I meet the comms manager in The Foundry’s most human room, which is to say the ugliest: a beige break room with a humming vending machine and a microwave that sighs like it remembers another life. The glass wall gives me a slice of corridor—clean, curated, everything on-message—and beyond that, the glacial lake with its uneven bathtub ring where the dam schedule writes algebra on stone. The coffee slouches out of the vending machine like a confession.
“They told me to stop saying crisis,” the comms manager says, eyes smeared with the kind of tired makeup you put on for cameras you didn’t consent to. “But they put it in the file names.”
“I’m here for file names,” I say, and I don’t pretend I’m not. My voice lives lower now, where steadiness is a muscle I can actually flex. I slide them a sleeve for the cup so their fingers don’t burn. Care doesn’t need a caption.
We sit at the small round table. The stainless kettle on the counter catches a reflection of a rook logo from the hallway sign—control disguised as strategy, the same joke told in metal over and over. Ozone rides in when the automatic door breathes; the whole building smells like rain and printer toner, like someone cedar-polished a conscience.
“I used to think we were saving the future,” they say, tapping the table with two fingers. “Now I’m an extra in a donor salon where the toasts are live-captioned and the truth is not.”
“I’ve watched those captions,” I say. I remember a toast about “legacy without heirs,” how the words wore museum lighting while bodies did the cleanup.
They slide me a folded napkin. I don’t unfold it right away. This is a church and a crime; we both need to rehearse the sacrament.
“I’m not recording,” I say, hands palm-up, empty. The vending machine hum eats the lie detector in the air.
“You should record where we end up,” they say, mouth twisting. “But not this minute.”
We sip vending coffee. The cup tastes like cardboard and bitter loyalty. The hallway monitor flickers to life—Julian’s face, perfectly calibrated, framed by greenery from the edible landscaping, his sentences a metronome. “Mission purity,” he says, and the captions catch up half a breath late, earnestly, faithfully.
“He can sell a famine,” the manager murmurs. “And somehow we’re the ones buying forks.”
I unfold the napkin.
rookrook.
The lowercase looks like a child whispering a secret name for a monster. My fingertips go cold. The napkin is a joke only if you’re inside the room enough to think it’s clever.
“Password for the drive,” they say, voice barely air. “I scrubbed metadata, but I’m not a wizard. You promised attorney first.”
“Attorney first,” I repeat, and I can hear Tamsin scolding my posture already—shoulders down, mouth closed until the chain of custody buckles. “You’re not a wizard because they don’t pay for wizards. They pay for actors.”
They huff a laugh that keeps trying to be a cough.
I set the napkin on my palm a second longer than needed so they can watch me not pocket it like loot. Then I slide it into a small manila envelope that already holds two blank Post-its, a decoy receipt, and a sticker sheet I use to label lanes in my life. I write N3—foundry coffee. Every breadcrumb should have a weather.
“There’s a script called ‘pregnancy crisis,’” they say, meeting my eyes only at the start of the word then letting them fall to the plastic tabletop. “Two versions. One if you deny. One if you confirm.”
I feel my belly under the table, small and stubborn. I keep my hand open on the Formica instead.
“What does the confirm one say?” I ask, and my voice doesn’t shake because I trained it not to.
“That it’s a private medical choice,” they say, “but that you’ve historically been an unreliable narrator and have a pattern of pressuring vulnerable women. Quotes from professors about moral hazard. Clips of you smiling in photos next to other people’s kids like you staged a counter-brand.”
“Unreliable narrator,” I repeat, chewing each syllable until it stops being literature and becomes payroll. “A phrase for fiction stolen to bludgeon a body.”
They nod. “They’ll feed it to the outlet that used anonymous colleagues last week. Your friends read it and think, ‘maybe we should wait this out.’ By the time the waiting ends, you’re a story that happened to someone else.”
The hallway monitor throws Julian’s silhouette into our glass. He’s talking about “child-neutral amenities” in cities, about the “dignity of not reproducing under duress.” He wears rook cufflinks; he always did. The captions nail dignity and stumble on duress, then recover like nothing happened.
“Did you write it?” I ask.
The comms manager scrubs their face with both palms. “I moved commas around. I put ‘private’ in front of ‘medical.’ I added the sentence that says harassment isn’t tolerated. I wanted to sneak in ‘by donors’ and couldn’t decide if the joke was worth losing my badge.”
I remember all the commas I moved in other jobs to make cruelty sound ergonomic. “You kept something out?”
“They wanted a line about you being ‘hormonal’—coded in a way that reads as concern. I deleted it and blamed AP style.”
The kettle’s steel skin shows the rook logo again, a twitch of black. I want to swallow it whole.
“Why me?” I ask. “Why now?”
“Because pregnancy is content,” they say, not softly. “Because you made a drawer for a future person and didn’t sell tickets. Because autonomy doesn’t trend without a scandal. Because control calls itself safety, and your body is a poll they don’t want to lose.”
“Say it into the drive,” I say.
They push something small across the table—the kind of USB that comes inside cheap swag. My name is not on it; a rook sticker is. It’s funny and it’s not.
“Password’s on the napkin,” they repeat, procedural to keep from drowning. “Draft statements, talking points, and the contingency scripts folder. There’s also a spreadsheet labeled ‘Narrator.’ That’s the quotes they plan to buy, plus a tab called ‘optics.’ You don’t want to see the color-coding.”
“I always want to see the color-coding,” I say, and realize how jaded I’ve become that this makes me hungry, not faint. “I can’t thank you in a way that doesn’t endanger you.”
“You can give me a way out,” they say, straightening for the first time, a vertebra clicking in their throat. “Not today. Not dramatic. I just don’t want to be here when the next caption lies for him.”
—micro-hook—
I lay out the path like I’m reciting a recipe my mother taught me: one burner phone, one introduction to a whistleblower attorney who doesn’t flinch, one email from me to Tamsin that says “client” in scare quotes and nothing else, one neutral escrow for rent if there’s a gap, week to week. I add a map to a storage unit where they can drop anything heavy, literal or otherwise, without name tags.
“Anonymous unless you opt in,” I say. “We salt the record with derivatives, not your nouns.”
They watch my hands, how they stay flat on the table, palms occasionally lifting only to count. They’re checking whether I sell this or hold it. I hold it.
The monitor in the hall shifts to a highlight reel: Julian presenting a plaque, Julian nodding at a donor, Julian touring a pilot project where strollers are politely discouraged in favor of “community fluidity.” The caption team earns their grants.
“He’s good at pretending care,” the comms manager says, voice turned sideways. “He walks slow when a camera is near a cane.”
“He texts fast when a budget is near a clinic,” I answer, because the receipts say so.
They blow on their coffee and finally drink. The bitterness puts a color in their cheeks that wasn’t there. Little returns to the body look like health.
“I can’t promise protection from hurt feelings,” I say. “I can promise procedure.”
“I used to think that was cold,” they say. “Now it sounds like heat that works.”
I tuck the drive into a padded sleeve inside my bag, then into a second sleeve. No heroics. No flourish. Just boundary and cloth. The sugar skull sticker I use for exhibits with teeth goes on the edge so I can see it when I need courage.
“What do I call you?” I ask.
“Not by my name,” they say, and a smile touches the corner of their mouth like it’s been locked outside and just climbed in through a window. “Call me your least favorite comma.”
“Comma,” I say. “Thank you.”
They glance at the napkin again, then at me. “I know the password is stupid,” they say. “He made it as a joke for a donor demo once. It stuck. It’s on half the files no one thinks are sexy. We don’t put our sins behind hard words. We put them behind habits.”
“Habits are louder than headlines,” I say.
The vending machine pops and pings; a coil releases a granola bar that lands with a crumpled dignity. The lake outside flashes a sheet of dull light as a boat cuts wind-narrow across the lowered surface, wake spreading and re-writing the water in brief italics. Everything in this city tries to make its performance look native.
“You should go,” they say, and it’s not fear, it’s choreography. “There’s a standing 3 p.m. with Hale two doors down.”
“He still wears rook cufflinks?” I ask.
“He had them minted for the board,” they say. “They’re heavier than they look.”
“So are napkins,” I answer, tapping my envelope.
—micro-hook—
In the corridor, I keep my eyes on exit signs like they’re a poem I memorized in childhood. Julian’s voice floats from another monitor, buttery with conviction: “We don’t coerce. We clarify.” I don’t look at him. My body knows his silhouette already, knows how his jaw clicks when a question veers off-script.
The front doors open on humidity and the smell of wet stone. Across the lake, the low-water ring looks fresher than yesterday, like someone traced it with chalk. The HOA listserv dings on my phone with a “gentle reminder” about stroller storage and a new pilot for “camera-neutral” path zones. I archive, tag, move on.
In the car, I place the drive on the passenger seat as if it were a person buckling in. I don’t plug it. Attorney first. Procedure is the love language that keeps paying rent.
My phone lights with a text from a number I don’t recognize: when I send you a period, it means i’m safe.
I send back a single lock emoji and then a heart, same order as I sent to my mother. Love asks for trust; safety asks for documentation. I give both the way I know.
I drive to the Annex where Tamsin keeps a room that smells like paper and victory. I don’t share the napkin password over text; I slide it across her desk on the same envelope, and she whistles one grateful note through her teeth.
“They labeled you an unreliable narrator,” she says after peeking at the index of documents I scribbled on the envelope flap. “How refreshingly on the nose.”
“They also wrote scripts for my body,” I say. “Two versions.”
“Then we’ll write one for theirs,” she says, all bone and promise. She pulls on latex gloves like a surgeon and holds the drive at its edges. “We image this. We don’t touch it raw. Hale can cry about chain of custody into his cufflinks.”
“I told Comma we’d build a path out,” I say.
“Then we build a path,” she answers. “That’s what we do when the world keeps trying to sell a cliff as a vista.”
The imaging rig whirs with the patience of old machines; its fan is a lullaby for people who sleep next to servers. I sit with my palms on my knees and count my breaths in fours. The room tastes like toner and peppermint from the candies Tamsin leaves for clients to convince their mouths to unclench.
She slides a single printout toward me while the imaging completes: a calendar snippet from the drive’s directory tree. DONOR BREAKFAST—LAKEVIEW—DRAFT REMARKS (pregnancy frame).
“They were writing this before your deposition,” she says, voice low and bright with anger she converts to verbs. “Not reactive. Programmatic.”
I swallow air. The baby swirls inside the word frame like it wants out of English.
“We don’t leak,” I say. “We ask for it in court and make them spell their own strategy under oath.”
“Receipts only,” she agrees. “But we can prepare for their favorite noun.”
“Crisis,” I say.
“No,” she says. “Narrator.”
She slides me a legal pad. I write comma in the top corner, then cross it out and write path. I list the burner, the lawyer, the storage unit, the neutral escrow. I draw a tiny rook and put an X through it because petty helps.
Outside the Annex window, rain hesitates, then resumes; the lake throws back a dull applause. I taste lemon from yesterday’s cupcake, ghost-sour and good.
When the image finishes, Tamsin labels it with a hash that looks like a spell. We log it, sign for it, and tuck the original into a bag I do not touch again.
“We’re energized,” she says, “which is where mistakes live. So we take the long way home and don’t open anything until I’m in the lab.”
“I’ll go by the lake,” I say. “Refuse to be content.”
“You are not content,” she says. “You’re record.”
I step back into damp air and watch a heron drill patience into the waterline. The rook logo glints from a donor plaque by the path; some volunteer has polished it. I press the envelope to my ribs and feel the napkin like a second heartbeat.
I end with a question I refuse to text to anyone, not even Tamsin: When their prewritten crisis meets my unreadable body, which script do they fire first—and can I turn that trigger into testimony before the rook on his cuff decides which comma to cut?