Epilogue #2
‘I miss you too,’ I sign back to her. ‘Come here. Please.’
Her smile spreads slowly, then all at once, the same way it has since she was five years old.
We talk for another ten minutes about the offer, the timeline, what a move would look like, and the apartment situation.
She’s done her research with the thoroughness she brings to everything, and I listen to her walk through it and feel something shift in my heart.
Something that has been slightly out of place for a long time and is now settling back where it belongs.
My sister.
Here.
In this city.
By the time we end the call, I’m smiling, and my eyes are doing something I’m going to attribute entirely to the warm June wind. I drop my phone to my side and stand in the evening for a moment, just feeling the size of it.
The door opens behind me.
I don’t turn around as I know the footsteps—the weight and pace of them.
Ghost moves in beside me like he belongs there, filling a space I didn’t know was missing.
He settles against the railing beside me, eyes on the same stretch of Vegas dusk, steady and grounded in that way he gets that never pushes for answers before I’m ready to give them.
After a minute, he reaches into his cut and pulls out the other half of my jerky packet, the one I handed him hours ago and completely forgot existed, and holds it out like this was always part of the plan.
I take it, and we stand there together in the warmth.
“That was my sister,” I say.
“I figured.”
“She might be moving here.”
He hesitates for a moment, then he nods. “Good.” Flat, certain, definitely not a pleasantry, because Ghost doesn’t do pleasantries. Just a fact he has assessed and agreed with.
“You don’t know her.”
“She matters to you.”
I turn my head toward him. He’s still watching the skyline, jaw set in that familiar way that means he’s said exactly what he meant and considers the matter closed.
The evening light catches the edge of his profile, sharpening every hard line of him, and I realize I’m standing out here in the dark with completely unmanageable feelings for the most controlled man I’ve ever met.
This is fine.
I have made my peace with it.
Mostly.
My phone buzzes. Piper is sending me a screenshot of an apartment listing with bright windows and original tile in the kitchen again. She has circled it in red marker.
Piper: Found one. Don’t panic.
Four seconds later…
Piper: It’s three blocks from you.
I laugh before I can stop it, that specific laugh, the unguarded one—the Piper-induced laugh. Without thinking, I show Ghost the screen. Just turn it toward him because something good happened, he is beside me, and that’s where my hands go.
He reads it—the toothpick shifts. Something at the corner of his mouth does the thing that is not quite a smile but which I have come, over many months, to understand is one.
“She sounds like you,” he says.
I snort out a laugh. “God help you… she’s worse.”
He looks at the screen for one more moment before I take the phone back and start typing something about the tile.
Then Ghost goes still beside me.
Not his usual still. This is something different. It’s the still of someone who has been turning something over and has finished.
I wait.
Ghost doesn’t do rushed conversations, and anybody who knows him learns that pretty fast. Push too hard, and he’ll shut down completely. So I stay where I am and let him get there in his own time.
“Your organization,” he says.
I glance up at him. Something in his tone makes the back of my neck prickle. “Unsilenced?”
The non-profit I have given the last four years of my life to.
The one that started as a volunteer gig on Tuesday evenings, and became the thing I get out of bed for.
Legal advocacy, housing support, and emergency resources for people the system has decided are too inconvenient to help properly.
Domestic violence survivors navigating courtrooms that weren’t built with them in mind.
At-risk kids falling through gaps that shouldn’t exist. Adults with disabilities warehoused in group homes that take the state’s money and spend it on everything except the people it was meant for.
We are loud, underfunded, and we make a lot of people in comfortable offices deeply uncomfortable, which I have always taken as a sign we are doing something right.
“The funding applications. The three rejections this year,” he states matter-of-factly.
Everything in me goes tense. “How do you know about those?”
He doesn’t answer straight away. Just stares out at the skyline for a minute, thinking it through properly before he says anything, the way he always does when the words actually matter.
“Ghost?”
“I’ve been watching a name,” he says. “It kept appearing in places it had no reason to be. Financial movements, State committee decisions, funding bodies….” He pauses. “It’s connected to your organization’s grant chain.”
The warm evening feels different now, much sharper at the edges.
“What name?”
He turns his head and looks at me directly. The full Ghost stare, still, level, completely open. “Senator Calloway.”
Calloway.
The man who chairs the state welfare committee.
The man whose office has received eight months of complaints from families I sit across from at kitchen tables.
The man whose name is on every single rejection letter Unsilenced has received this year, framed in language so technically correct it was impossible to argue with.
Three applications.
Three rejections.
All on technicalities.
I have been calling it bad luck. My director has been calling it bad luck.
I have been filing it away under ‘the system is difficult to navigate’ because the alternative, that someone was deliberately making it difficult, required a specific kind of target on our back that I didn’t want to believe we had.
“How long?” My voice comes out steady. I don’t entirely know how.
“Long enough to be certain.”
“Certain of what?”
He hesitates, and when he speaks again, his voice has that flatness it gets when he is being precise rather than careful.
“That those rejections aren’t administrative errors.
He’s been watching your organization for months.
The work you’re building on the group homes…
the management companies, the missing money, the families…
he knows. And he’s not making mistakes, Sage.
” Ghost’s jaw tightens by a fraction. “He’s warning you. ”
For a second, the only sound between us is distant traffic humming somewhere outside the clubhouse.
I have been doing this work for four years.
I’ve learned to stay steady in difficult rooms, to absorb a lot without letting it move through me too fast, to keep building when the building is hard.
I have sat with a lot of things that were harder than they needed to be, and I have kept my feet on the ground.
Right now, my feet are under me, but everything else is doing something I can’t fully account for.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” It comes out weak, but he hears it anyway.
“I wasn’t sure,” he says. “I needed to be sure before I brought it to you… I’m sure now.”
I look at him. This man who monitors everything from the corner of every room.
Who says almost nothing. Who has apparently been tracking a state senator in silence for reasons that have everything to do with me, my work, my organization, the families I show up for, entirely without being asked and entirely without saying a single word.
I should be furious.
There is a version of this conversation in which I am furious, in which I tell him that my work is mine. My fights are mine, and I don’t need someone managing information on my behalf. I have had that speech prepared for months, aimed at no one in particular, just sitting there ready.
But I know the difference between being managed and being… this.
Whatever this is.
I look at him for a long moment in the warm dark. “We’re going to talk about all of this,” I say. “Not tonight.”
“I know.”
“But soon. All of it, Ghost.”
He keeps looking at me long enough that I start to feel it.
“I know, Sage.”
It’s only my name.
Still, something shifts, as if it carries more than he was willing to say out loud.
The door gives under my hand and swings inward, the wash of clubhouse cool rolling over me in a thick, familiar wave.
It settles across my shoulders, sinks into my skin, carries the layered scent of leather, beer, and the low hum of voices that know my name.
I pause just inside the threshold, eyes closed for the span of a single breath, letting it all steady me.
Then I square myself, smooth whatever still lingers across my face into something usable, and turn toward the room to find Marley.
Thirty seconds later, I count—because I cannot help it—Ghost’s footsteps cross the floor behind me, and he settles back into his corner, his laptop opens, and the click of the keys starts up again.
Everything exactly as it was.
Except everything is completely different.
Marley looks at my face when I reach her and does not say a single word. She simply picks up my wine glass and hands it to me, which is the correct response and also why she is my best friend.
Victoria glances up at me with a ginger smile. “Everything okay?”
“Fine,” I lie.
Victoria studies me with that familiar, measured stillness of hers, the look she wears when she’s already reached a conclusion and is simply letting it sit for a moment before doing anything with it.
“Good,” she says, and goes back to her conversation with Sin, who is sitting on the arm of her chair with his hand resting on her shoulder in the way he always touches her, like she is both precious and permanent.
I sit back down, sip my wine, and let the room settle around me. Millie’s laugh, Deek’s story, the low sound of Ro behind the bar, the comfortable weight of a Sunday evening among people I would choose every single time.
My phone buzzes.
Piper again. A follow-up to the apartment listing…
Piper: The tile is original 1960s. I looked it up. I know you don’t care about tile, but I feel you should know.
Piper: I’m so excited I could actually die. Six weeks, Sage. SIX WEEKS.
Something cracks open in my chest filling it with warmth and anxiousness.
In six weeks, my sister will be here.
Somewhere out there, a senator believes his declines in my applications are enough to make me fold. Across this room stands a man who has been tracking that same senator for months, not because the work matters to him, but because I do.
He has never said it out loud.
But I know it anyway.
My phone vibrates in my jeans pocket.
I chuckle, shaking my head. “Damn, Piper,” I whisper to myself as I pull out my cell again.
I glance down, but the text isn’t from her. It’s an unknown number, and the message says it’s encrypted.
A small, cold knot forms somewhere just below my ribs.
I shouldn’t open it.
Not in the middle of noise, laughter, and the warm, familiar chaos of people who believe the worst is behind us.
But, I open it anyway.
The image loads first.
Ghost’s bike is parked outside the clubhouse, exactly where he left it. It’s shot from a distance, at an elevated angle, definitely not a passerby’s lucky capture.
This is surveillance.
Intentional.
Someone has been watching.
Someone is still watching.
My fingers go still on the screen.
For a second, the room around me fades into something muted and far away, like sound underwater.
Then the message appears beneath the photo.
Unknown Number: You’ve always understood sacrifice.
My throat tightens before I can stop it.
A slow, controlled inhale. The kind you take before walking into a situation you already know will cost you something.
Another line.
Unknown Number: I’m curious how far that extends?
My pulse begins to climb, not in a frantic spike but in that steady, inevitable rise that comes with recognition. Not of the sender, but of the kind of game this is.
The next words land like a blade laid gently against skin.
Unknown Number: He looks loyal.
Unknown Number: Loyal men break beautifully.
Something inside my chest shifts.
Not fear.
Not panic.
Calculation.
Protective instinct, immediate and bone-deep.
I feel the exact moment this stops being about me.
My grip tightens on the phone, and the edges bite into my palm. I welcome the sensation—something physical, something controllable.
The final line appears.
Unknown Number: I’ll be in contact again with my demands. Don’t disappoint me, Sage.
Across the room, Ghost’s head lifts. It isn’t dramatic. He doesn’t snap to attention or scan for threats. He simply looks up, the way he always does when something in his environment shifts before he can figure out what it is.
His eyes find me with precision.
Of course they do, they always do.
I lock the screen before his gaze can drop to my hands. Slide the phone into my pocket with movements that feel almost detached from me, rehearsed even though they are happening for the first time.
My heartbeat is loud, and a reminder that the moment has already shifted shape.
This is how it starts.
Not with violence.
But with leverage.
Ghost begins to move toward me. Slow, deliberate, that grounded certainty that has always made him feel like the safest place in any room. And suddenly the image of his bike, alone in the dark, burns into the back of my mind.
I square my shoulders before he reaches me. Adjust my expression into something neutral, something breathable…
Something he won’t question.
Because the truth would make him dangerous.
And dangerous would make him a target.
“Everything okay?” he asks.
His voice is low, calm, but his eyes are searching mine in that reckless way he has.
This is the first moment I understand exactly what protecting him will require.
This is also the first time I lie to him.
“Yeah… everything’s fine.”
THE END