22. Kat #2
And there will never be a name at the end of it. No signature. No email. Just a pleasant stranger at a public event who never touched me, never threatened me, never said a single sentence a lawyer could hang on a hook. Three hundred witnesses, multiple cameras and not one frame worth anything.
He is everywhere and nowhere. He has never had to be in the room.
You can outlast a man in a room. You can pin a name, a face, a quote to him until he is real enough to have to answer.
This one has learned the single trick I own no counter to, he is never in the room.
He sends a pleasant nobody with my dead mother's word tucked in his pocket, and he stays home, and there is nothing for me to walk toward, no threshold to plant myself in, no face for any lens.
Someone cuts the ribbon. The applause echoes. a cheer that sounds like it comes from underwater.
I take one breath, then another. My hand and my fingers have gone white on the recorder and I loosen them, one at a time, like a person defusing something.
Thirty feet behind me, Naveed has not moved.
He is still reading the crowd. He did not see it. There was nothing to see. A man spoke to a reporter at a press event for ninety seconds and walked away, and my protector, who counts exits in his sleep, has no reason on earth to have flagged it.
I want to go to him.
Every instinct I have built since I was nine years old says handle it, tell no one, because telling someone is how you learn what it costs to need people. Instead everything in me turns toward a man standing at a barricade with his back half to me, the wanting is so loud it drowns out the band.
So that is where we are.
I don't go, not yet anyway. I will not walk over there with my hands doing this. He would smell the fear wafting off me from a mile away, then he would move.
My phone buzzes in my bag, rings out and goes to voicemail, I pull it out because my hands need a job.
Cami.
I watch her name sit there and go dark.
The voicemail loads a second later. I do not press play.
I do not have to. I can hear it already, level, cultured, filthy underneath, I know she will say she has gone unanswered too long and that means I am either buried in a story or buried under my problem, and she needs to know which so she can be jealous of the correct one.
Cami is the sound of a life that still has room for jokes. One ring away. And I cannot get to it from in here.
I put the phone back in my bag.
The crowd is settling into the benches now.
Every one of them facing the parking lot.
My phone goes off again in my hand. It's Mara.
I answer while walking, because standing still is not something my body will agree to right now.
"Mara."
"Where are you?"
"A park opening. There's a band."
"Get somewhere you can hear me."
I find the gap between a catering van and a fence, press my free hand flat against cold metal, and let it hold some of my weight.
"Go."
"We got served an hour ago. Notice of intent." Papers shuffle on her end, fast. "Defamation. Tortious interference. They're claiming the piece damaged an ongoing commercial relationship, which is a very fancy way of saying they lost money and would like somebody to bleed for it."
"Who filed?"
"A holding company I have never heard of, represented by a firm I have absolutely heard of." A pause. "Kat, they didn't just name the paper."
Cold slides down the back of my throat.
"Say it."
"You're named. Personally. Katarina Romero, in your individual capacity."
I look at the fence. The wire is bent in one spot where somebody pushed through it a long time ago and nobody ever fixed it.
"That's not how this works." My voice comes out level, which surprises me. "I was on assignment. The paper indemnifies me."
"It does up to a point. That point has a number attached and this number is bigger.
" She exhales. "They're not trying to win.
Nobody files this expecting to win. They're trying to make you a person with a legal bill, a deposition calendar, a name that gets typed into a search bar with the word lawsuit attached to it for the rest of your career. "
"So they can't beat the reporting."
"They don't have to beat the reporting. They just have to beat you." Her voice softens, which is worse than the shuffling papers. "Legal wants you to stop filing until we get a posture. Not stop working. Stop filing."
"And if I say no?"
"Then I fight them on your behalf and I will, but I need you to understand the shape of what you're standing in." She goes quiet a second. "They knew your middle name, Kat. It's in the caption. Nobody uses your middle name."
Someone read the letters, then typed the name from my birth certificate into a legal document, and both of those people work for a man who has never once put his hand on anything.
The band starts a second song. Three hundred people on benches, facing a parking lot, applauding a park.
Thirty feet away, past the barricade, is a man who would put his body between me and a bullet without a second thought. There is a caption, a filing fee, a firm on a letterhead and my mother's word for me sitting in a box on a shelf, and none of it is anything he can stand in front of.
I want him here anyway. That is new, I hate it, but it's true.
There is no bullet to catch for me here.
There is a caption with my middle name in it and a stranger who said my dead mother's word out loud, a man I will never lay eyes on who read a nine-year-old's letters over his coffee and picked the useful line and not one inch of it can be stopped by six foot three of trained violence at a barricade.
I have spent weeks quietly terrified of how far I have let myself lean on him.
The jokes on me. I finally let a man become the wall between me and the dark.
I cannot tell anymore whether that is love or the precise thing I swore at nineteen I would die before I let happen to me.
I have lost the ability to tell those two apart, and I am not sure I want it back.
"Send me the PDF," I say.
"Kat…"
"Send it."
It arrives while she is still talking. I open it against the fence, thumb shaking on the glass, and scroll past the caption, the holding company and the firm.
There, on line four, printed clean:
Defendant Katarina Elena Romero, individually.