And she locked the door.
The lock had been installed by Ryan himself 18 months ago.
A simple privacy lock.
He had commented on it with a tight smile that she chose not to examine too closely.
She sat on the edge of her bed in the dark.
She put her hand over the bruise on her wrist.
It didn’t hurt much anymore.
That was the thing about bruises.
They stopped hurting before they stopped being visible.
She was still visible.
She was still here.
She had gone to work.
She had come home.
She had walked past him and down the hallway.
Tomorrow was not one of her work days.
But Thursday would come again.
She would get in her car with the gate code memorized in her mind.
And she would go back.
That was enough for right now.
That was enough.
She was not, she told herself in the dark, a woman who needed to be rescued.
She was a woman who needed a place to stand.
She thought she might be finding it.
The second week, she found the first real discrepancy.
It was buried in accounts from 18 months ago.
A withdrawal she didn’t recognize.
Larger than it should have been.
Categorized in a way that didn’t match any invoice she could find in the boxes.
She cross-referenced it.
She found two more smaller ones in adjacent months.
She made a note.
She didn’t say anything yet because she was not in the business of presenting half a picture.
She was also, in the second week, learning the men.
Tommy was 26 and hungry to be taken seriously and deeply uncertain whether the things he did to demonstrate this were actually working.
Which gave him an endearing quality that he would have been mortified to know was visible.
He started stopping by the office to ask if she needed anything.
And she started giving him small tasks.
“Run these to the copy place on Hrix.”
“Pick up these supplies from the office store on your way in.”
Not because she couldn’t do them herself.
But because he needed something useful to do with his helpfulness.
And she knew how to use what was available.
Big Lou was 51 and built like something that had been hit with a lot of force over many years and had simply incorporated the damage into its general structure.
He was not a man of many words.
But he had an absolute and unwavering commitment to feeding people.
It manifested as a plate of something appearing on her desk at roughly the same time every day, regardless of whether she had asked for it.
She ate everything he brought her.
She told him once that his biscuits were better than her mother’s.
And he stood in the office doorway for a moment, looking like he had been handed something fragile.
“Don’t tell anyone I said that,” she added.
“Who am I going to tell?” Big Lou said.
Then he left.
Decker was 44 and the most mechanically gifted person she had ever encountered.
She realized this not from watching him work on bikes.
But from watching him fix the window unit in her office on her third day without being asked.
He used only what appeared to be a screwdriver.
And he worked with a level of quiet, focused intensity that reminded her of surgeons.
He communicated primarily in observations rather than conversation.
And she appreciated this because she operated the same way.
Garrett was 22 and the newest member.
He was trying to determine, she could see, whether she was something to be protective of or something to learn from.
And she watched him work it out with the patience of a woman who had watched young people work things out for many decades.
There were others.
Marcus, who rode a blue bike and laughed easily and played cards badly.
Silva, who was quiet and watchful and had a tattoo on his left forearm that she recognized as a military insignia.
Reeves, who was the sergeant at arms and who had looked at her on the first day with a careful suspicion of a man whose job required him to be suspicious of things.
And who had softened incrementally and grudgingly.
Over the first two weeks, until one afternoon, he held a door open for her and seemed surprised that he had done it.
And Jack.
Jack, who she was coming to understand was more complicated than he appeared.