I choose the room with the softest shadow. A wool blanket lives on the back of a chair, pilled and honest. A kettle breathes behind the nurses’ station; the social worker pours into paper cups and places them on a low table, steam unwinding like the first kind word after a long night.
I set my phone face-down and off. I slide the recorder into a drawer and close it with two fingers, quiet enough to avoid giving the air a reason to tense. My show taught me how to ride adrenaline; tonight I teach myself how to step off it.
Elena stands in the doorway, profile cut from patience. “I’ll keep the hallway clear,” she says. “No press.” Her badge glints and then dulls again under the fluorescent hush. “You can stay,” she adds to me, “but you’re not her conduit right now.”
“I hear you,” I say. “I’m here as a person.”
The social worker introduces herself with a name and a list of choices. “Tea with honey, plain water, or nothing for now. Door open, cracked, or closed. Lights this level, lower, or higher. You can answer or not. You can stop any time.” She says it like a blessing that respects the listener’s God.
“Door cracked,” Alina murmurs. Her voice is threadbare but owned. The blanket lifts over her shoulders when she breathes. The band on the pulse ox glows a patient green that used to be a cue light in my head; I let it be medicine instead.
I hover where a perched crow might, but I do not choose the highest place in the room. I take a chair, plant both feet, and let heat find my palms on the paper cup. The tea tastes like oversteeped leaves and relief. On the wall, someone has taped a watercolor of a river with tiny white birds; in the cramped wings of paint I catch the ghost of the Orpheum’s cherubs and look away before the motif can reclaim the scene.
“Basic needs,” the social worker continues, pen capped. “Food, sleep, clothing, phone, safe contact. I can coordinate a ride to a confidential location or a hospital bed overnight, whichever you choose. No cost discussions tonight.” She turns to Elena. “We’ll need a limited statement for the chart, not for the case.”
“Understood,” Elena says. “I can come back for the formal later—if she wants one later.” She meets my eyes for half a breath. Our détente holds—dumplings later, never email now.
The city leans against the window with a faint wheeze. Somewhere beyond the hospital, the factory sends up sugar again; the air carries a molasses warmth that doesn’t belong in linoleum but insists. I imagine our studio under that smell, the glass cube humming like an aquarium, tiny LEDs sleeping, the creek behind it preparing to lift the sidewalk during the next full moon. The places I’ve turned into stages will keep trying to be stages unless I choose otherwise again and again.
“Juniper’s here,” the social worker says, glancing at Elena, who nods. “Only if it’s welcome.”
Alina lifts her head. “I want to see her,” she says. “But not long.”
Elena steps out, returns with a young woman whose courage lives in the tremor she doesn’t hide. Juniper clutches a denim jacket like a shield and a flag all at once. She looks to me and then away, cheeks gone high with shame that isn’t hers to carry.
“Hi,” Juniper says, stopping a body-length away and waiting for permission with her entire posture. “I can leave.”
“Stay,” Alina answers. The word is small and sovereign. “Stay, but no questions.”
“No questions,” Juniper echoes, swallowing. “No—no content.”
“No content,” I repeat, borrowing their shared vow like a coat I promise to return. I lift my hands to show them empty. “No mics, no notes.”
Juniper’s breath evens out a notch. She takes a chair, tucks both feet under, and holds a paper cup without drinking. The tea stitches the room together one curl of steam at a time.
“We’ll do practical first,” the social worker says, guiding us like a soft metronome that serves the players, not the score. “Alina, I can arrange bedside advocates, a trauma-informed exam if you want it, and a motel tonight with a guard on the hall, or the hospital stay with security. Your choice is the right one.”
“Hospital tonight,” Alina says. “Then… somewhere quiet. Not with family yet.”
“Done,” the social worker says, already texting. “Do you want me to call someone for you, or do you want that control?”
“I’ll do it,” Alina says. “Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow,” the social worker agrees. “For work and school, I can issue notes that say ‘medical absence’ without details. For housing, I can coordinate. For online, I can help you lock down accounts and redirect contact through a legal mailbox. For media, we can set a ‘no approach’ notice.”
I nod like a civilian who has learned a new language and is grateful to be allowed to listen.
“Juniper,” the social worker continues, turning with the same care, “do you need a ride home, a friend to sit with, or a bed here tonight?”
“I… could use a ride,” Juniper says, glancing at Elena. “And… a number to call before the next panic attack, not during.”
“I’ll text you a warm line,” the social worker says. “Humans answer it.”
“I can pay for a car,” I say, reaching for my wallet before remembering money isn’t the offering that matters most right now. I put the wallet back. “Or I can just sit for a while. Quiet.”
Juniper looks at Alina for permission. Alina nods a little, lifting the corner of the blanket like she might offer a seat at the edge of a bed she owns. “Quiet is good,” she says.
Elena checks her watch and then doesn’t comment on time, which is its own mercy. “For my statement,” she says to Alina, “I can ask two yes/no questions or I can wait. One: do you want me to list you as ‘no media contact’? Two: do you want me to hold your name back from any press release for now?”
“Yes and yes,” Alina says. “And ask the hospital to route calls through the advocate.”
“Done,” Elena replies, typing the words like a promise onto her device without letting any sound add new edges to the room. “I’ll be outside. Knock—or don’t. I’ll check back in twenty.”
When the door eases to its cracked position again, we breathe together. The paper cups steam into the tiny weather system between us. I count nine breaths and then remind myself I don’t need a number. I am not scoring this moment; I am keeping a promise to stop.
“I’m supposed to help,” I say to Alina, to Juniper, to the little birds on the taped watercolor who will not transform into cherubs no matter how my brain tries to make a pattern. “Usually that means narrating. I’m learning that help can be silence and logistics.”
Alina watches me with a measured caution that makes me grateful for the training I don’t have and the social worker’s training that she does. “What happens to your show?” she asks. The question is not a booby trap; it is a practical reality that lives in the same room as her ribs and her thirst.
“I unplug things on purpose,” I say. “I’ll release a short episode without music and without any detail you don’t consent to. It will read like a footnote, not a finale.” I stop, catch myself, and unwind the showiness from my verbs. “I’ll publish a statement that the community can hold me to.”
“No stage,” Alina says, and the words draw a line across the floor tile that my hunger cannot cross.
“No stage,” I answer. I let the words enter my body through breath and not just through ears. “When you’re ready, if you want to, you can give one sentence for the record. Victim-authored, not host-framed.”
“One line,” she repeats, thinking with her eyes half-closed. “Not tonight.”
“Later,” I say. “Or never. Your tempo.”
Juniper’s shoulders drop a fraction, like someone loosened a strap. “I’d… like to give one line too,” she says, not looking at me. “Someday. For other callers who think helping means bleeding on-air.”
“We can build a place for that,” I say. “Not a stage. A page the internet can’t set on fire.”
The social worker smiles with her eyes. “I have partners for that,” she says. “Survivor-written statements hosted by a clinic, not a platform.”
I sip the tea that cooled while I learned something my career forgot to teach me: humility makes room for oxygen. I turn my paper cup between my fingers; the ridge scrapes my skin and keeps me present.
“Okay,” Alina says after a careful minute. “I’ll give one line later. Something that helped me survive. Only that. And you say it without me on tape.”
“I will,” I say. My throat answers before my head does, which feels honest. “And if the Night Choir asks for more, I’ll tell them our pledge: victim-first, delay, consent.”
“Your fans,” Juniper says, a gentle dig that is more curiosity than critique. “They like to sing.”
The pin on my bag—a cherub microphone I regretted as soon as I recognized the symbolism—presses into my hip when I shift. I unclasp it and place it face-down on the table. “They can learn to be a choir without a soloist,” I say. “They can learn to transcribe, to fund therapy, to log stone markers nobody visits. They don’t need my cliffhangers.”
“Good,” Alina says. She sinks back into the blanket, eyelids lowering with the relief of a choice made and respected. “Tell them I was believed without being consumed,” she adds, and then stops herself. “Not yet. Later. That’s the line, though.”
The sentence floats, weighty and buoyant. I do not write it down. I memorize it in the part of my mind where my sister’s phone number lives in case I drop my contacts into a lake.
The social worker finishes her texts. “Room is set,” she says. “Security posted, advocate en route. I’ll walk you, Alina, and stay till you sleep.”
“I’ll come to the door,” Juniper says, rising with careful knees.
I push my chair back and don’t lead. I follow. In the hallway, Elena steps away from a vending machine and hands me a packet of honey. “For tea,” she says.
“For apologies I don’t make anymore,” I say, slipping the honey into my pocket like talisman and test. “Dumplings later?”
“Later,” she says. “No email.”
We walk together until the doors take Alina and the social worker deeper into the wing. Juniper’s ride will meet us downstairs. My hand lifts and then rests at my side, touch offered and withdrawn before it can steal autonomy. Alina sees and reaches first, choosing the contact, the agency. Her fingers find mine with a squeeze that lasts a full heartbeat longer than protocol. “No stage,” she reminds me.
“No stage,” I repeat, letting the squeeze become a seal. When she releases me, the room keeps some of her heat.
Outside, the rain has thinned to a mist that makes streetlamps into halos I refuse to read as signs. I stand with Elena and Juniper under the hospital awning and listen to the tires hiss. The city smells like burnt sugar again. In the distance, freight hums through old tracks, the note a kind of low kindness for those who cannot sleep.
Back in the glassbox, I turn the lights low and keep every switch quiet. The creek behind the studio has pushed its dark water up the curb, a sheet of mirror collecting neon confessions I won’t chase. The aquarium hum is steady, not a cue. I open a blank document and type: Community Pledge, Reaffirmed. Then I delete the line and leave the page white.
I call Jonah to say I’m safe and he says nothing for a long minute, just breath, which is right. I leave him with the silence and the address of a late-night dumpling place where we keep our détente with the world, and then I place the cherub pin into a drawer beside the recorder and do not lock it. Objects are not the enemy; habits are.
I fold into the chair and let the tea steam again in memory, Alina’s words lighting one corner of the room without making glare. The Night Choir will ask for an episode; the sponsors will ask for numbers; the algorithms will ask for volume. I will answer with a single sentence when Alina says I may.
When I publish that quiet page and the downloads dip, will I hold the dimmer steady long enough for the chorus to learn a new key—or will the old hunger knock on the glass, asking to be fed?