I stack the cheap paper calendar on top of the legal pad and rub the soft pencil down the page until the boxes gray to weather. The lake hums against the windows; dam-release rumor must be true because the waterline is a half inch lower than yesterday, a ring of pale grit newly visible. I don’t reach for ink. I shade dates lightly—notice of appeal due, designation of record, appellant’s brief—then lift the pencil and blow the dust away. It tastes like graphite and cedar from the closet where I keep the extra paper, a smell that used to feel luxurious and now reads like overdesigned denial.
“Pencil,” I say, tapping the eraser against the deadline for the first brief. “Not a prophecy. A plan.”
Tamsin sits across from me with the fountain pen capped and obedient under her palm. She has ramen-shop hair again, pinned up with a binder clip. “Pencil is the right religion,” she says. “Calendars are for control fantasies. We’ll give ourselves rituals instead: drafts one and two, a walk after each.”
“Walks along a lake that keeps moving without us,” I say.
She watches the windows fog from our tea. “That’s the point.”
The room wears storm light well. The HOA listserv pinged earlier about “ponding” on sidewalks and reminded us to keep strollers off common paths—“child-neutral amenities enhance resale value.” I nudged the notification into a folder named Receipts and closed the app. Today’s air tastes like ozone and tea leaves; a house plant brushes my wrist when the humidifier kicks. I drag my wrist back to the paper and block a weekend in soft gray for “rest,” a word that feels suspicious and necessary.
“Media,” Tamsin says, passing me a printed protocol. “I’ve drafted what I want you to agree to. No taped appearances. No podcast panels. A single written statement when necessary, cleared by me. If something leaks, silence for twenty-four hours. Then a link to the order, and nothing clever.”
“I don’t have clever left,” I say. “I want quiet.”
“Quiet is a posture. People misread it as weakness. Good. Let them.” She taps the protocol, then the calendar. “We’ll file on time with boring, coffin-sturdy citations. Meanwhile, the board will lurch through governance rehab, and Hale will perform being reasonable on someone’s microphone. Your name will itch. Let it itch in the dark.”
I nod and take the printout. The paper scrapes my fingertips with a dry sound that makes my shoulders lower by an inch. I initial in pencil at the bottom.
“Pencil?” she asks, a half-grin.
“I like to leave room for better boundaries,” I say. We both let that sit.
I open a drawer I used to avoid and bring out the cheap desk sharpener. I crank the handle; the blade’s metallic rasp blends with the rain flicking the deck. The rook-shape that once bossed the house exists now in reflections only—on a chrome doorknob, on a cufflink abandoned in a dish, on the router’s vent holes if I squint. Whenever the rook appears, I ask: control or costume? Today, just a smudge.
“Let’s pencil in your mother’s visit,” Tamsin says, voice softer. “You’ll want support when the first appellate deadline comes and the podcasts misquote your silence.”
“Tuesday dinners,” I say, shading small squares like bandages. “She brings soup and corrections.”
“Bless her corrections.”
My phone buzzes on the table, patient as a metronome. I flip it over and silence the screen without reading the subject lines; the haptics leave a faint tick in my palm. Storm or no storm, the donor salons will be filling glasses somewhere tonight, their toasts live-captioned on a big wall. The captions will read legacy, courage, misinterpretation—and the commas will keep pace with the laughter. I picture the rook-logo napkins folded like wings. I choose to stay in this kitchen with the graphite ghosts instead.
“Say it again,” I ask.
“What?” she says.
“The thing you say when you think I’m being brave but you won’t call it that.”
Tamsin tilts her head. “You set a boundary on paper and defended it with receipts. That’s not bravery; that’s hygiene.”
I laugh, the sound clean and small. “Hygiene it is.”
Micro-hook: The phone buzzes again, and the subject lines wait like bait I refuse to taste.
We move through the calendar lightly. Each penciled block looks like a door I can open or not. I draw tiny triangles for milestones, then rub the graphite with my thumb until the shapes soften. When she points to the week after the opening brief, I fill the space with a shaded rectangle and write walk. The lake changes levels with the dam schedule anyway; I want my body to have a schedule that isn’t a reaction to theirs.
“One more,” Tamsin says, and she reaches into her bag. She slides a second sheet across the table: press requests, bookers, a columnist who loves performing nuance. At the top, a cluster of NDA offers—cousin to hush money but dressed better. The logos wear soft grays and serifed shame.
“They want to buy your non-existence,” she says. “You’ll be asked to ‘avoid disparagement’ in perpetuity, which means they’ll define disparagement as your continued breathing near a microphone.”
I say nothing. I uncurl my fingers and flatten the page. The edges dimple where my nails had pressed.
“I can reject them for you,” she offers. “Or we can leave the inbox unwatered until they wilt.”
“Let them rot,” I say. “No reply, no click, no read receipts. Silence as a mirror.”
My phone buzzes again: Opportunity to share your journey—supportive platform—DM embargo ready. I swipe the preview off the glass like a mosquito.
“Unanswered it is,” she says. “If anyone tries to alias you through back channels, forward, then forget. I’ll collect.”
“I’m good at collecting,” I say, glancing at the Receipts folder. “I’m retiring from performing.”
Tamsin leans back. “Perform the refusal, then. That counts.”
The kettle clicks. I pour hot water over fresh leaves and turn the timer. Steam fogs my glasses; I wipe a circle with the heel of my hand and watch the lake flatten into pewter. The storm smell presses its weight into the room—wet concrete, distant ozone. In that air, the NDA stack looks ridiculous, like trying to paper a thunderhead.
“Any message for Mara?” Tamsin asks.
“Tell her the drawer’s still closed,” I say. “Tell her I’m guarding the quiet she asked for.”
“Will do.”
Micro-hook: The phone vibrates harder, then stills—someone’s escalated to a call that will never pick up.
We talk through tactics until the pencil squeaks like a tiny violin. She outlines the briefing ladder again, not because I don’t understand but because rehearsal turns time into tolerable units: notice, record, opening, answer, reply. Her hands punctuate each word in the air; her rings nick the table with small clicks that feel like timestamps. We assign days for me to disappear: no email, no scrolling, walks only with the phone on airplane mode and the bracelet—long since gutted and repurposed as a charm—left at home.
“Last piece,” she says, gathering our papers into a tidy stack that leaves the rook logo on the folder half-hidden. “Infrastructure. You’ve already done more than most clients, but now that daylight exists, darker things crawl toward the house. Lock your borders.”
I close my eyes briefly. The bracelet had taught me about borders the hard way. “Tonight,” I say. “I’ll name the networks and fence every device I don’t trust.”
“Send me your new public email,” she says, rising. “I’ll throttle everything else through the firm. If a journalist wants the scent of your breath, they can sniff a PDF.”
I walk her to the door. The glass carries our reflections like two bruised commas. She lifts a hand to the knob, then pauses at the rook-shaped glint in the chrome. “Still haunting the edges,” she says.
“Only as a caution icon,” I answer.
She squeezes my shoulder. “Pencil beats rook,” she says, and then she’s gone, footfalls swallowed by rain and the HOA’s perfect drains.
I let the house exhale. The hum of the smart fridge fades into the hum of the router on the console table by the pantry—my old enemy in a black plastic hoodie. I bring it to the kitchen like a dog that needs retraining. The plastic is warm against my palms. I set it beside the calendar and open my laptop.
New SSID: FENCE-ONE. WPA3, long passphrase that reads like a sentence only I would write. I create a guest network named PORCH for devices that don’t deserve the house. I blacklist the MAC address of the retired bracelet and the wellness scale that once told too many stories. I segment the smart speakers to their own tiny island called STAGE, where they can shout at each other in quarantine. I rename the admin account from admin to a word my mother says only when she is half-asleep and safe.
“No default,” I whisper.
The login timer blinks back. I set an auto-rotation for keys, a weekly ritual that will outlast this case. I schedule it on the pencil calendar—small circles, not heavy blocks. I apply DNS rules like hedgerows. I disable WPS with the satisfaction of pulling a plug on a paparazzi light. Each click is a fencepost; each restart is a gate that swings and latches. The storm lights flick when the router reboots; I hear the shoestring thump of the dryer in the next room.
I walk through the house and collect loose rooks. A cufflink glints in a dish. A tiny rook etched into a door lever looks up with chrome arrogance. I drop the cufflink into a mason jar labeled EVIDENCE—EMOTIONAL and twist the lid until the rubber seal sighs. The door lever I leave; I prefer my reminders visible.
My phone buzzes one last time. I open the notifications screen—not the messages—so I can see without entering. NDA reminder, podcast exclusive, “friendly off-record chat.” I scroll with my knuckle. I do not tap.
“Unanswered,” I say to the router, to the lake, to the drawer.
The nursery drawer remains closed, a clean horizontal line in the room down the hall. I stand in the doorway and listen. The house isn’t quiet; it’s layered: rain pinging the grill cover, lake bargaining with the wind, the faint after-ozone that always follows a storm here, and under it, the cedar heartbeat of the closets. I touch the drawer with two fingers and then step back.
In the kitchen, I write a single sentence on the calendar margin, small enough to keep between us: Privacy is a fence I build to welcome later. I shade a box three weeks from now and write midwife consult in letters I can erase if needed, not because I plan to erase it but because power has taken enough ink from me.
When I finally sit, the router’s LEDs pulse like a steady breath. My laptop shows a neatly segmented herd of devices, all of them penned. Tamsin’s protocol lies beside the mug, signed in pencil. The NDA stack sleeps on the far edge of the table, out of reach, out of luck.
I open a new email to my mother and type, “Tuesday soup?” then delete the question mark. I send. A minute later, a reply: “Already thawing.” I don’t realize I’ve smiled until my mouth tastes like tea again.
The storm softens. The lake takes back a millimeter, a shy return. The HOA thread pings and I mute it for a month. Across the kitchen, the chrome knob catches a rook shadow and releases it, just light being itself.
I close the laptop. “Boundaries extend past verdict,” I tell the room. “Process continues.” Saying it aloud doesn’t summon dread. It keeps time.
I turn off the overheads, leave the under-cabinet strip burning like a runway, and breathe in the last of the ozone before the house goes cedar again. On the table, the pencil waits where I left it, point sharp, ready to change its mind.
I whisper a promise to the drawer I didn’t open and to the future I’m protecting with fences no one can livestream: Not yet.
Unresolved: When the lake rises and the microphones drift away, will quiet keep its edge—or will exposure creep, patient as water, find the seams I haven’t reinforced?