Chapter Twenty-Three
GHOST
The Next Night
Piper waits across from me at Sage’s kitchen table, hands folded, her expression unreadable. The silence doesn’t bother her. If anything, she seems more comfortable in it.
It’s an easy mistake to think that means she’s waiting.
She isn’t.
She’s watching.
Listening.
If anything, she’s more dangerous in the quiet.
Sage sits beside me. Close enough that our knees almost touch under the table. Neither of us planned that, but it happened anyway, the way most things between us have started happening lately, without a decision attached to them.
I sign first, because Sage asked me to, and because some part of both of us understands that Piper will trust this more if it comes from me directly instead of filtered through her sister. ‘We need to tell you something.’
Piper’s eyes flick between us. She doesn’t sign anything back yet. She watches, reading the two of us the way she reads everyone, looking past the words to what we’re trying to hide.
I lay it out the way Sage and I agreed on the ride over. The group home inquiry. The families Sage has spent three years documenting. The politician who doesn’t want that inquiry to finish. The pressure that’s been building around Sage’s work for weeks now.
I don’t mention the texts.
I don’t mention my bike photographed outside the clubhouse by someone we still haven’t fully identified.
I keep my hands steady, my signs clean, and I watch Piper take in every piece of it, her jaw tightening slightly when I get to the part about the political pressure, her eyes narrowing when Sage explains, in her own signs, what the campaign has cost her these past few months.
When we finish, Piper doesn’t say anything for a long moment.
Then she signs at a pace that leaves no room for misunderstanding. ‘You’re not telling me everything.’
Sage’s hands still. ‘No.’
‘Am I in danger?’
I answer that one myself, holding her gaze the way I’d hold anyone’s when I need them to trust that I’m not softening the truth for comfort. ‘We’re working to make sure you’re not.’
Piper studies me. She has Sage’s intelligence but none of her sister’s instinct to look away first. She holds my eyes for three full seconds, maybe four, long enough that I feel it settle into my chest like something being weighed and measured.
Then she nods once.
She turns to Sage, and something in her expression shifts, softens, and sharpens at the same time. ‘Don’t protect me by keeping me ignorant. I’ve been managing things people thought I couldn’t handle my entire life.’
Sage’s hands come up slower this time. ‘I know.’
‘Then stop!’
Two words.
I’ve watched Sage absorb a great deal over the past several weeks without flinching, threats delivered through a phone screen, an SUV trying to take her off the road, the exhaustion of carrying something enormous while pretending to everyone around her that she isn’t.
But I watch something different move through her now, watching her sister sign those two words across the kitchen table.
Because it’s the exact thing I told her last night about myself when I laid a phone screen in front of her with six weeks of encrypted traffic on it. ‘Stop deciding what I can and can’t carry. Stop protecting me by keeping distance instead of closeness.’
She couldn’t hear it from me yet. I understand that now, sitting here. Some walls only come down for the people who built them alongside you, and Piper built half of Sage’s before I ever showed up in her life.
Sage looks at her sister for a long moment, something unlocking behind her eyes, and I feel it, too, sitting beside her, because whatever just happened at this table between the two of them belongs to me as well in a way I hadn’t expected it to.
Then, I do what I always do when I don’t know what to do with what I’m feeling. I work.
“Can I borrow your devices?” I ask out loud, but Piper reads my lips anyway.
She slides her phone across the table without hesitation, and her laptop follows a second later. No questions, just trust. The same trust she’d given me the day she signed, ‘He learned.’
Somewhere between then and now, she’d decided I wasn’t just learning her language anymore, I was one of her people.
I work through her devices at the kitchen table while Sage makes dinner neither of us asked for. I add new passcodes, location sharing locked down to two people, a tracker I build into her phone in under six minutes, one that will ping Sage and me both if her signal drops somewhere it shouldn’t.
Piper watches my hands the entire time, her eyes tracking every movement across the screen. She never asks what I’m doing, but trusts that if I needed her to know, I’d tell her.
When I glance up, she’s already signing to Sage, angled so I won’t catch it if I’m not paying attention.
But I am always paying attention.
‘Does he do this for everyone?’
Sage’s hands answer without hesitation. ‘No.’
Piper’s mouth curves. ‘I knew you were special.’
She pauses, and something in the set of her shoulders tells me she’s about to say something she’s been sitting on for a while. Her signs shrink smaller, private, the kind she’d only use with her sister, except I’ve spent eleven weeks learning this language, and I catch every letter of it.
‘You guys fucked!’
Sage goes completely still beside me. Her mug stops halfway to her mouth. ‘How do you—’
Piper doesn’t even let her finish. ‘Your faces. Both of you.’
I keep my expression as level as I can manage, which isn’t level at all, because I can feel heat climbing up the back of my neck the way it never does in situations that actually carry risk.
Sage looks somewhere between mortified and helpless, glancing at me like she’s hoping I’ll offer some kind of denial she can hide behind.
I don’t offer one.
Piper leans back in her chair, entirely unbothered, entirely serene, the same steady confidence she carried into this conversation about her own safety twenty minutes ago.
‘It’s about fucking time,’ she signs, and there isn’t a trace of teasing left in it.
Just something quieter, something that looks almost like relief.
Sage laughs, the sound breaking loose from somewhere she’s clearly been holding it, and I feel my mouth pull sideways despite every instinct telling me to keep my face unreadable.
Piper watches the two of us for a moment longer, then reaches for her newly secured phone, checking something on the screen as if she hasn’t just upended the entire evening with six signs and a smirk.
I finish locking down her laptop and set it back in front of her.
She looks up at me, and for the first time since we sat down at this table, there is nothing guarded in her expression at all. ‘Thank you,’ she signs. ‘For telling me the truth. Even the part you didn’t say out loud.’
I don’t correct her because she’s smart.
She already knows deep down, this shit is bigger than we are letting on.