Chapter Twenty-One
GHOST
A Couple of Hours Later
Three live feeds in Sage’s apartment compete for my attention, each one carrying something that should matter.
None of them win.
Information has always been easy. Patterns, data, problems waiting to be solved, but the woman across the table is none of those things.
Sage sits with her laptop open, her hair pulled back the way it gets when she’s stopped caring what she looks like and started caring about what she needs to say.
The financial map takes up my center monitor, twenty years of Calloway’s committee laid out in a language that only makes sense to someone who has spent a decade learning to read the places people hide things.
I keep working while Sage talks, because I can do both, and because I think she needs me to keep my hands moving so she doesn’t feel like she’s under a microscope.
“Start with the first family,” I say. “Give me names if you’re cleared to share them.”
She does.
The Hendersons first, then the Alvarez family, then six more after that, each one a story she has been carrying alone for three years, folded into files, testimonies, and photographs that never should have needed to exist. She tells me about a mother who lost her son to a system that was supposed to protect him and instead sold him out to a funding structure built by a man who has spent his entire career pretending to care.
She tells me about a father who stopped trusting anyone in a uniform.
Twelve families in total.
Twenty-three individual accounts, cross-referenced and documented with a thoroughness that tells me exactly why Unsilenced hired her in the first place.
She has my full attention.
The map keeps updating on the monitor beside her, pins shifting as new information comes in, but it can wait. She notices. I see it in the way her shoulders ease a fraction every time I ask another question instead of assuming I already know the answer.
“The Alvarez case,” I say, scrolling back through the timeline. “The grant rejection came through in March. Before or after the committee restructures?”
Sage barely looks at her notes. “After. Three weeks after.”
I nod once. “That’s when they stopped losing votes.”
Her fingers pause over the keyboard. “What?”
I rotate my laptop toward her, pulling Calloway’s committee records beside the funding timeline. “Before the restructure, every grant application landed on one person’s desk.” I tap the first column. “That person had to approve or reject it. Their name went on the decision.”
Her eyes track the dates. “And after?”
“Calloway changed the process.” I pull up the new workflow. “Now every application goes to a committee instead of one person.”
She frowns. “Why does that matter?”
“Because committees don’t have to say no.” She furrows her brows. “They can ask for more paperwork, more reviews, more discussion. They can send it back. Move it to the next meeting. Leave it sitting on someone’s desk until the funding window closes.”
Understanding dawns across her face. “So, nobody actually rejects it?”
“Exactly.” I nod. “It dies all by itself.”
I highlight three more organizations. “These all happened after the restructure. Different charities. Different excuses. Same committee. Same fucking chair.”
She studies the list, her expression tightening. “Calloway.”
“He never has to put his name on a rejection.” I tap the final document. “If anyone asks, he points to the committee and says, ‘They made the decision.’ The committee points to the process. The process becomes the villain.”
“But he built the process.”
“Exactly!”
Silence settles between us.
Finally, she looks up. “I-I thought we just… weren’t good enough.”
I shake my head. “No.”
She waits.
“Unsilenced was never supposed to get funded.” Her shoulders drop a fraction, some knot of tension loosening like she’s been carrying it alone for months. “That…” I say quietly, “… is a very different problem.”
She sinks lower, then turns to look at me, her eyes glazing over a little. “Why did you learn ASL before you ever met Piper?”
I don’t answer right away. Not because I don’t know the answer, but because I have never said it out loud, and I don’t say things out loud unless I’ve decided they’re worth the cost.
“She matters to you,” I say. “You matter to—” I stop. Start again differently. “She was coming. It made sense to be prepared.”
Sage looks at me across the table, and I know that look. It’s the one that means she isn’t going to let me off with half a sentence tonight.
“Ghost.”
“Yes?”
“You’ve put your cock inside me. I think you can give me the decency of finishing that sentence.”
I hold her gaze because I have gotten better at that over the past few months, better at not finding a reason to check a monitor or answer a phone that isn’t ringing.
“You matter to me. I learned the module because you matter to me, and Piper mattering to you made her matter to me… that’s the whole sentence. ”
She doesn’t say anything for a moment. Her eyes are bright in a way that has nothing to do with the desk lamp between us, and I think if I reached across the table right now, she would let me hold her hand and neither of us would need to say another word about it.
But I don’t reach.
Not yet.
There’s still work in front of us, and I have learned that Sage needs the work finished before she can let herself feel the rest of it properly.
So, we keep going.
Somewhere past midnight, she slides a file across the table that stops me mid-sentence.
Riverside Group Home, with an intake photograph clipped to the corner. A case number beside a birth year that isn’t mine, in a home that isn’t one I ever lived in.
But it’s close enough.
I don’t say anything for a beat too long, and Sage notices, because she notices everything about me now, whether I want her to or not.
“Ghost?”
I could deflect. I’ve done it a hundred times without her catching it. But we’re past that tonight, somewhere around the third grant rejection stamped over an application that never should have failed, and somewhere around the fortieth name she trusted me with that she was scared to say out loud.
“I did four years in places like this,” I say. “Before I aged out.”
She goes very still. “Group homes?”
“Three of them. Different names. Same paperwork.” I nod at the file still in her hands. “That’s why I read systems the way I do. Nobody was going to fix mine for me, so I taught myself how.”
Her eyes drop to the intake picture before coming back to me, and something changes in them. Not pity. Thank fuck. I couldn’t take pity from her.
“You shouldn’t have had to do that.”
Simple words.
But somehow, they’re harder to sit with than anything else she could have said.
I look down at the table. “Didn’t have much choice.”
“I know.” Her voice softens. “That’s the part that pisses me off.”
My eyes lift to hers.
“You were a kid, Ghost. You shouldn’t have needed to understand the system well enough to survive it because the adults around you couldn’t get their shit together.
” Her fingers move over the corner of the file, smoothing it down.
“And I’m not saying that because I feel sorry for you, so don’t even start. ”
The corner of my mouth pulls despite myself. “Wasn’t going to.”
Her eyebrow lifts. “Bullshit.”
That almost gets a laugh out of me—almost.
She looks at the file again, and when she speaks this time, some of the fire has left her voice. “Is that why you never once treated this like a favor to me?”
“It was never a favor.” I hold her gaze, because I’ve gotten better at that too. “This case stopped being just yours a while ago. I just didn’t say so until now.”
She watches me for a moment, and I can almost see all the things she wants to ask.
Which home?
What happened?
Where were my parents?
How bad was it?
Sage doesn’t ask a single one—instead, her hand crosses the table and finds mine. “Okay,” she says quietly.
My fingers close around hers.
She leaves the file sitting between us and doesn’t try to drag another piece of my past out of me just because I cracked the door open. She stays, her hand in mine, giving me room to leave the rest where it belongs.
Turns out, that’s enough.
We sit like that for a while before her eyes drop to our hands. Something shifts in her expression, and when she finally pulls away, it isn’t to reach for another file.
She leans back in her chair, takes a breath, and I know before she says anything that we’re not talking about me anymore.
She doesn’t wait for me to ask about her.
That’s the part that undoes me.
After everything I’ve just handed her, she gives something back.
I sit across the table, laptop still open and coffee gone cold for the second time, and let her get there without pushing. I’ve learned by now that Sage gets to the hard things on her own timeline, and trying to hurry her only makes those walls go higher.
So I stay quiet.
But she starts talking anyway. “My dad left when I was seven,” she says, and the words come out steadier than I expect. “Piper was five. One day he was our dad, and then he just… stopped being one. Stopped calling, stopped showing up. Eventually, we stopped expecting him to.”
I stay exactly where I am, fighting the urge to reach for her because I know if I break the rhythm now, she’ll stop, and I won’t get the rest. Instead, I listen, the way I listen to everything, completely, careful not to miss a line.
“My mom didn’t leave,” she continues. “She just wasn’t…
there. Not in the ways that counted. Depression, and then the drinking got worse after that, and nobody ever called it a crisis because it never looked like one from the outside.
She got up. She went to work most days. It just meant somebody had to notice when Piper stopped responding to sounds she used to jump at, had to sit through the audiologist appointments, and had to fight the school district when they wanted to put her in a program that would’ve buried her instead of helping her. ”
“You,” I simply say.