Four days.
Four days of the blank screen. Four days of the apartment without her in it. Four days of reaching for the phone to check the feed and finding nothing—the app deleted, the camera in a drawer, the window across from her studio just a window now.
I don't know how people live without knowing. The not-knowing is a physical thing—a pressure in my chest, a weight behind my ribs that shifts when I breathe and never settles. She's somewhere in Brooklyn. She's at Tess's, or she's at her apartment, or she's at the studio. She's alive and she has a cut on her throat that's healing into a scar and she's surrounded by people who didn't watch her through a pinhole camera for weeks and the not-knowing if she's all right is eating me alive.
I don't call. I don't text. I don't drive to Brooklyn and park on her street and wait for the cargo door to go up. I sit in the apartment that smells less like her every day and I wait, because waiting is the only honest thing I have left to offer her.
The Order calls. Abraham, twice. Blackwood, once. There's an operation in Vienna that requires my assessment and a Council meeting on Thursday that requires my presence and the machinery of my professional life grinds on the way it always grinds, indifferent to the fact that the man inside the machine has been hollowed out.
I attend the meeting. I deliver the assessment. My voice works. My mind works. The operative functions because functioning is what the operative does, the way a heart beats—not by choice, by design. But the rooms I move through are rooms without her in them, and the emptiness of that is something I'm not equipped to metabolize.
On the fourth night, my phone rings.
Not a text. A call. Her name on the screen—Jess Rowe—and the sight of it stops my heart. Not a metaphor. An actual cardiac interruption, a skipped beat that I feel in my throat and my fingertips and the pit of my stomach.
I answer.
"Come to the studio," she says. Her voice is—I don't know what her voice is. Tired. Quiet. Stripped of the fury that was in it the last time I heard it, when she stood in my apartment and told me I'd built a cage around her life. What's left is something rawer. Something underneath the anger.
"When?" I say.
"Now."
I don't ask questions. I don't change clothes. I put on shoes and a jacket and I leave the apartment and I take the subway because driving feels wrong—too fast, too controlled, the man behind the wheel managing the variables. The subway is surrender. You sit in the plastic seat and the train goes where the train goes and you arrive when you arrive and the only thing you control is whether you get off.
I get off in Brooklyn. I walk to her street. The night is cold—late November, the kind of cold that gets inside your jacket and stays. The studio is ahead, and the cargo door is down, and there's light coming from the gap at the bottom. She's inside. She's working, or she's sitting, or she's standing in the middle of the floor looking at the sculpture that she made while I watched and that will always carry that knowledge now—for both of us.
I knock. Three raps. The knock she knows.
The cargo door goes up. Not all the way—four feet, enough to duck under. She's standing on the other side, herhand on the chain, and the light from the studio falls on her face and I see her for the first time in four days and the seeing nearly takes my legs out from under me.
She looks tired. Dark circles. Thinner in the face, the way she gets when she forgets to eat, when the work or the worry consumes the part of her brain that tracks basic needs. The cut on her throat has closed—a thin red line below her jaw, already scarring. She's wearing her work clothes. Her hands are clean. She hasn't been welding.
I duck under the door. She lets the chain go and the door stays where it is—half open, the street visible, the cold air coming in. She doesn't close it. The choice is deliberate, and I understand it. The door stays open. She controls the exits.
The studio is the same and not the same. The floor is clean—the Order's team was thorough. The workbench is ordered, the tools racked, the torch secured. The sculpture stands in the center, the yielding forms lit by the overhead fluorescents. But the space carries the weight of what happened here, the way a room carries the weight of any violence that's occurred inside it. The walls know. The concrete knows.
She sits on the crate. I stand. The distance between us is eight feet of concrete floor and it's the most honest distance we've ever occupied.
"Sit down," she says. Not an invitation. An instruction. The voice of a woman who's spent four days deciding whether to make this phone call and has arrived at a set of conditions.
I sit. On the second crate, across from her. Close enough to see the scar on her throat. Far enough that she has the space she needs.
"Talk," she says. "Everything. From the beginning."
I open every door.
The rainy night. October. Walking in Brooklyn with no destination, the emptiness inside me so total it had become a kind of weather—internal, pervasive, the atmosphere of a life that functioned without meaning. And then the gap in the cargo door and the blue-white light of the welding torch and a woman in a mask and gloves, working steel, and something in my chest moving for the first time in—I don't know how long. Years. Maybe ever.
I tell her about standing in the rain for forty minutes. About the pin I dropped on the map. About going home and not sleeping and knowing, with a certainty I couldn't explain, that I had to see her again.
I tell her about the research. The databases, the skip-tracing, the foster records. Her bank balance—$341.22. The number that told me she was surviving and not much more. The feeling that accompanied the number, which was not pity and not charity but something fiercer—a fury at the world for making a woman this talented scrape by on nothing.
Her face when I say the bank balance. I watch her absorb it—the invasion of it, the intimacy of a stranger knowing the exact sum of your poverty. Her jaw tightens. She doesn't speak.
I tell her about the broker. Lena. The sculptures purchased through channels designed to be untraceable. The mirror piece and the iron fist, carried into my apartment and unwrapped and hung on walls that had never held anything and that came alive the moment her work touched them. I tell her that I sat on the floor of my living room and looked at the mirror piece for three hours the first night, and the face it showed me was the first honest reflection I'd had in twenty years.
I tell her about the shell company. The lease. The camera—pinhole, mounted in the window frame, pointed at her cargo door. I tell her I watched her every day. Watched her arrive at the studio, watched her leave, watched the cargo door for any sign of her. I tell her the feed was the first thing I checked in the morning and the last thing I checked at night and that the watching became the organizing principle of my days—not the Order, not the Council, not the operations that had defined my life. Her.
