Chapter Six
SAGE
The Next Day
I’ve been sitting with the weight of these stupid text messages for a month, and some mornings it presses down on my chest before my eyes are even properly open.
Before coffee.
Before the desert light has had a chance to push through the gaps in my blinds and remind me where I am.
Before I can choose not to think about it.
I sit at my desk at Unsilenced on a Tuesday morning that looks exactly like every other Tuesday morning, and stare at the screen in front of me. I think about how good people are at pretending everything is fine. About how well I’ve gotten at it. How practiced.
Unsilenced didn’t start as anything close to what it is now.
Sandy built it from nothing almost a decade ago, back when she was doing intake for families out of the trunk of her car and a borrowed office above a laundromat, because nobody else would.
Legal advocacy, housing support, and emergency resources for the 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.
I didn’t start it. Sandy did. I’ve just spent three years trying to make sure I deserve to be part of it.
I came on as a caseworker straight out of my master’s, half convinced I’d burn out inside a year like everyone warns that you will.
Sandy hired me because I was thorough to the point of obsessive, and it turns out that’s exactly what this work needs.
Somewhere in those three years, the group home investigation stopped being one file among fifty and became the thing I built almost entirely on my own.
An idea scribbled in the margins of a notebook that turned into twenty-three individual accounts and a case Sandy trusted me enough to let me run with.
She still signs off on the budgets and answers to the board, but I’m still the one she calls in when a case needs someone who won’t let it go.
Three years of building something important will do that to you.
Three years of learning exactly which faces to show in which rooms, of protecting families whose lives are already cracked down the middle, of caring about something so much you’d rather carry the threat alone than risk any part of it landing somewhere it shouldn’t.
The office is quiet right now. It gets like this before ten o’clock, the hum of the air conditioning and the low shuffle of one of the other researchers moving files somewhere down the hall. I loved this calmness before the day picks up speed.
I used to arrive early on purpose just to have it.
Now I use it to worry.
The first text came on a Thursday. I remember that because I was standing in the Unsilenced break room, pouring the second coffee of my morning, when my personal phone buzzed against the counter. Not my work phone, my personal one. The number I give to maybe a dozen people in the world.
I picked it up.
The message was encrypted, with no sender ID that led anywhere real. It sat in my messages like an uninvited guest making itself comfortable, and I read it four times before I understood I hadn’t misread it once.
Unknown Number: You’re getting close to something that will ruin people who don’t deserve to be ruined. Back away from the group home inquiry. Or the people closest to you start paying the price.
I remember setting the coffee down very carefully on the counter.
I remember the way the break room suddenly felt too small for all the air I was trying to breathe.
The group home inquiry. Three years of my life sitting in folders on this desk and on the encrypted drive I keep at home and in the memory of twelve families who trusted me with the worst thing that had ever happened to them—twenty-three individual accounts.
Children, siblings, parents who came to me in person, sat across from me, and handed over their stories with shaking hands because they needed someone to tell them it meant something, that somebody was going to listen.
I’ve listened.
I’ve documented.
I’ve mapped the funding streams, traced the contracts, and sat in coffee shops with sources who asked me three times to double-check who would see their names.
I’ve driven to addresses that weren’t in great parts of town and sat in living rooms where the furniture was mismatched, the carpet was worn thin, and I have heard things that kept me awake at two in the morning for months.
Because behind the group homes with the glossy brochures, the politician photo opportunities, and the clean websites with stock photographs of smiling children, there is a different story entirely.
A system has been failing Nevada’s most vulnerable people while a man named Senator Calloway launders his public reputation through it. Cuts to services, redirected funding, and a paper trail I’ve been quietly following for so long it’s become the background noise of my entire year.
And now someone wants me to stop.
I look at the message again now, the way I’ve looked at it approximately four hundred times over the past three weeks.
Pulling it up and reading it as if there’s some version where the wording becomes less deliberate, less specific, less clearly written by someone who knows exactly what I am doing and who I am doing it for.
There isn’t.
Unknown Number: Back away from the group home inquiry.
Not stop your investigation or drop the story or the inquiry. The specific, particular inquiry. The one that hasn’t been publicly announced. The one I haven’t talked about outside of this building and a handful of off-the-record conversations.
Whoever sent this has access to information they should not have.
I knew it the second I saw it.
I know it now.
Three years of chasing paper trails has taught me one thing. When someone starts burying the truth, they don’t make noise, and they make everything look normal.
I told myself it was a scare tactic.
The first text is always a scare tactic.
I have reported on enough of these situations from the outside to know at least that much.
Someone finds out you’re close to something they don’t want found, and they reach for the simplest tool available.
The anonymous message, a cryptic warning, or a voice designed to sound like it has power, because power is the only thing that might make someone like me hesitate.
I told myself that.
I told Marley too.
I wasn’t planning on telling anyone, but then Marley arrived with two bottles of wine, takeaway Thai, and approximately four hundred screenshots of wedding ideas she needed my opinion on.
A couple of glasses later, we’d solved exactly none of her seating chart problems, agreed flowers were outrageously expensive, complained about politicians, and decided my neighbors were one badly played guitar solo away from a noise complaint.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, I picked up my phone and read her the message.
She didn’t interrupt.
She didn’t ask questions.
She just listened.
When I looked up, she’d put her wine glass down.
“What happened?”
I handed her the phone.
I watched her read it, watched the way her brows pulled together and the laughter that is usually somewhere close to the surface of her face went somewhere else entirely. She looked up at me. “Sage.”
“It’s nothing,” I told her.
“That is not nothing.”
“It’s a scare tactic.”
She stared at me for a long beat, and Marley, for all that she runs warm, loud, and enormous-hearted through every room she walks into, has always been sharper than people give her credit for.
Those clever eyes behind her glasses were doing the quiet kind of reading that has nothing to do with words on a screen.
“Are you going to tell Ghost?”
I put my phone in my pocket. “No.”
“Sage—”
“Marley.” My voice came out steadier than I felt and steadier than I deserved, given that my hands weren’t quite right under the surface of my sleeves. “I need you to not tell anyone about this. Can you do that for me?”
She did not look happy about it, but she agreed anyway.
Partly because she trusts me, but mostly because she’s known me long enough to recognize the look I get when I have already made up my mind. At that point, arguing isn’t really a conversation. It’s just cardio with extra frustration.
I haven’t told Ghost because I know what he would do.
I know because I have spent enough time watching the way he moves through this world to understand how his mind works.
He would track the number. He would map the sender’s connections.
He would pull on every thread he could find until he had a name, a location, a picture of exactly who sent it, exactly why, and then he would make himself the most obvious and available target in the state of Nevada.
He would do it without hesitating, and he would do it because of me. I have read the messages threatening him too many times to miss what the wording is actually threatening.
Unknown Number: The people closest to you.
I don’t know when Ghost became one of my people.
There wasn’t a moment, no grand declaration or conversation that changed everything.
One day I just realized I trusted him in that quiet, instinctive way you only trust people who have taken the time to really see you.
Ghost doesn’t hand that kind of attention out easily.
Maybe that’s why it means so much when he does.
I am not putting him into the crosshairs of this mess.
So I am carrying it alone. I am being sensible about it. I’m coming to work every morning, sitting at this desk, and doing the thing I have always done, which is to refuse to stop.
My desk at Unsilenced isn’t glamorous. No one will put it in a magazine.
It’s a standard-issue government-adjacent nonprofit desk that’s passed through about four different occupants before me, with a surface scratched in the bottom left corner by somebody’s keys, a monitor that sits slightly too far to the right, and a drawer that lets go if you pull it too fast, dumping everything onto the floor.
I love it completely.
The walls on my side of the office are pinned with a system only I fully understand.
A grid of documents, photographs, and printed financial tables arranged in the logic of three years of building something piece by piece.
Family account summaries, some photographs I took with permission, faces carefully covered because nobody’s story becomes a statistic in my office, but the environments matter.
A group home in the east of the city where the rosters show double the residents they’re funded to accommodate.
Another facility on the west side where the reported therapy hours and the actual therapy hours are separated by a number that should have triggered a review two years ago.
The senator’s name doesn’t appear anywhere on this wall.
His money does.
His committees do.
The companies he’s appointed people to, the grants that flow through his networks, the contracts approved through channels that somehow circle back to the same three management organizations every damn time.
It’s in there.
It is all in there.
I just haven’t been able to connect the last pieces in a way that doesn’t leave enough room for a lawyer to drive a bus through.
Three years, and I can feel the edges of it.
I open the file on my screen, the one that currently holds the compiled testimony from seven of the twelve families.
The interviews were long. Some started in one session and had finish in two or three more because the person across from me needed to stop, gather themselves, and come back when they had the words for the hardest parts.
I scroll to a section I’ve read so many times it has its own worn groove in my memory.
Patricia. Forty-three. Her younger brother spent eight months in a group home that was supposed to provide the mental health support he couldn’t access anywhere else.
The support didn’t materialize. The reports that were submitted said it did.
Her brother came home thinner, quieter, with gaps in his accounts of those eight months that she still doesn’t know how to close.
Patricia sat across from me in a diner. She held her coffee with both hands, and she didn’t cry until the very end, and then she apologized for it.
I told her there was nothing to apologize for.
I told her this mattered!
I told her we weren’t going to let it disappear.
And I meant every word of it, and I mean it still.
Those threatening text messages on my personal phone don’t change that.
They only change how I’m navigating it. It makes me more careful, more deliberate, more thorough about covering my tracks and ensuring everything I have is backed up somewhere the wrong hands can’t reach.
But it does not make me stop.
I am not built to stop.
I’m not sure it’s something I even know how to do when the thing in front of me has Patricia’s face in it, nine others similar to her, and twenty-three accounts that deserve to reach the people who can act on them.
My phone buzzes on the desk.
My entire body tightens before I can stop it.
I look down, and it is Marley.
Emotional Support Human: Morning check-in, you okay?
The tightness in my chest loosens a fraction.
Me: I’m good.
Three dots appear immediately.
Emotional Support Human: Liar, but I love you anyway. Still on for lunch?
I find myself almost smiling despite everything, especially at the name I gave her on my phone. It always makes me laugh because it is one hundred percent accurate. Obviously.
I quickly type back.
Me: Absolutely. I’m fading away here, practically a skeleton at this point!
Her response is quick.
Emotional Support Human: Drama queen, see you soon xoxo.
Smiling, I put the phone face down on the desk, turn back to my screen, and look at Patricia’s testimony and the twelve families who came to me because they needed somewhere for their story to land.
I look at the wall.
I look at the name that isn’t written anywhere, but that sits behind every single document pinned up there.
Then I open my notepad, click my pen, and get back to work.
Because that’s what I do.
Because that is the only answer I know how to give to those encrypted messages that try to convince me that what I’m building here doesn’t matter.
It fucking matters!
It matters more than whoever sent those messages is comfortable with.
And that, more than anything, is exactly why I am not going to stop.