The printer hums behind me. Two pages of the anchor portrait come out in full-color print. I pin the second copy to a separate board I keep for threats that haven’t arrived yet. My mind runs in straight lines again.
On the left-hand monitor in the second row, a port feed shows a container offloaded with more care than necessary. The manifest reads as medical supplies. The contractor I pay to read manifests the way men read lies flagged it as a possibility and then cleared it. My shoulders drop a fraction. You can’t watch sixports and pretend you’re not waiting for a pattern you recognize. You can’t call yourself a protector if you don’t remember who trained you to look.
Aurora covers the anchor piece with muslin. She stretches her back against the doorframe until it pops. She doesn’t like chairs when she works. I catch myself anticipating her choices. That’s a small problem. Anticipation can be strategy when it keeps the explosions in the rigs that need to be dismantled. Anticipation can also be the shape obsession takes before it knows its own name. I shift in the chair and put my feet flat on the rug.
I go back to work on files that don’t have her name. A woman whose ex will violate a protective order the first day he thinks no one is watching. A man we called a driver until we found out he was a courier for people who break bones like ice. A volunteer who thinks she can fix a man with a skill set older than this house. We will stop the first. We will break the second. We will fire the third and pray she learns before it costs her something she can’t grow back.
Every fifteen minutes, my eyes go to the center screen the way you look at an EKG you know is normal but can’t stop checking. She paints, cleans, answers a message, draws a box on a whiteboard and checks it. She eats a banana and a piece of toast that probably tastes like whatever solvent she uses. She washes a plate in a sink that belongs in a factory. She stares at the portrait without moving for exactly the length it takes soluble oils to go tacky.
On my laptop, the call schedule for tomorrow populates with a new line:10:30 — A. Hale (Board Chair tentative).I don’t know if I want him to show. His presence would be an indicator that this is something where people talk about art like investments and survivors like theme. His presence would also pull her into a frame we don’t control. I type a text to hisoffice: “Chair attendance not necessary. Please do not join unless requested.”
I pour water into the tumbler I never use for anything stronger. I drink half and refill it.
When the light in her studio goes from warm to orange, she turns off two lamps, covers a second canvas, and does her end-of-day check: caps tight, rags in the can, heater off, muslin down, window latches engaged. She looks at the back door one more time and puts her hand on it. She says something to the room. I don’t need the audio to know it’s a line she’s said before. I see it in the set of her mouth. I can’t read the words, but I know the content.
She sets her phone face down. She leaves it that way even when it buzzes twice. She’s learning to control what gets to her and when. Good. My team can compensate for a hundred things; we can’t compensate for people who invite their enemies in and call it networking.
I switch the studio feed to a motion trigger and kill the live view. The screen goes back to gallery rotation. On a shelf above the monitors, a single photo sits in a simple frame: my mother pouring tea into a mug that says SAFE HOUSE in block letters a volunteer thought was funny until she learned what the word didn’t mean. I don’t keep many photographs. I don’t need to. The images in my head are already sharp.
I close the laptop and the office goes even quieter. Downstairs, a resident opens and closes a cupboard in the kitchen, then stops because the habit here is to move in ways that let other people sleep.
I stand, stretch my back until the vertebrae crack, and pad to the window. The water is dark enough to swallow anything you don’t hold with both hands. I don’t romanticize it. People drown in quiet places all the time.
My reflection sits in the glass: a man who looks like a tidy problem—neutral face, clean haircut, a thirty-eight-year-old who wears money like a uniform and medicine like a second skin he can’t take off. The scar under my jaw is small and old, a reminder that in my twenties I thought my knuckles were smarter than my head. The man in the glass grips the window frame tighter than he should and then lets go.
The Persian rug gives under my weight when I turn back to the desk. The corkboard waits on the wall like a plan we can execute if no one gets clever. I look at the printout of Aurora’s painting and the red thread that ties her to people who haven’t decided whether they want to help or own. I speak into the room because empty rooms are better at keeping secrets than crowded ones.
“Stay small, Aurora,” I say. “Stay safe.”
It sounds like a prayer. It lands like a threat. Both are true. I don’t pretend otherwise.
At the door, I pause and think about the woman in my mother’s shelter. About tea poured into a mug that said safety over and over until the word lost meaning. About a boy with burns who will sleep tonight because he knows which door clicks and which door doesn’t. About a painter who refuses to let anyone hold the work unless she knows what they’ll do with it.
I’ve seen what happens to women who believe in open doors. She paints them; I close them. For her sake, I hope she never learns the difference.
Chapter 3 – Aurora
The car door opens to cold air and cameras.
I step out, careful with the hem of mt dress so I don’t snag silk on the door latch. The harbor wind cuts through the block like it owns it. My breath fogs and then disappears. The gallery’s glass walls throw the winter sky back at itself. Inside, light looks warmer than it is out here. People are already stripping off coats in the vestibule like they’ve reached a border where the night can’t follow.
I pull my oversized wool coat tighter for one more second, then let the attendant take it and hand me a claim tag. The black slip under it falls clean. I didn’t buy it for tonight. I bought it because every other dress I own looks like I borrowed it from someone who says “brunchtime.” This one feels like me: simple lines, no fuss, and alive when I move. There’s paint under one fingernail I couldn’t get out without acetone. I left it. It feels like insurance.
“Welcome,” the woman at the desk says, smiling past me to the next person. “Down the hall to the left for the preview. Bar is on the right.”
I don’t need directions. I can find my work from the smell. Oil, varnish, and the tang of turpentine that never fully clears, even when a gallery opens every window at five a.m. Under it creeps the scent of perfume and champagne.
The black-tiled floor reflects everything, so the room looks twice as full. My canvases hang in a clean line and then break the line on purpose where something needs more air. On the far wall, the big one, my translation of the therapy wing mural, anchors the set. The gallery’s lighting earns its rent tonight. The edges are crisp. The shadows sit where they should. I’ve never seen them like this in public light. It punches me in the chest and steadies me at the same time.
“You made it.” Zoe appears at my elbow like she has a sensor for my shoes. She looks like a woman who sleeps four hours and runs on adrenaline and espresso. She’s good at hiding the cost. “You look great. Don’t kill me; we’re already at capacity.”
“That’s the idea,” I say. My voice behaves. We both know full rooms sell better than empty rooms, even if the buyers talk louder when their friends watch them nod.
“Ledger is here. Two other outlets. Mirrow Museum has three staff on the floor. I kept it tight. The foundation wired the first payment this afternoon,” she adds low, like a side note that isn’t a side note, “and one of your patrons” —she means Karael; someone above Jessa; the kind of person who likes the word patron— “is in the building. Anonymous on paper, but he’d like a private word before he leaves.”
My chest doesn’t move for a beat. “That wasn’t part of the agreement.”
“I know.” She keeps her smile in place for the room and tucks seriousness behind it for me. “I told them we’d see. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. But be ready if I bring him over. He might be a board member. He might betheboard member.”
