“Cameras?”
“Blind spot,” he says. “A truck parked in the alley blocked most of the frame. Not ours.”
“Plate?”
“Dirty. We’re enhancing.”
“Flores has family?”
“Mother in Tacoma. Brother in Fresno,” he says. “She grew up in the system. Aging out at eighteen, two years community college, nonprofit development ever since. Clean references, clean background. Good at the job. Asked for more responsibility last week.”
“She didn’t leak for money,” I say. I know that story too well to misread it. “If she leaked, she thinks she’s doing the right thing. Or she’s being played by someone who knows she believes that about herself. Find her. If she went to Caldwell, we take the hit ourselves and tell press we failed to supervise adequately. We don’t let him call her a criminal. If she’s hurt—” The sentence stops between my teeth. “If she’s hurt I want our name nowhere near the reason.”
“Understood,” Reid says. He shifts his weight.
I take the legal file off the top of the stack and actually read the words as if they’re not just weights. Emergency motion, protective order, First Amendment claims, survivor privacy. I strip the baroque down to the bone. We will say:Courts have balanced press freedoms and privacy before. They can do it again.We will say:Harm is not hypothetical.We will include a sealed appendix with affidavits from clinicians who havewatched an ex partner find a woman’s new city through a news clip about “hope.”
By seven, we will move people before dawn. By eight, Caldwell will go live again because he likes to stand at a camera when commuters can pretend outrage is virtue. By nine, Nadia will call in and make me earn every verb in that grant language. By ten, I will put Aurora in a room full of maps and protocols and let her see how ugly protection looks before it is marketable. She will hate me and then she will hate him more and then she will hate herself for the order. I will not fix that for her. I will give her facts and then a door she can walk through back to the guest wing if the facts make her want to vomit.
The studio behind me is still. I can see the corner of the chaise through the half-open door and the outline of the place where the wall met her wrists. The marks I rubbed out last night with my thumbs are on my palms like memory, not ink. I flex my hands. The sound they make is the same sound I hear in my head when I think about the wordmineand argue with it until it becomesprotectinstead.
The TV blinks: my screen throws a news alert at me I didn’t ask for:Caldwell to Announce “New Evidence” on AM News at 7:30.Of course he is. He doesn’t have evidence. He has a screenshot and a rumor and a desire to hear his own name more times before noon than mine.
Chapter 33 – Cassian
By the time the house finally goes quiet, I’m past the point where work has any give left. The statements are drafted. The donor deck is stitched into something that will hold for forty-eight hours. Echo took fifteen new beds on short notice, and the last text from Navarro said “settled” and then three words that mean more than most:no incidents reported. Caldwell ate the noon hour, the four o’clock block, and the evening cycle with the same three phrases said six different ways, and my legal team bled his sentences dry of anything actionable and still called it a risk. I did thirty seconds at a podium under an overhang in the rain and said the line I promised I’d say—exposing locations exposes lives—and then walked without taking questions because I won’t give him a clip he can cut into something it isn’t.
I avoid my office. The room smells like printer heat, dry paper, and my own temper. The studio is worse. I can lock the door, but I can’t instruct my body not to remember how long it took for her to saynow. I need a neutral space where I have fewer habits. The conservatory makes the most sense.
It’s a little-used glass rectangle bolted onto the West Wing like an afterthought from an owner who didn’t believe in weather. The roof is ribbed panes held by black steel. The plants that survive our irregular attention are the kind that like neglect—ferns that drink air, a rubber tree that ignores you if you ignore it, a jasmine vine that took the corner wall as an invitation and wrapped itself around the pipe so thoroughly I made a note to fund the next gardener hire out of a budget line that doesn’t scream “security.”
Two lamps are enough. I don’t bother with the overheads. The glass makes its own light, anyway, taking whatever the house spills and turning it into reflections. A canvas drop clothcovers the old upright piano in the corner. I don’t play often. When I do, it’s the same three things: scales in the lower octaves to hear the strings complain, the left hand of a sonata my mother made me practice when I was ten because she said my impatience needed somewhere to go, and the first four notes of something I never finished learning. I don’t take the cloth off because I want to entertain myself. I do it because the sound of a big instrument settling in a damp room is useful when your head is full of news anchors and deadlines. The piano creaks as the fabric lifts and slides. The wood smells like old polish. I press a key, then another, and let the notes be what they are.
I sit on the bench and brace my elbows on my thighs and let my head drop forward. The knot above my right shoulder blade is a fist made of bone. I press it against the edge of the keyboard until it hurts enough to focus. I push a thumb into my scar without thinking until the tissue goes from numb to sharp and then back to the kind of sensation that lives. It’s a trick Navarro taught me years ago when an intake wouldn’t stop clawing at the same spot on her arm; held pain gives the endless pain a border. It still works.
I’m not rehearsing what comes next. For once, I don’t want to run lines in the theater of my head. I want to sit still long enough for my pulse to stop making decisions for me. The rain helps. The glass helps. The fact that no one thinks to look for me here helps the most.
Footsteps in the corridor try to be quiet by starting as whispers and then become what they are by the time they reach the door: bare feet on old wood. The hinge sighs. A rectangle of light from the hall. She stands there with a mug held in both hands and an expression that tells me she didn’t come looking for me, and that finding me is still not an accident. When she realizes I’m alone, her shoulders drop a fraction.
“I didn’t know anyone used this room,” she says. Her voice is normal. Flat from a long day, not brittle. Her hair is unpinned and damp. The robe is gone; she’s in a T-shirt that’s seen linseed oil and a pair of black sleep shorts that have never met a donor. The mug smells like chamomile because the kitchen staff learned three days ago what to put under her nose late and what not to suggest because she’ll bristle and refuse it.
“Most don’t,” I say. I nod at the bench. “Stay.”
She hesitates as if she’s running the future five minutes in her head and adjusting for risk. Then she crosses the tile and sits on the far half of the bench and sets her mug on the lip of the piano.
We don’t talk for a minute. The rain takes the first exchange. I press my fingers to the lower keys and play a line that is moreremember-thisthan music. The wood under my palm vibrates. The sensation travels up into my forearm and unties something I didn’t know was still tied.
“You play,” she says.
“I can keep time,” I answer. “And I know how to use my left hand when my right is busy.”
“That sounds like a double meaning,” she says, without heat.
“It’s just true,” I say, because I’m tired of turning everything we say into a test. “My mother made me learn enough to sit still. She believed in tools. Scales were a tool for children who want to get up when they should keep their ass in a chair.”
“I would have liked her,” she says, and then laughs under her breath like she surprised herself with the confession. “Maybe. Unless she told me to stop talking. I never liked that.”
“She would have liked you,” I say, and the certainty in my voice surprises me enough that I check it. It holds. “She liked people who didn’t hide from their own argument.”
