Chapter Twenty-Four
SAGE
The Next Day
The email lands in my inbox at eleven. I barely glance at the subject line before flagging it for later.
My screen is already crowded with seating charts for the fundraiser, donor confirmations, volunteer schedules, and a spreadsheet Piper helped me color-code because apparently my filing system is ‘controlled chaos,’ which is rude, but not entirely inaccurate.
I smile to myself as I move another donor into the confirmed column.
Three years.
Three years of planning, fundraising, meetings that ran late into the evening, and convincing people that Unsilenced deserved to exist. Every green square on the spreadsheet feels like another tiny promise kept.
A soft knock lands against my office door, and I don’t look up immediately. “Come in.”
The silence that follows lasts just long enough to make me glance up at Sandy, who is standing in the doorway. For a second, I don’t recognize her expression. She always looks composed. Even on the days everything is on fire, she’s the one reminding the rest of us that we’ll find a way through it.
Today? Today her face looks pale and drawn tight around the mouth like she’s carrying something too heavy to keep holding to herself, and the smile that usually greets me never comes.
“Sandy?”
“Can you come into my office for a minute?”
Something inside my chest tightens. Not because of what she says, but because of how carefully she says it.
I close my laptop without saving the document.
The walk to her office can’t be more than twenty steps.
It feels like twenty miles.
People look up as we pass. Someone from reception gives Sandy a questioning look, but she doesn’t answer it. When she reaches her office, she closes the door behind us with a soft click that somehow sounds louder than it should.
She doesn’t sit down. Instead, she stands behind her desk with a folder clutched against her chest, staring at it for a long moment before slowly lowering herself into her chair. “Sit down, Sage.” It’s not a suggestion, so I do.
The leather chair creaks beneath me as I lean forward, resting my forearms on my knees. “Sandy…”
She lets out a slow breath through her nose before sliding the folder across the desk toward me. “We’ve received formal notification from the regulatory board.”
I blink. “About the fundraiser?”
“No.”
My stomach drops.
“They’ve opened a review into Unsilenced.”
I frown, trying to make the words fit somewhere they don’t belong. “A review?”
“Someone lodged a formal complaint.”
For one ridiculous second, relief washes through me. Complaints happen. People misunderstand paperwork. Someone probably forgot to submit something.
“We’ll send them everything,” I say immediately.
“The financials are all reconciled. Every grant is documented, every donation has a paper trail. Jess keeps three copies of everything because she’s convinced the internet is going to explode one day.
She watched this episode of The IT Crowd, and she swears the internet is kept in this little black box.
” The joke dies the moment it leaves my mouth.
Sandy doesn’t smile. Instead, she quietly turns the folder around so it’s facing me. “Read it.”
My eyes skim the opening paragraph. Then stop.
Financial mismanagement.
Conflict of interest.
Improper allocation of charitable funds.
My heart gives one hard, painful thud. “N-no.” The word escapes before I can stop it.
I flip the page.
Names.
Dates.
Bank transfers.
Meeting records.
Specific enough to feel real. Specific enough that, if I didn’t know every line of our accounts almost by heart, I’d think someone had uncovered something terrible.
“This…” My voice catches. “This i-isn’t…” I can’t even finish the sentence.
“Yeah,” Sandy says quietly.
I shake my head harder, scanning line after line, looking for the mistake that has to be there.
“There isn’t any of this. This is bullshit!”
“I know.”
I snap my head back up to look at her. “Then who the fuck wrote it?”
She exhales frustratingly. “The board won’t tell us.”
I throw a hand in the air, glancing around the room, not really sure what I am trying to find. “Well, they have to!”
“They don’t, Sage.”
I look back at her. “They can’t just accuse us and…” My words trail away as my eyes catch on a date halfway down the page.
Two weeks.
I stare at it, then I look back at Sandy. “The hearing…”
She nods once. “The investigation begins two weeks before the fundraiser.”
Everything inside me goes completely still.
Not because I’m calm, but because my brain has suddenly stopped trying to solve the problem.
This isn’t a mistake.
Mistakes don’t arrive with perfect timing.
Mistakes don’t wait until three years of work are almost finished.
Mistakes don’t know exactly where to aim.
A cold wave rolls through me. “Calloway.”
Sandy’s shoulders sag. “You think he’s behind this?”
“Yeah, I do.”
The room feels too small.
I see every late night around the conference table, every family who sat across from me and cried because someone had finally listened, every volunteer, sponsor, and conversation convincing people to believe in something that didn’t exist yet.
I think about Piper helping me build the website.
Ghost quietly fixing security issues I hadn’t even known existed.
Marley dropping off food because she knew I’d forgotten to eat.
The club turning up to support something that wasn’t even theirs.
All of it.
“The families, the sponsors, everyone has already booked flights,” I whisper.
Sandy’s eyes glisten. “I get it.”
“They’ve taken leave from work.”
“They have.”
“They’re bringing their kids for fucks sake!”
Her mouth trembles. “I know, sweetheart.”
The paper slips from my fingers onto the desk. My hands have started shaking so badly, and for the first time since Unsilenced stopped being a dream scribbled in the margins of an old notebook, I can’t see a way to save it.
“This will ruin us, Sandy.”
She sniffs, pressing trembling fingers beneath her eyes before the tears can fall. She gives one small nod. “This will shut us down, Sage.”
The silence stretches between us, heavy and goddamn useless. No words are left that can fix this. No speech is waiting somewhere that makes the folder on the desk disappear or gives us three years of our lives back.
I push myself to my feet because sitting there any longer feels like admitting it’s already over.
Sandy is beside me before I reach the door. She wraps her arms around me, and for one impossible second, I almost let myself fall apart right there against her shoulder.
Instead, I swallow it. “I’ll… I’ll think of something,” I whisper, even though I don’t know if I’m trying to convince her or myself.
“I know you will.”
I nod, and by the time I step out of her office, the hallway feels impossibly ordinary.
Everyone is still working.
Jess is laughing with one of the volunteers over something on a clipboard. Michael is carrying three boxes toward the conference room. Someone calls out that the sponsor banners finally arrived.
Life keeps moving.
Unsilenced keeps breathing.
Only I know somebody has just slipped a knife between its ribs and twisted.
I smile when people look at me.
Or at least I think I do.
Nobody stops me.
Nobody knows they have just spent the morning planning an event that will never happen.
The automatic doors slide open, and heat rushes over me, the midday Nevada sun so bright it hurts my eyes.
My car sits exactly where I left it, and I fumble my keys, missing the lock.
I try again, and the door finally clicks open.
I yank it wider than I mean to, and it bounces back against the hinge with a sharp metallic crack that echoes through the empty parking lot.
“Fuck!” The word tears out of me, and I slam the door shut.
It isn’t enough, so I wrench it open again, then slam it harder.
Again.
And again.
Like if I make enough noise, maybe something inside me will stop screaming.
It doesn’t.
It only gets louder.
I grip the top of the door until my knuckles ache, staring blindly across the parking lot while my vision swims.
Three years.
Three fucking years!
Late nights.
All the families who deserve to be heard.
Children drawing pictures for a fundraiser they were excited to attend.
Volunteers giving up weekends because they believed in what we were building.
Sponsors trusting me.
Sandy trusting me.
Ghost. The thought of him breaks whatever thread I’d been hanging onto. A sob tears out of me so violently it folds me in half. “N-no.” It comes out broken. “This can’t be happening.” My chest locks so hard it feels like the air has vanished from the world.
I try to breathe.
Nothing.
Another desperate pull.
Nothing.
My lungs refuse to work. Panic crashes into me all at once, my heartbeat slamming against my ribs so hard I’m convinced something inside me is going to give way.
No.
No.
No.
Not this!
Not after everything.
My hands are shaking so violently I can barely see them, and the edges of the parking lot blur.
Everything feels too bright.
Too loud.
Too far away.
I can’t…
I can’t…
I can’t fucking do this.
I slide into the driver’s seat because my legs have stopped being reliable somewhere in the last thirty seconds.
The door barely closes before another sob rips through me. Tears spill faster than I can wipe them away. Every thought piles on top of the last until I can’t tell where one ends and another begins.
They’re going to shut us down.
The fundraiser is over.
The families will think I lied to them.
Everyone believed in me.
I failed them.
The last thought lodges itself hard somewhere deep inside me.
I failed them.
It repeats.
Louder.
Again…
I failed them.
My phone is sitting on the passenger seat. I don’t remember putting it there, but my hand reaches for it anyway.
Ghost.
My thumb presses his name, and he answers before the first ring finishes.
“I just saw it come through,” he says immediately. “I flagged the regulatory board’s system six days ago. Someone accessed Unsilenced’s file outside normal review protocol. I’ve been tracing it sinc—” He stops. “Sage?”