The thought arrives the way operational facts arrive—clean, neutral. Target neutralized. And the neutrality is its own kind of horror, because a man is dead on the floor and the part of me that processes death is treating it as a line item.
I turn around.
Jess is against the wall. Her hand is on her throat. Blood between her fingers—not arterial, not pulsing, the slow seep of a surface wound. Her eyes are on the body. Then on me. Then on the body. Then on me.
She's not screaming. She's not crying. She's looking at me with an expression that contains so many things simultaneously it shouldn't be possible for a single face to hold them all. Horror. Relief. Recognition. The understanding of a woman who is seeing, for the first time and without obstruction, what the man she's been sleeping with actually is.
I cross the studio. I kneel beside her. My hands find her face—her jaw, her cheek, careful, not touching the wound. I frame her face and my hands are shaking and the words come from the place where planning used to be.
"I'm sorry," I say. "For everything. The cameras. The apartment. The sculptures. The show. All of it. I'm sorry."
She doesn't speak. Her eyes move between my face and the body.
"He's dead," she says. Not a question. A reading. The way she reads metal—looking at the surface and understanding the structure underneath.
"Yes."
Her hand comes up. The one that isn't pressed against her throat. Her fingers touch my face—the crooked finger against my cheek. The wrong angle. The joint that will never straighten.
She touches me with the finger he broke, and I feel the whole of Jess Rowe in that single point of contact. The damage. The endurance. The choice to reach toward the man who killed her abuser with the hand her abuser broke.
"I told you not to follow me," she says.
"I know."
"How did you know he was here?"
The question. The one that sits at the center of everything—the surveillance, the cameras, the architecture of control that she dismantled in my apartment two hours ago. If I answer honestly, I'm confirming what she already suspects. If I lie, I'm building another wall between us over the body of the man I just killed for her.
No more walls.
"I was watching the studio," I say. "From the unit across the street. I have a camera."
She closes her eyes. I watch her absorb it—the final piece, the piece she'd guessed but hadn't confirmed. The empty room. The lease. The window facing her cargo door. The eye she couldn't see, watching every morning, every evening, every hour she spent in the studio she thought was hers alone.
She opens her eyes. Looks at me. The blood is drying on her neck.
"I want to be angry at you," she says. "I am angry at you. I'm so angry I can't see straight." Her voice is low, steady, controlled in the way of a woman who is holding herself together through force of will. "You watched me. You bought my art. You broke into my home. You funded my career. You controlled my life without my permission and you did it from the first night and you never told me."
"I know."
"And the same cameras that violated me are the reason I'm alive right now."
I don't answer. There is no answer. Both things are true and the truth of them sits on the concrete floor between us alongside the body.
She takes a breath. Lets it out. Looks at the body.
"What do we do?" she says.
The question is practical. The voice of a woman who grew up in a system that didn't protect her and learned that the moments after are for action. The feeling comes later. It always comes later.
"I can handle it," I say. "I have—resources. People who can make this clean."
"The people you work for. The consulting." She says it flat. Not a question.
"Yes."
She looks at me for a long time. The blood on her neck. The dead man on the floor. The man kneeling in front of her withbruised knuckles and a confession and the camera feed still open on the phone in his pocket.
