The Pull
I walked home with the photograph pressed into the soft bowl of my palm like a strange, borrowed coin. The colony's narrow streets were a rope of shadows and light; children played on stoops, women balanced laundry on their heads, and the smell of frying food threaded through the air like a familiar song. I should have been satisfied with the small, exact things the day demanded of me — mend a neighbor's torn tent, stitch a sleeve, bargain for cheap vegetables — but the photograph sat heavy against my ribs and pushed at the space where ordinary worry lived.
At home, my mother's fingers worked like a second set of brains: careful, patient, practiced. She folded the thin towel with movements that had raised me into someone capable of endurance. She looked up when I came in, eyes a map of worry and small kindness. "How was the office?" she asked.
"Same as always," I lied. For one thing, a Commissioner asking a cleaner to fetch a photograph is not an ordinary "same as always." For another, the truth had a shape my mother might not have believed, or might have believed and then developed a thousand other fears. Better to keep it tight as a fist.
That night, I unfolded the photograph under the dim bulb that hummed our kitchen into a yellowish hush. Meera's smile was bright in the paper, the kind of smile that could have been tagged to anyone's memory. Daniel's arm around her suggested command and protection. I touched the corner of the photo with the tip of my finger and felt the paper's salt-dry texture against my skin. It felt like part of someone else's life — a life I had been allowed to glance into accidentally, and now, somehow, intentionally.
A thought came and left me like a bird: maybe some people's grief looked like a closed door; maybe others' grief smelled like old photographs hidden in lockers. The oddity of being chosen to ferry another person's history made my mouth taste like iron. I had been trusted with a scrap of a man's past, which meant he expected me not to spill whatever it might contain.
Sleep that night was a thin thing. I lay awake thinking about faces I had never meant to meet — the Commissioner's face that watched the city like someone watching his property — and about small contradictions: a man who runs a city and who collects lost photographs; a woman who cleans floors and who suddenly carries someone else's sorrow in her pocket.
The next morning, the building last night had been a mausoleum of ordinary tasks. Today it hummed like a place with a secret. Daniel Hart kept seeing me in his doorways. His glances had the weight of an order that also felt like an invitation. He did not speak to me as often as he looked; his looks had an economy to them, shades of command tempered with private interest. When people with power pick someone small to notice, it is as if they have discovered a private toy — interesting, new, and to be handled carefully.
I delivered the photograph to his office when the light bent perfectly across the street and made the city look like a scene set for confession. He did not say much. He sat and unfolded the photograph, looking at the two faces as if re-reading their conversation. "Where did you find it?" he asked.
"In the locker room," I said simply. The truth, like a clean coin, sits easier sometimes.
He hummed. The hum was not idle. "There are more," he said. "Small things: receipts, notes, sometimes a ribbon. Someone has been removing pieces of that morning, and hiding them. Or maybe misplacing them. Either way, they belong to me now."
"Why?" I asked, the question slipping out before I knew the taste of it. Why would a powerful man care for fragments?
He looked at me as if surprised I would ask. "Because they are part of proving what I suspect." His voice was a low clarity. "Proof is a fragile animal. It hides in trivialities." He tapped his fingers on the photograph as if that made it more solid.
I thought about how in my colony we measure proof differently: by whether your landlord's threats stop after you pay rent, whether your child returns from school safe, whether a neighbor keeps a promise. Proof in the world he moved through seemed colder, like coin counted on a ledger. Still, the photograph in my hand had the soft, dangerous thing proof can be: it could condemn or it could save.
That afternoon, he asked me to begin coming more often. "You'll be paid extra," he said. "You will be given tasks that no one else knows the importance of. You must be careful. Keep your head down. Move things quietly." He tapped his pen against the desk like a slow metronome. "You must also tell no one."
Telling no one is heavy. At home, silence is not always peaceful; sometimes it is a net. My mother could have noticed the tightness in my face and followed it to a place I did not want her to go. She could have found herself worrying in a new way, suturing her fear into a thousand nightly prayers. There are kinds of secrets that are kind, and others that are corrosive — I did not yet know which this was.
Over the next week, my life became a study in double lives. By day I swept floors and emptied bins, by night I would bring him small things he claimed had been misplaced in the building's underbelly — a canceled note, a ticket stub, a matchbook with someone's initials. Daniel treated each recovered item with a reverence that felt unfit for inanimate things. He spoke to them like a man collecting shards of a memory he would reassemble into a whole.
He began to talk to me more. At first his conversation was tactical: where people ate lunch, which doors stuck in the rain, who came in late on Thursdays. He learned the building through me; I learned the city through him. But the dialogue deepened, and in that deepening I found a dangerous tenderness. He asked me about my mother; I learned he had no children and that the portrait of his late wife had been moved to a locked box. He told me, once, how he often walked the city at night, watching the way light fell on the architecture like a judge measuring people by the angle of their shadows.
"You're clever," he told me one rainy evening as we stood in the hallway with an umbrella shared between us. The water made us both smell like the city: raw and wet and alive. "You notice what others don't. You have a patience that's almost… noble."
The way he said noble stung and warmed at once. In our colony, words like that are reserved for saints or the very old. He had no idea what being called noble would do to my face, to the small woman who had learned to make humility a shield. I felt the blush surge up my neck like someone stubbing an open flame. "I just do what needs to be done," I managed.
He smiled then — not the public, political smile he wore for cameras, but a private upturn of his mouth that hinted at something softer. "That may be true," he said, "but doing what needs to be done often requires courage in places that people forget to look for it."
I could have told him how many kinds of courage I had practiced — how many nights I had refused to cry because my crying would make the house feel unsafe; how many times I had stepped into a fight because someone younger than me was being bullied; how many small, stubborn rebellions had been my currency. Instead, I found myself answering less with words and more with small acts: I folded his documents with care, I found him the right sticky note, I retrieved an envelope he'd thought lost.
There are dangers in being useful to someone with power. Usefulness can render you necessary, and in necessity you become visible in ways that are not safe. Yet each small task gave me an unexpected thrill. I had never been someone who could affect the course of another person's life. In the quiet of his office, my hands moved and the world rearranged itself, almost as if possibility had been waiting for someone to lift it.
The age gap between us—twelve years, a figure that sat like an unspoken wall—never felt like an issue at first. In other settings, it would have been a headline; in the small, private moments when he brushed a folded paper toward me, it felt like a fact that belonged to the world outside the window. We did not speak of it; it lay between us like a book whose cover we both read but whose pages we had not yet dared to open.
Then one evening, a week into my new role as his quiet courier, the boundary between the professional and the personal tilted. I had just returned a photograph he thought had been destroyed; it showed Meera laughing, a candid no one had meant for cameras, and Daniel's face had gone white the way paper does when an old bruise is brought into light. He pressed his thumb to the corner of the photograph — a useless human motion that felt like prayer.
"Why are you doing this?" he asked without looking at me. It was rhetorical, but the undercurrent of the question was a current that might sweep an island away.
"Because you asked me to," I said simply. Truth again: easier to keep, easier to carry.
He let out a small, almost inaudible laugh. "That's rarely a reason for anything good." He turned to me then, and the room contracted to the narrow space between our faces. He studied me like someone reading a map and discovering a route he had never trusted. "Do you ever want more than what you have?"
It was a dangerous question. I had rehearsed what I would say if he asked me about money or safety or whether I had read enough to know his world was full of dangers. But this was different. This was an invitation to imagination. More than what I have? The colony's roof was a more-than I had learned to dream of: a roof that did not leak, a bed that did not fold into itself at night, enough rice to stop the constant arithmetic of hunger.
"Yes," I said without thinking. The single syllable felt like admitting a sin and a prayer at the same time.
He leaned back and watched me as if gauging the shape of that hunger. "People like us," he said quietly, using the pronoun like a knife and a balm at once, "we are made of different things. But wanting is a human thing."
His voice was soft. There was nothing theatrical in his tone, no exploitative hunger masquerading as sympathy. It was simply… honest. It would also be dangerous. There are moments in a life when the heart files down the edges of propriety and slips into a place it knows is forbidden. The thrill is immediate and the price invisible until later.
I wanted, for an instant, to say the thing that would make our worlds collide completely: tell him everything, ask for everything, offer myself in exchange for a life that did not demand constant compromise. But fear is a practiced silence, and I had cultivated it. "I want to be safe," I said instead, because safety is a concrete idea. It is something you can bargain for, measure, and ask for.
He smiled the way someone smiles when a negotiation is begun. "I'll try to keep you safe," he said, then stopped himself, perhaps realizing how presumptuous the promise sounded. "But the world I navigate isn't forgiving. If you step into it, understand the cost."
I understood the cost in pieces before I knew the full price. I understood that being seen by him had already altered my future in invisible ways. I knew the colony would whisper once they saw whose eyes watched me linger in the office doorway. I knew that my mother would worry, and I knew, with a dull, domestic certainty, that worry turns into practical problems: landlords, loans, jealous neighbors. Love, or the shape of it, rarely fits neatly into the ledgers of survival.
That night, folding the photograph back into its paper envelope, I thought about a title Daniel might never see above a book he'd never read. I thought about how people become more than their mistakes, or sometimes more than their sins. I thought about being beneath someone's shadow—safe, obscured, warm—and also crushed beneath its weight.
He had begun the process of making me visible, and I had begun, in small obedient steps, to accept it. The city hummed on around us, indifferent and noisy. But inside his office, in the small hours between the tick of the clock and the pulse of the traffic down the avenue, a dangerous conversation had started: between a woman who had always known what it is to be small and a man who had the power to redraw the margin lines.
I did not yet know that the photograph would be only the first fracture, that secrets loved by powerful men have gravity, and that those secrets attract predators. I did not know that loving someone who lived in glass would make me visible to a thousand new dangers.
All I knew then was the small, simple thrill of being noticed — a feeling both intoxicating and terrifying — and the heavy, practical decision to keep the photograph safe in the pocket closest to my heart.
Drop Your Vote and Comment here....
She was hired to clean his office.
Now she's cleaning up the fragments of his past —
photographs, letters, and ghosts that shouldn't have survived time.
Daniel Hart calls it "proof."
She calls it danger with a heartbeat.
💭 If someone powerful began to see you — really see you —
not as a servant, but as the only person who understands their secrets,
would you stay close…
or step back before the closeness devours you?
🕯️ Tell me —
Is Aria being chosen, used, or changed?