“Draw funds from evergreen accounts to cover payroll and vendor contingencies for sixty days,” I say. “Move them through the Harbor Shelter conduit, then wash them back into main. Caldwell will try to freeze something public. We keep the work moving even if he thinks he made a dent.”
“Done,” he says. “We’ve already created a cushion. If he hits us with a hearing, we’ll need lines on donor calls. Mara will handle. I’ll keep this house quiet.”
He pauses. The switch flips from strategist to friend who knows where the bone is weakest. “Hale was seen in your private wing this afternoon,” he says carefully.
“I saw her,” I say.
Reid’s eyes flick toward the gym door and back. “You’re making her part of this whether she knows it or not.”
“She already is,” I say, not pretending otherwise.
“You know what I’m going to say,” he adds.
“Say it anyway,” I tell him.
“Don’t stage intimacy in the same week a Senate committee tries to tear your work open,” he says. “If Caldwellthinks he can turn her into a witness, he will. If he thinks she’s leverage, he’ll treat her like a door he can kick. You want her close? Fine. Keep that closeness from looking like you built a narrative around her.”
“I’m not performing for Caldwell,” I say. “He’ll get the theater he deserves—none.”
“Then do the other work clean,” he says. “Because if you drag her into your private wing while your public wing is bleeding news, I can’t protect both fronts without making a mistake I’ll have to live with.”
“Noted,” I grunt.
He switches back to logistics. “Two more practicals,” he says. “First, Caldwell’s staffer reached out to a former volunteer. Offer of money for stories about our ‘underground clinics.’ She declined, called us, recorded the call. Second, the senator’s team sub-subpoenaed Mercy Ops’ phone vendor. They’re fishing.”
“Background checks,” I say. “On everyone. Accelerate new-hire verifications. Quietly. If there’s a leak, I want a name I can say aloud from memory.”
He nods and slides a different document out of the folder he’d tucked under his arm. “One more thing,” he says. “The house rumor mill says Lila is flying out Monday. That leaves Hale without her anchor. It’s not my remit to advise your personal choices, but my remit includes preventing opportunistic assholes from deciding she’s a soft entry point when she’s not walking with a friend.”
“Keep eyes on the transfer from the guest wing to the car,” I instruct. “No staff interactions that look like escorts. Normal. Unremarkable. Then bring me the plate numbers of any vehicle that appears twice on this road between now and Tuesday.”
I dismiss him with a flick of my fingers.
The office is quiet again. The television pops to B-roll: Caldwell at a hospital ribbon cutting, Caldwell shaking handswith a woman in a lab coat who will later learn her likeness sold the wrong story.The map on my wall glows with the work that makes those words real.
I sit back and put my hands together under my chin. There’s a film of sweat at my hairline the towel didn’t catch. The shirt sticks where the scar meets cloth. I could button the collar and make it stop. I leave it.
I open the left drawer of the desk. The leather folio inside holds the things I pretend are tools when I need them to be: embossed cards for the Residency House’s orientation dinners, keys with no labels, documents with single sentences that carry long consequences. I take a card out and a fountain pen I only use when I plan to mean every loop I write.
The card looks like civility. It is actually an initiation protocol. We bring a person into the private wing, we feed them at a table where we can see how they eat when they think they’re being hosted, we tell them rules, we listen for how their voice tries to slide around language they dislike. For donors, it’s theater. For residents, it’s structure. For Aurora, it will be both, and I will hate myself if I pretend otherwise.
I write her name slowly:Aurora Hale.It’s a neat hand I learned so that people would trust signatures I didn’t have time to explain. Under it, I write:
This evening — Private wing, West Hall. 21:30. Dinner briefing: Sanctuary protocols and residency scope. Attendance required.
The pen clicks back into its slot. I flip the card, press the house seal into wax at the corner because the aesthetic makes staff take it seriously. When the crest cools, I slide the invitation into an envelope and write her name on the front again because the repetition steadies my hand.
My phone buzzes across the desk. It’s a text from Navarro. Two lines:
R slept after lunch. Drew for an hour. Asked about you.
I close my eyes for a count of three because small sentences like that are why all of this exists. Then I look at the envelope with Aurora’s name on it and admit the other half of the truth:compulsions.
I stand. The rain is louder now, closer to hail than mist. The pines on the slope bow their tops as if they’re counting. I open the office door. A house aide I trust walks past with a maintenance log.
“Delaney,” I say.
He stops with the quick pivot of a man who’s learned to make his body available without looking like prey. “Sir.”
