She studies my face like she wants to decide if she should say more. She doesn’t. “I’ll be in the press room,” she says. “If a camera shows up at the gate, I’ll enjoy sayingnoprofessionally.”
The room empties down to me and the map and Caldwell’s chin at a good angle. Rain finally commits to the roof.
I move to the window because standing still inside noise has always been a mistake I’ll only make once. The harbor takes the weather like it always does—the surface is theater, it is the currents underneath doing the real work. I think through the afternoon: legal drafts, donor calls, a pass through the on-site clinic to put eyes on the boy who keeps his shoes on, a walk of the perimeter with Reid because nothing reduces rage like measuring the length of your own patience with an actual path.
I pull the blinds on the window halfway down because Caldwell’s face doesn’t deserve this view. Then I go to work.
The next three hours are the kind the public never understands well enough to thank you for: calls with counsel that are mostly about commas that keep strangers out of rooms; a nineteen-minute conversation with a donor who thinks his name deserves a wall and who lost interest when he learned the wall doesn’t exist; a walk-through of the clinic where R is asleep with a blanket over his knees and a phone charging inside a locker because he decided he could let go of something for awhile; a meeting with Simone where we build a list of phrases that turn into bridges inside interviews and a list of ones that turn into traps. Reid runs his drills. Mara eats a granola bar at her desk and writes three versions of the same sentence until it stops reading like we’re lying just because we refuse to say more.
At 16:22, counsel emails a draft motion to narrow the subpoena. It cites donor privacy, trade secrets, and case law that says “oversight” doesn’t mean “come inside.” I make two small edits: I strikein good faithbecause men like Caldwell drink it like sugar, and I addsurvivor safetythree times because repetition is a weapon too.
At 17:03, a staffer from Caldwell’s office leaves a polite voicemail with Mara’s assistant “inviting” me to brief the senator off the record. We let it sit. At 17:20, a blogger posts a photo of our gate with a caption that suggests we’re hiding bodies. At 17:26, Mara posts our statement. At 17:29, the blogger edits his caption to ask if we’re hiding heroes or villains. That’s the news cycle: a question mark on fire.
At 18:10, Navarro texts:Walk-in stabilized. Whistle-blower sleeping. R ate half a sandwich and asked for music. Shoes still on. Good day.The only number that matters.
At 19:15, I stand in the map room and stare at the red markers until my eyes dry out. If Caldwell had any idea, he would never have putunregulatedin his mouth like he had just invented it.
Caldwell thinks he’s coming for me.
He has no idea what he’s walking into.
Chapter 27 – Aurora
The rain can’t decide if it wants to fall or hover. It beads on the guest wing windows, then slides, then stops halfway down the glass as if the house told it to wait its turn. Lila sprawls across the small couch in our sitting room with a blanket around her legs and her phone held above her face like a light she can’t quite climb into.
“Forty-three emails,” she groans. “My boss thinks ‘out of office’ is a creative-writing prompt. Every time I say it, he replies with a calendar invite.”
“You could ignore him,” I say, rinsing a coffee mug in the little sink and setting it upside down to dry. The mug has a minuscule chip on the rim; I turn it, so the chip faces the wall like I’ve done a kind thing.
She lowers the phone enough to look at me. “I can ignore him until Monday,” she says, then sighs. “Which means I have to go back Monday. I’m sorry, Rory. I thought I could push it, but the gallery has a loan coming in and they’re panicking about insurance language.”
My stomach drops in a way I feel at the backs of my knees. She was always leaving—people with jobs arranged around other people’s art can’t live in a house like this for more than a week without their inboxes becoming alarms—but I’ve been using her presence like a handrail. I try to hide the disappointment and fail just enough for her to see it. She’s known me long enough to catch the micro-wince.
“I know,” I say. “It’s okay. You warned me. Your life is not my panic button.”
She tosses the phone onto the cushion and sits up, blanket still wrapped like a skirt. “My life is one of your panic buttons,” she says, softer. “But if I stay, I’ll start resenting the person I love most. That never ends well.” She studies my face like a curatordeciding whether a line is deliberate or an accident. “Maybe you’re enjoying Mr. Ward’s company too much anyway.”
“It’s not like that,” I snap, too fast.
“That color on your face says otherwise,” she says, but she’s grinning when she says it, and the teasing lands as intended: a tap, not a shove.
“It’s not,” I insist, then feel the heat climb my throat because my body can’t be trusted with nuanced statements. “He—this place—everything—” I stop and start over. “He is a problem that comes with answers attached to the bottom. You pick it up for the answers and the weight belongs to you.”
Lila leans back and chews that like a piece of bread with too much crust. “You’ve been cooped up in his rooms too long,” she says at last. “Go walk it off before you start drawing locks and calling them windows. And don’t give me the studio. I know you. That’s not air. That’s more him.”
“Walk where?” I ask, glancing at the hallway that runs straight and polished to the residents’ doors and then turns toward corridors I’ve only seen in staff footsteps.
“Anywhere you haven’t been told not to,” she says, then rolls her eyes at herself. “Okay, that was a joke that tasted like a dare. I meant: fresh hallways. Stare at some old wood that doesn’t care about Cassian Ward.”
I pick up my sketchbook and a pencil from the table. “You’ll be okay for an hour?”
“I’ll be fine,” she says, flopping back onto the couch and tugging the blanket up to her chin. “I’m going to practice healthy detachment by doom-scrolling Caldwell’s face and then texting you from three rooms away to saydon’t marry the house.”
“That’s a long text,” I say.
“I’ll abbreviate,” she says. “DMTH.”
“Noted,” I say.
