15. Gaps in the Record
Chapter fifteen
Gaps in the Record
Rafe
The cursor blinks in the empty field for longer than it should.
I have the villa laid out in my head as clean as a timeline. The paddock, the service road, the back rooms of the house, Kiwi’s name lighting up my phone at 12:14 a.m. I could account for every hour if I wanted to. Months of Dominic’s training have made sure of that.
His system wants all of it.
I write the first true line.
Subject attended private circuit gathering with university associates.
True. Clean. The kind of sentence that survives an audit without telling anyone what the night actually looked like.
I try another.
Subject appeared emotionally distressed.
I stare at it. It’s accurate, but Dominic and Alistair don’t care that she’s hurting. They care whether the hurt makes her easier to manage, harder to predict, or useful to somebody who reaches her before they do. I delete it and type the opposite.
No notable change in routine.
That one is a lie. I know it while I’m typing, and I know it again when the cursor settles at the end of the sentence, waiting for me to take it back.
I don’t.
When I reach the part about the coke, my hands stop. The real version comes together easily because I’ve written enough of these reports to know exactly how it should sound.
Subject used cocaine repeatedly and appeared visibly altered. University associate contacted reporting party at 12:14 a.m. Reporting party located subject and left the main gathering with her.
I don’t write that she called herself Lark. I don’t write how bright her eyes were or how hard her jaw kept working. I don’t write that I knew what I was looking at before Kiwi told me, or that Lorelei pulled me down the hallway and I followed anyway.
I erase the whole thing and replace it with two sentences.
No security concerns. Subject returned safely.
I read the last word twice. Safely.
Then I close the laptop without submitting the report.
It isn’t the first time I’ve left things out.
I know that as soon as I scroll through the last month of what I’ve already sent and see the pattern all at once instead of one report at a time.
At first, I only kept things that didn’t seem relevant: the way she sings when she thinks nobody is listening, low and unfinished, trying out lines like she’s saving the real performance for a bigger room, or the fact that Zaconia can make her laugh when the rest of us can barely get her to smile.
None of that belonged to Dominic, so I didn’t give it to him.
Then the omissions got heavier. I left out the fight with Carmen that I heard through a cracked door.
I stopped recording how long Lorelei slept after bad nights or how little she ate the mornings after.
I didn’t mention the one time I found her standing in the hall looking honestly scared, before she noticed me and put her face back together.
I stopped naming who she kissed unless enough people had seen it that leaving it out would draw more attention than including it.
I told myself I was keeping the reports limited to information relevant to the job, and I never asked who got to decide what relevant meant.
Dominic finds me in the garage two days later. He has his phone in one hand and barely looks up from it when he speaks.
“Anything unusual this week?”
The question is routine for him, delivered with the same interest another person might show the weather.
“No.”
The word comes out smoothly, and that bothers me more than the lie itself. Earlier, I would have hesitated long enough for him to hear it. Now I can say it while tightening a bolt that was already tight, my voice steady and my hands doing exactly what they’re supposed to do.
Dominic nods and turns toward the door, then stops with one hand on the frame.
“Somebody at the paddock says she’s been answering to a different name.”
The wrench doesn’t move. It takes everything I have to keep it that way.
“People say a lot of things at the paddock.”
“They do.” He still hasn’t turned around. “Which is why I’d rather hear it from the person who was standing next to her.”
This is the test, and I know it the way I know the weight of a tool. If I give him the name, it goes into a file, and a nickname she picked at a party becomes a variable somebody else can plan around. If I refuse too hard, I tell him something else: that there’s something here worth protecting.
“Nobody’s calling her anything,” I say. “Drunk kids at a party make up nicknames all night. Ask me what they called the guy asleep under the blanket.”
Dominic looks back at me for a long moment. Whatever he is measuring, it takes longer than I would like.
“The blanket,” he repeats.
“He was very committed to it.”
Something moves at the corner of his mouth, not a smile, only its outline.
“Keep the reports current, Rafael.”
He leaves. I keep the wrench on the bolt until his footsteps are gone, and my hands stay steady the whole time, which is what frightens me.
It’s the first time Dominic has asked me a question he already had part of the answer to.
I lied to his face in a room I’ve known since I was twelve, and I don’t know yet what it’s going to cost, only that the bill has started.
Lorelei texts me a little after nine that night. The first message is a picture of something burned black in a pan, captioned RIP dinner. A minute later, another appears.
Lo: also your sweater is mine now, legally, I checked
I laugh out loud in an empty garage.
Me: what happened to the sweater rule
Her answer comes back immediately.
Lo: there is no sweater rule. there was never a rule. this is a lawless household
I sit there grinning at my phone longer than the joke deserves. The tightness that has been sitting in my chest since the villa loosens enough for me to breathe around it.
This part of her doesn’t fit anywhere on Dominic’s forms. Burned dinner, stolen clothes, bad jokes about imaginary property law.
He can turn cocaine into leverage and grief into a question about compliance, but there isn’t much he can do with a ruined pan and a sweater she has decided belongs to her.
Whatever else they get to watch, they don’t get this.
I open the laptop again. The report is exactly where I left it, waiting for me to decide whether the lie counts if it never leaves the screen.
I submit it.
My phone buzzes less than a minute later.
Dominic: Received.
Two words. No questions about the gap between the gathering and her safe return, no request for the names of the people present or the reason Kiwi called me after midnight. Whatever system takes the report next has accepted the version I gave it.
I look back at Lorelei’s messages. I can tell myself the missing lines protect her, and they do. They also keep me from writing that I knew she was high and went down that hallway with her anyway.
Both are true.
I only like one of them.
Lorelei never asked me to redact her life. She doesn’t even know there is a report, much less that I’ve appointed myself the person who decides which parts of her belong to Dominic and which ones she gets to keep.
I put the phone away and go back to the bike. The rear chain was aligned before Dominic walked in, but I loosen it and start over.
Twenty minutes later, I’m still adjusting something that was right the first time.