup on the floor, looking down at his hands like he found something there he hadn’t expected to keep. The sight puts my breath back where it belongs. I take the stairs, because stairs give your body something to do that your head can’t ruin.
Upstairs, the glass corridor gives way to the warmer hall that leads to the guest rooms. Lila is awake and on the floor stretching like a ballerina with an agenda. She looks up when I come in and clocks my face before I say a word.
“Soup?” she asks.
“We need to buy stock in soup,” I say. I flip my sketchbook open because I don’t have the energy to lie or the desire to unload. “Look.”
She comes to the desk and stands over my shoulder. On the page: the cup, the edge of a blanket, the wheel of a cart, Simone’s hands in their caution pose, a boy’s mouth when pain lets go a fraction. And Cassian’s hand, not his face, not his eyes—the hand I drew without meaning to, tendons and scars and the neat line across one knuckle where he must have picked a fight with a table and let the table win.
“Yikes,” Lila says, which is her word foryou’re in deepwhen she doesn’t want to sayyou’re in danger.She points at the hand. “That’s… specific.”
“It’s what was there,” I say.
“Uh-huh,” she says. She leans her hip on the desk and crosses her arms. “We can unpack this with snacks, or you can pretend it’s all fine and go to a debrief and then the studio and it won’t be fine but at least you’ll have data.”
“Debrief,” I say, because pretending is easier when it has a schedule.
She kisses the top of my head the way she did when we were nineteen and I came back from a foster meeting with a smile I learned to wear for strangers. “I’ll be in the spa pretending to be a hostage,” she says. “Send an SOS if you’re actually one.”
