Page 62 of Christmas with Three Firemen

“Denied,” I say.

“Noted. I’ll tell the crew we lost you.” He steps over the line of subsidiary registrations without disturbing a single page, sets the coffee and the cookies on the one bare corner of the desk, and then, instead of leaving, he settles onto the floor with his back against the foot of the bed, pulls out his phone, and goes quiet.

That’s it.

He doesn’t ask what I’m building. He doesn’t offer to help, which would mean explaining, which would mean surfacing from the one place I’m currently functional.

Grateful for this, I go back to the filing.

And it takes me a while to notice what’s missing, because it’s a thing I’ve never once been without in my working life. The awareness.

The low-grade hum of being observed. Every colleague I’ve ever shared a desk with. Every supervisor walking the floor. My whole career, and my whole childhood before it, other people in the room have registered as some flavor of surveillance.

Mateo is four feet away, and my shoulders have come down from around my ears.

I take a cookie. It’s shaped like a star, iced with more enthusiasm than correctness, and it’s still faintly warm.

“These are terrible,” I say, taking a second one.

“They’re perfect,” he says, not looking up. “Callum decorated that batch. He tried very hard.”

“The frosting is an inch thick.”

“Like I said. Perfect. Oh, I saw Rico tonight,” he says, eyes on the screen. “Second visit. He’s got the nurses bringing him extra pudding already. Asked me to smuggle in his phone charger and, I quote, something fried.”

“Did you?”

“The charger.” He scrolls. “I have limits. They’re exactly one item long.”

Something in my chest loosens half an inch. He’s flirting with nurses and demanding fried food. He’s himself, or close enough that Mateo can joke about it, and Mateo would know.

He goes quiet after that.

The radiator ticks, the storm breathes against the window, his phone glows, my pen moves. Somewhere near two, I realize I’ve been working with someone in the room for an hour, and it has cost me nothing at all.

***

It’s the timeline that does it. It’s always the timeline.

Near three, I’m reconstructing the week for my own log, because Morrison said document everything, and everything includes what was done to me. I write it out, one line per event, dates and hours down the left margin.

The last time my desk was right was the night I carried the photograph down to the gym. The first time it was wrong was after my shower the next morning. In between, I was on a gym floor coming apart and then dead asleep on top of my own covers for eleven hours. Something happened inside those hours.

And the complaint, by Morrison’s account, went in yesterday afternoon. The same day I stood in this room with wet hair, counting my folders.

All I have is the cover sheet he forwarded. I want the body. The unit keeps a night desk; it’s how preliminary reports land in my inbox after midnight, so I call it, and a records tech picks up on the fourth ring, sounding young and bored and half asleep. I ask her to pull the Delaney complaint from the case file and text me photos of every page. She doesn’t ask why I need it at three in the morning. Night staff never do.

My phone starts buzzing twelve minutes later.

I sit on the floor beside the desk, careful not to wake Mateo, and scroll. Legalese. Boilerplate. Respondent this, improper conduct that.

Page four stops me.

…a pattern of targeting entities affiliated with the respondent, including but not limited to Meridian Building Group…

Meridian.

I found Meridian two weeks ago, buried in a permit. I connected it to Delaney at this desk, by hand, on a yellow legal pad. I have never put that connection in writing anywhere else. Not in a records request. Not in a report. Not in an email to Morrison. The only place on earth where Delaney and Meridian sit on the same page is in my handwriting, in this room.