Page 112 of Reckless

“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.