8. Kat #2
"No." Something goes out of her voice, some long-held weight. "You were half right. Which is worse, because half right gets printed and half right gets you laughed at."
"Not anymore."
I'm already standing. Already looking for my boots, which are by the door, squared next to a pair three times their size.
I need the wall. Every printout, thread and pinned photograph, this map beside it, and two hours alone with a marker.
"I have to go home," I say.
The line goes dead the second I say it, because Sienna doesn't do goodbyes, and I stand in the middle of a stranger's kitchen holding a phone that just handed me the last fourteen months of my life in one file.
Naveed comes out of the hallway before I've taken two steps toward my boots.
He's in a black shirt and he hasn't slept and there's no expression on his face at all, which by now I've learned is not nothing. It's a man deciding which of the four things happening in front of him needs handling first.
"I'm going home," I say.
I put it down flat, the way you'd put down a set of keys. Not a request. Not an opening move in a negotiation, because I've watched him negotiate and the man doesn't lose.
"The wall," I add. "It doesn't move. That's not me being dramatic, it's physically true.
Fourteen months of threads and pins and margin notes and half of it makes sense only because of where it sits next to the other half.
If I take it down and rebuild it here, that's a week. I don't have a week. I have this."
I hold up the phone like it's evidence in a courtroom, which, give me eight hours, it will be.
"So I'm going. Tonight. You can come, you can post up outside, you can call in whatever you call in. But I'm going."
I've got three more arguments loaded behind that.
I've been building them since the floor.
I have one about how a fortified building with plywood on the window is objectively harder to enter than it was on Tuesday, and one about how my source protocol is now his source protocol, and a really good one about how the man himself said he doesn't do safehouses.
"Understood."
I blink. "What?"
"We leave in ten." He's already moving, already reaching for a jacket. "Bring the plate."
He's gone into the other room before my brain catches up with my mouth.
Ten minutes.
I stand there in his empty kitchen with all three arguments still stacked in my chest and nowhere to put them.
That was too easy.
That was so far past too easy it circles back around to suspicious.
This is a man who spent Tuesday arguing me out of a source meet in a public restaurant.
Who wouldn't let me carry my own laptop bag down two flights of stairs because it changed my hands' availability, whatever that means.
Who once looked at my grocery list and made a face.
And now I say I'm going back to the loft the fire people have already visited twice and he says understood like I asked him about the weather.
He comes back with the jacket on and a bag over one shoulder that appeared out of nowhere.
"You're not going to fight me on this."
"No."
"You fought me about a sandwich."
"The sandwich had a window behind it."
I open my mouth. Close it.
He crouches by the door and starts working the laces on his boots, and I stand there watching the tendon in his forearm move, and my entire chain of reasoning walks out of the room without me.
That's the thing nobody warns you about.
He isn't doing anything. He's tying a shoe.
And my attention goes toward him like water finding the low point in a floor, and I have to physically drag it back and put it on the file, the map, the two names that used to have question marks.
"You already decided," I say. "Before I came out here. You'd already decided we were going back."
Nothing. Just the second lace.
"See, this is the part where a normal person says yes or no."
He stands. Checks something at his hip without looking at it, the way other men check for a wallet.
"Boots," he says.
"Wow. Riveting. Do you have a longer version of that?"
"Boots, please."
And there it is, that flat delivery that lands exactly one beat after I've stopped expecting it, and I have to turn toward the door so he doesn't see what my face does.
I get my boots on next to his.
Ten minutes later we're in the car, and the bridge lights are sliding over the windshield, and the whole way across the river I'm doing two things at once: rebuilding the wall in my head, thread by thread, name by name.
And failing, completely, to read the man beside me.
The key turns different.
That's the first thing. Not the sound, the resistance, the mechanism eating the bolt instead of just sliding past it, and my hand knows it's wrong before my head does.
"You changed the lock."
"Core lock. Two of them." He's behind me with the bag. "The old one was decorative."
"You've said that. Repeatedly."
"It was true repeatedly."
The door opens onto my loft, and my loft is not my loft.
It's still mine. That's the strange part. The camel throw is over the arm of the sofa where I left it. My mug is upside down on the drying rack with a coffee ring under it I never got around to scrubbing. The lemons in the bowl on the counter have gone soft on one side. Nobody moved my things.
But the light is wrong.
I cross to the windows because I can't not, and the plywood is gone, and the glass is back, and when I put my fingers on it, it doesn't feel like glass.
There's a skin on it, faint, a barely-there sheen that eats the streetlight instead of throwing it back.
The city outside is the same city. It just isn't looking in anymore.
"Ballistic film," he says. "It won't stop everything. It stops the first thing."
"It stops a brick."
"It stops a brick."
I run my thumb along the edge where the film meets the frame, and it's cut so exactly that I have to hunt for the seam. Whoever did it took their time.
The camera over the fire door is the size of a bottle cap.
There's another at the stairwell turn, and one on the alley side, angled down at the recess by the trash cans where a person could stand for six minutes and never be seen from the street.
He didn't put one facing the loft. Every eye points out.
"When did you do this."
"While you were at my place."
"That's two days."
"It's a small building."
"Naveed. This is not a two-day job."
He sets the bag down by the door and squares it with his boot, and he doesn't look at me. He looks at the frame, the sightlines, the seam at the top of the window like he's checking his own work.
"It was a security necessity," he says. "You'd have come back regardless. I preferred the building be survivable when you did."
Something in my chest goes loose and stupid.
I have to turn away from him to handle it, so I walk.
Kitchen, where the outlet by the sink has a new plate on it and I know that means something I don't understand.
Bookshelf, untouched. The reading chair by the window, still angled how I like it, and I understand suddenly that he could have moved it, that the correct tactical choice was to move it, and he left it.
And then the wall.
Months of thread and pins and printouts and my own handwriting getting worse toward the bottom corners. Not one thing shifted. Not one photograph straightened. He walked past this every hour for two days with a drill in his hand and he did not touch it.
He fortified my life instead of asking me to leave it.
My knees don't quite hold as they should.
Heat climbs my neck and my eyes sting and my hands want something to do, so I grip the back of the chair and breathe through it, because this is not the feeling I have armor for.
I've been handled before. I've been managed, escorted, advised, benched.
Every single time, the message underneath was the same: the problem is that you're here, so we'll move you.
Nobody has ever looked at the place I built and decided to make it hold.
That is the sentence that undoes me completely. Every powerful man who ever stood in my life read the place I built and decided the fix was to remove me from it for my own good. This one read the same place, reinforced the glass and left every pin exactly where my hand had put it.