Chapter 2: Evelyn

Chapter 2: Evelyn

The walls here are the colour of compliance. Not white—something a shade warmer, like a smile you don’t trust.

First rule: choose the chair with your back to a wall. Second: learn the camera’s blink. Third: don’t perform. Performers get interpretations. Interpreted people get notes. Notes get meetings. Meetings mean rooms without windows.

Group C smells like floor polish and almost-boiled kettle. Seven chairs in a circle, one jug of water trying to sweat itself into a puddle. No clock, which is deliberate—time behaves better when it isn’t being watched.

I arrive early because I like maps, and there’s no better map of a place than the way it fills when people think no one notices them. The fidgeters sit near the door. The angry ones pick the chair that looks most breakable. The ones who think they’re harmless take the middle.

Then there’s him.

Hoodie, hands visible, shoulders loose in that careful way you only learn by being measured. He doesn’t take the middle or the edge; he takes the space like he’s already had it a while and would prefer we take our shoes off.

He doesn’t look at me at first. Most people do. I’m good at being looked at and giving back nothing. He gives back nothing without looking. That’s either practice or instinct. Both interest me.

Hargreaves is the facilitator today. Small, neat, rotating smile. She sets her clipboard on the table like a garnish and starts with the same warm-up everyone pretends is new.

“Describe one moment from the past week. No interpretations.”

Callum says something about lights flickering. The woman with the bitten nails mentions the canteen kettle switching off too soon. I offer the radio in the laundry holding one note like the air forgot how to breathe. Hargreaves nods like she’s adding pebbles to a jar.

While we breathe with our palms on our thighs, a drop fattens on the jug and refuses to fall. I glance; so does he. We both pretend we didn’t.

“Pick something you can control,” Hargreaves says, “and change it by one degree.”

I relax my jaw. Across the circle, he loosens his shoulders further, a degree that reads as nothing unless you’re reading him. I am.

When the session ends, people escape in the rhythm of relief. He waits without appearing to wait. I let the crowd pass and take the alcove with the fake window the colour of summer you can’t touch.

“You’re new,” he says, not unkind.

“You’re not,” I answer. Statement for statement. We’re writing a ledger, one column each.

He tells me his name later, when the corridor has ears and we both feel like being impolite to them. Lucas Winters. His mouth barely moves on the last name, like it has sharp edges inside it. I file that away with other things that cut.




They give me a card with SLEEP / SPIKE — TIME — ONE WORD like a game you win by being dull. I set it under my pillow and dream of metal. Not chains, something thinner. Wire. In the dream I can hum and make it vibrate.

On my second day, a guard collects me for a “brief orientation.” The man in the small office with the calm voice calls himself Dr Malik. There’s a second camera in the corner angled to triangulate intentions. Malik hands me a form with a line for my name and a second line blank.

“Paired work,” he says. “Observation and regulation. Ten minutes, twice a week, supervised.”

“Like a playdate for problems,” I say.

He pretends to smile. “Like a mirror.”

I let the pen hover a moment longer than necessary before signing. Malik watches for meaning; I give him handwriting.

Back in my room I stare at the ceiling until the hairline cracks arrange themselves into something that might be a map or a trap; the difference is where you stand. The camera blinks twice. I blink once. It’s not a conversation. It’s a truce.




Group C again. Eight chairs today. The extra one is the kind of announcement that lets you pretend you didn’t hear it.

I pick my seat—back to the wall, sightline to the door. Lucas enters with the slow economy of someone who doesn’t waste movement on being seen. He takes the chair two to my left, which is exactly far enough to be polite and close enough to be intentional.

Hargreaves does the usual. Breath. Palms. One-degree changes. We comply like we always do, which is to say we do it and make sure everyone sees we’re not making a production of it.

Halfway through, the jug on the table fogs over from nothing. The radiator ticks and threatens heat. Hargreaves looks at the thermostat like it insulted her personally and writes nothing on her clipboard.

We’re dismissed with the scrape of chairs that always sounds like apology.

In the corridor, the guard at the end is pretending to talk to his radio. The other guard, the one with the soft tread, strolls past like inevitability. The window in the alcove is still summer.

Lucas stops where the wall juts out enough to shadow us from the camera for the three inches it takes the lens to adjust. He doesn’t touch me. He doesn’t crowd. He looks.

“You stand like you expect a hit and plan to return it,” he says mildly.

“You sit like you’ve practiced being furniture,” I say. “Comfortable. Within reach. Too heavy to throw.”

His mouth does not quite become a smile. Up close his eyes are not the blue they seemed across the room but a colour made to look like sincerity on TV. They’re not sincere. They are very awake.

“Dr Malik,” he says, low, like we’re sharing air, “thinks pairing us is data.”

“And do you?” I ask.

“I think it’s a door.”

“To what?”

He tips his head as if listening for footsteps. There aren’t any; the facility holds its breath so loudly you can hear the absence of it.

He leans in—not enough for the camera to log proximity as incident, enough that when he says it I feel the shape of the words first.

“One day,” he murmurs, and it’s a promise or a weather report, “you’re going to beg me. And I’m going to make you mean it.”

The reasonable part of me—the bit that fills forms properly and knows where the edges are—writes him up as a risk, stamps the paper, files it under men who like the word beg. Another part, the one I grew teeth for, steps closer by a degree so small you’d miss it if you blinked wrong.

“I don’t beg,” I say, because it’s the true thing and the safest lie.

He doesn’t argue. He steps back exactly the distance he leaned in, as if we’re measuring the room together. The shadow between us snaps like elastic.

“Office Two,” a voice calls from down the corridor. A guard, the civil tone of a man paid to escort decisions. “Winters.”

Lucas goes. He doesn’t look back; he’s the kind who knows looking back is like signing for a parcel you didn’t order. The door closes with the soft click of paperwork aligning.

I breathe out long enough to not make a sound.

On the way to my own room I pass the laundry. The radio is on; the song is almost something I remember and then it isn’t. The note holds a fraction too long, like someone is thinking, and then the music remembers how to be ordinary. I leave it be.

On my shelf: a second card, because someone is impatient or efficient. The same instructions. SLEEP / SPIKE — TIME — ONE WORD.

I write the time the way you write your birthday when a stranger asks: automatically, defensively, a little wrong on purpose. For the word I hover long enough to be dramatic no one will see, then write weather. If anyone reads it, they can think I mean mood. I mean pressure.

At dinner the canteen smells like three different kinds of beige. The woman with the bitten nails asks me for the salt and thanks me too many times; it’s the kind of overcorrection that comes from never having been allowed to need anything. I pass her the salt and say nothing and she looks relieved anyway.

On the way back, a trolley squeaks like a bad violin. Hargreaves walks by with a stack of files and that curated frown she wears when she wants us to believe she is thinking about us and not the list she has to complete before she can go home and forget we exist.

In my doorway, I find the pairing form tucked partly under the door like a note in a school locker. I pick it up and read what I knew it would say.

VALE, EVELYN — PAIRED WITH — WINTERS, LUCAS

My mouth does not become a smile. My chest doesn’t lift; my pulse does not stagger. I stand there until the footsteps down the corridor belong to someone else, then I close the door calmly because calmness is a kind of theft. It steals the moment from whoever wanted to see me react.

The camera blinks, patient. I lie on the bed and stare at the cracks. They look less like a map now and more like a coastline. Coasts are where ships leave and arrive and sometimes break apart. I don’t mind coasts. I mind tourist towns.

If Lucas believes I’ll beg, then he misunderstands what wanting does to me. It doesn’t make me pliant. It makes me precise.

The radiator ticks twice and goes quiet. Somewhere a door opens without buzzing, the secret glide of a staff latch. I close my eyes and count backwards from forty-nine because it’s a number that feels uncommitted.

When sleep comes, it brings wire again, thin as breath. In the dream I hum and the wire hums back, a long steady note that makes the air feel like glass.

Morning will bring the room with the mirror and the panic button no one presses. It will bring ten minutes and a camera that thinks it has seen everything.

One day is not today.

But I am already deciding what I will say when he asks me to mean it.

Chapter end