Paper walls-a

I wake up reaching for my phone.

It is muscle memory — the automatic morning grab, hand sliding across the nightstand before my eyes are even open, fingers searching for the familiar weight and glow of it. I find nothing. My hand hits clean wood and stops there and I lie still for a moment with my eyes open on an unfamiliar ceiling and remember where I am.

The safe house. East side. Clean sheets that smell like nothing.

Damien Cole's apartment.

I sit up slowly. My cheek is stiff where it swelled overnight and my knee aches from the pavement and my hands have thin scabs across the palms that pull when I flex my fingers. Outside the blackout curtains there is a thin line of grey light along the bottom edge. Morning then. Somewhere between early and late.

I sit on the edge of the bed and I look at my sketchbook on the nightstand where I put it before I finally fell asleep. The cover is warped slightly from the rain. Some of the pages inside will be stuck together at the edges. I pick it up and hold it in both hands and press it gently, the way you press something to check if it's still alive.

It holds its shape. It's fine.

I exhale.

I get up and I open the bedroom door quietly and I look out into the main room. The couch is empty. Folded on the armrest is a grey blanket, neat and flat, corners lined up with each other. A pillow on top of it with the case smoothed down. Like a hotel. Like he was never there.

But the kettle is warm when I pass my hand near it. And there are two mugs on the counter again, handles facing the same direction.

He has already been up. He has already moved through this apartment and left it exactly as he found it and disappeared somewhere without a sound.

I stand in the kitchen in yesterday's clothes and I think about what I actually know about this man.

His name is Damien Cole. He is thirty-four, I think, though I don't actually know that — I am guessing from his face, from the particular kind of tiredness around his eyes that belongs to people who have been paying attention to the world for a long time. He runs a private security firm. He was in the military for eight years. He doesn't sleep well. He checks locks three times. He lines up mug handles.

That is everything.

I make tea and I sit at the table and I open my laptop. His company has a website. Cole Security Solutions. Clean design, dark background, minimal text.  Private security consulting and protective services for individuals and corporations. A phone number. An email address. No photographs of staff. No about page with a smiling headshot and a paragraph about his passion for keeping people safe. Nothing personal. Nothing warm. Just the facts of what the company does, laid out like a set of instructions.

I search his name directly. Damien Cole security. There are a handful of hits — a mention in a trade publication about private contractors, a brief quote in a news article about a corporate kidnapping case three years ago where the executive was recovered safely and Mr. Cole declined further comment, a business registration filing from the city that confirms the company's existence and address and nothing else.

No social media. Not a single profile on any platform. No LinkedIn, no T*****r, nothing. In an age where everyone leaves a trail of themselves across the internet like scattered breadcrumbs, Damien Cole has left nothing. Not an absence exactly — more like a deliberate erasure. Like someone who understood very early that information is a vulnerability and decided not to have any.

I close the laptop.

I look at the wall across from me and I think about walls — how you build them, how long it takes, how much you have to care about keeping people out to put that much work into it.

My sketchbook is open on the table beside my laptop. I didn't mean to open it but my hands do things without asking me sometimes, especially in the morning when my brain is still slow and soft. I am looking at a drawing I did three months ago — before Daniel, technically after Daniel but in the raw early weeks when I was still shaking.

It is a drawing of a door.

Just a door. Closed. Ordinary. But I drew it from the inside — the viewer is on the inside looking at the door, and there is light coming through the crack at the bottom, and the handle is right there, and the door is not locked.

I drew it and then I didn't know what to do with it so I turned the page and drew something else and forgot about it until now.

I stare at it for a long time.

You were so good, my college professor used to say, leaning over my shoulder in the studio, her reading glasses pushed up on her head. *You were so good and you just — stopped pushing. Why did you stop pushing? 

I didn't have an answer then. I do now.

I stopped pushing because Daniel thought it was sweet that I drew pictures for children. He said it the way people say something is sweet when they mean it is small. *That's sweet, babe.* When my first book got picked up by a publisher and I came home with a bottle of cheap champagne and my hands shaking with excitement he said  that's great  and then asked what was for dinner.

I learned to talk about my work quietly. Then I learned not to talk about it at all.

Then I learned to look at my own drawings and see them the way he saw them — small, sweet, not quite serious. I stopped pushing because somewhere between his eyes and my mirror I forgot that I was allowed to take up space.

I turn the page. I pick up a pencil. I start to draw.

I don't hear him come back.

That is the thing about Damien — he moves through spaces the way shadows move, without announcement, without the small unconscious sounds that most people make. No keys jangling, no clearing of the throat, no i'm back  called into the apartment. One moment I am alone and drawing and the next I am aware, without looking up, that I am not alone anymore.

I don't startle. That surprises me.

I look up. He is standing near the kitchen counter in a dark jacket with water on the shoulders from outside rain, looking at me with that even expression that gives away nothing and takes in everything.

"You went out," I say.

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