KAISEN #3
I let the words settle in my chest, warm despite the sterile cold of the hospital room, despite the ache radiating from my side every time I breathed too deep.
“Good,” I said. “What about the medical room?”
“Fully stocked. We brought in a consultant, like you asked—someone with maternity experience, discreet, off the books. She walked the space last week, said the layout would work fine for postpartum recovery, even minor complications. We’ve got the equipment list from her, ordering the last of it now. ”
I closed my eyes.
I could see it—the whole place unfolding in my mind the way it had every night for weeks, clearer than the ceiling tiles above me, clearer than the IV line taped to my arm.
A world built plank by plank, wire by wire, exactly the way I needed it.
No compromises. No half-measures. Everything Amai gave Truth was borrowed.
What I was building couldn’t be undone. It was mine, hers, ours, sealed and self-sufficient, floating outside the reach of every Landry hand that thought it had a claim.
“Timeline,” I said. “Where are we?”
“Four months, if the custom cabinetry ships on schedule. Five if there’s a delay on the water systems. We’re waiting on a specific filtration unit you wanted, the one rated for extended isolation. No easy substitute for that.”
“Get the substitute anyway if it comes to that. I don’t care what it costs.”
“Understood.”
I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling, thinking about how strange it was that a room meant to heal me felt so much smaller than the one I hadn’t even finished building.
“I need it done in three months,” I said. “Not four. Not five.”
Jacob hesitated, the kind of pause that told me he was recalculating numbers in his head, trying to figure out how to say that’s not possible in a way that wouldn’t cost him the account. “Mr. Landry, the water systems alone—”
“I don’t care about the water systems’ schedule.
I care about my family’s schedule.” My voice came out sharper than I meant it to, and I heard him swallow on the other end.
“We don’t know exactly when we’re coming.
Could be sooner than anyone expects. I need it ready before that happens. Not after.”
“I’ll pull crews from the other project. Double shifts if I have to.”
“Do that.”
“And the room upstairs—the one with the water view. You wanted reinforced glass, correct? One-way?”
“Yes.” I pictured it without trying to—light pouring through in the mornings, visible only from inside, the water beyond it stretching out in every direction with nothing on the horizon but sky.
A place with no neighbors to notice comings and goings, no delivery drivers memorizing a face, no witnesses at all.
Just movement, when movement was needed.
Just stillness, when stillness was safer.
“One-way, tempered, shatterproof. Exactly like the drawings.”
“We’re on it.”
“And no one else has walked the property. No subcontractors talking to people they shouldn’t.”
“Everyone’s under NDA. Same as before.”
“Good.” I exhaled slowly. “I want walkthrough photos sent to my private email. Every room. I want to see the progress myself, not just hear about it.”
“I’ll have those to you by end of week.”
“Make it three days.”
Another pause, shorter this time. “Three days. Understood, Mr. Landry.”
I ended the call and set the phone face-down on the blanket, the plastic cool against my palm, and let my head fall back against the pillow.
Somewhere out there, hammers were driving nails into a structure no one else knew existed.
Somewhere out there, a room was taking shape with soft edges and warm colors, built around the shape of babies that might or might not carry my blood, built around the shape of a woman who didn’t yet know she’d already been given a place to land.
Not a cage. I wasn’t building a cage.
I was building a sanctuary. The kind of place Amai could never offer her, because everything he had was borrowed from a war he’d started and couldn’t finish.
Mine was different. Mine was permanent. Mine was patient—waiting quietly, invisibly, for the moment the world finally became too dangerous for her to stay where she was, for the moment she needed somewhere no bullet, no father, no jealous brother could ever reach.
I would be ready when that moment came.
I looked around the hospital room—the beige walls, the flickering fluorescent light, the IV pole standing sentry beside the bed like a soldier too tired to salute—and felt nothing but impatience.
This place was temporary. A waiting room.
A pause between the life I used to have and the one I was building, mile by mile from anyone who thought they understood me.
Three months.
I could survive three months.
And when it was ready—when every room matched the picture in my head, when the water systems ran clean and the reinforced glass caught the morning light just right—I would have somewhere to bring her.
Somewhere no one else could take her from me.
Somewhere she would finally understand that I was the one who’d been protecting her all along.