Unshackled Ziva

Chapter 4

The city’s polished granite and screaming steel fell away block by block, softening into cracked sidewalks and the stubborn, soot-stained brick of old neighborhoods. With each step away from the Wright & Associates tower, a different tension uncoiled in Ziva’s shoulders not relaxation, but the shift from one strain to another, more familiar one. Here, the air didn’t hum with ambition; it smelled of exhaust, fried food, and the distant, damp green of the river.

St. Brigid’s Orphanage sat at the end of a cul-de-sac like a forgotten thought. It was a hulking, red-brick Victorian, its Gothic peaks and finials softened by time and neglect. The once-proud iron fence was now a rusted scribble around a yard of patchy grass and a single, gnarled oak. To the city planners, it was an eyesore, a prime redevelopment lot. To Ziva, it was the only blueprint that had ever made sense.

She pushed open the heavy front door, and it was all there, unchanged: the smell of lemon-scented industrial cleaner overlaid on a deep, woody scent of old polish and, faintly, of toast. It was the smell of institutional care, of countless hands on banisters, of hope and resignation scrubbed into the floorboards. It should have been a sour memory. For her, it was an anchor.

“Ziva Reed, as I live and breathe!” A voice, warm and gravelly, cut through the quiet gloom. Mrs. Kaur emerged from the office, her sari a vibrant splash of peacock blue against the dark walnut paneling. She was older, her hair a proud silver crown, but her eyes were the same: sharp, kind, and missing nothing.

“Hello, Mrs. Kaur,” Ziva said, and her smile, for the first time all week, felt real on her face.

“Too thin,” the older woman declared, clasping Ziva’s face in hands that were dry and strong as paper. “That fancy man feeding you only air and opinions?” There was no malice in it, only a profound skepticism of the world beyond St. Brigid’s gates.

“He keeps me busy,” Ziva deflected, the familiar shorthand of their relationship. Mrs. Kaur had never approved of Lucien. She called him “the architect of your captivity,” a joke that had stopped feeling like one.

“Busy is not the same as fed,” Mrs. Kaur muttered, but she released her, gesturing down the hall. “Go on, then. The light’s good in the courtyard this time of day. They’re all at the library, so you’ll have peace.”

The courtyard. Her sanctuary within the sanctuary. Ziva moved down the familiar hallway, her fingers trailing the wainscoting she’d once measured herself against. She passed the communal dining room, where the long tables still bore the ghostly scars of a hundred forgotten craft projects and homework assignments. Her own place had been at the far end, under the window, where she could watch the squirrels in the oak tree and pretend she wasn’t in a room full of other lonely children.

Then, she pushed through the heavy fire door into the courtyard.

It was a rectangle of forgotten space, hemmed in by the orphanage’s tall walls. The flagstones were uneven, heaved up by the roots of stubborn weeds. In one corner, the skeletal remains of a swing set stood sentinel, one rusted chain hanging loose. But in the center, defiant and glorious, was a giant, old wisteria vine. It had clawed its way up the south wall for decades, its trunk thick as a man’s thigh, its canopy a tangled, leafless labyrinth against the gray spring sky. In a few weeks, it would be a waterfall of lavender blossoms, scenting the entire block. Now, it was pure, sculptural architecture.

This was her place. The place where she’d learned that beauty could be persistent, could grow through cracks without permission.

She settled on the low, sun-warmed stone bench she’d claimed as a child, her back to the institution, her face to the vine and the small, struggling flower bed Mrs. Kaur tended. From her bag, she pulled not the firm-issued tablet, but a small, leather-bound sketchbook, its cover worn soft. A stub of a charcoal pencil followed.

The silence here was different. It was a quiet full of echoes of children’s laughter long faded, of her own younger sobs, of the comforting, wordless hum of a place that simply existed. She didn’t think about pavilions or client presentations or the weight of a new phone in her pocket. She just looked.

Her hand began to move.

It started with the wisteria’s trunk, capturing not just its shape, but its texture the deep, twisting grooves like topographic maps of survival. She drew the way the late afternoon light, weak but persistent, caught the ridges of the brick wall behind it, turning rough mortar into seams of gold. She sketched the shadow of the broken swing, not as a sad relic, but as a cool, blue shape pooling on the stone, a perfect negative of memory.

This was her language. Unfiltered. Unprofessional. Provincial. Here, “emotional take” was the whole point. She drew the feeling of the space the hushed embrace of the walls, the defiant reach of the vine, the quiet promise of the nascent buds. She drew the sanctuary.

As she worked, layering in the details of a cracked pot with a single, hardy geranium, her mind emptied of Lucien’s voice. The critical, internal monologue he’d installed in her head is this efficient? Is this innovative? Will it impress? fell silent. Here, there was only the line, the shadow, the truth of what she saw and felt. It was a reckoning with reality, not a manipulation of it.

She filled a page, then another, losing time in the way only true immersion allows. The drawing was more than a depiction; it was an act of possession. This place, this feeling, was hers. On this paper, no one could workshop it, rationalize it, or put their name on it first.

The slam of the fire door broke the spell. She started, her charcoal line skidding. Mrs. Kaur stood there, a mug of tea steaming in her hand.

“You’ll catch a chill,” she said, coming over and handing her the mug. Her eyes fell on the open sketchbook. She was silent for a long moment, looking from the drawing to the courtyard and back again. “You always did see it,” she said softly. “Not what it was, but what it held.”

Ziva’s throat tightened. She just nodded, sipping the strong, sweet tea.

“He doesn’t see this, does he?” Mrs. Kaur asked, not needing to specify who “he” was. Her finger hovered over the sketch, over the careful, loving detail of the gnarled vine.

“No,” Ziva whispered, the word raw. “He sees potential. For something else.”

Mrs. Kaur made a sound deep in her throat, a sigh of pure understanding. She patted Ziva’s shoulder, a simple, grounding touch. “The world out there builds castles, beti. But remember, a sanctuary is stronger. It has deeper roots.”

She left Ziva alone again with the courtyard and her drawing. The light was fading, the golden seams on the brick wall turning gray. Ziva closed the sketchbook, holding it tightly. For a few precious minutes, she hadn’t been Lucien Wright’s fiancée, or a junior designer, or an orphan. She had been an architect of her own quiet memory. She tucked the book into her bag, a secret talisman against the world waiting outside the gates. The scent of lemon and toast followed her out, a ghost on her clothes, as she walked back into a city that demanded everything except her truth.