Page 22 of Reckless

Almost.

The file I opened on Calloway is three lines long. I add a fourth.

Sage. Unsilenced. Grant rejections 2023 to present.

The thread between them is thin, and I don’t have the other end of it yet.

I close the laptop and sit in the quiet for a moment.

Sage has been different for the last few weeks. Not enough for anyone else to notice, but enough for me.

In the middle of all the celebrating, while Marcus was passed from one set of arms to another and the clubhouse finally remembered how to be normal again, she kept drifting half a step outside the moment.

Always smiling.

Always there.

Never quite letting herself settle into it.

I’ve seen the pattern before.

She carries the heavy stuff quietly, like keeping it to herself somehow stops it from spilling onto everyone else.

I know what I saw.

Her hand going to her pocket. The smile one layer thinner than it should have been. The delay before she answered me that lasted long enough to mean something and short enough to seem like nothing.

She said she was ‘fine.’

I opened the laptop once I got home, and I’ve had the Calloway thread open since.

So I flick to it again now.

Something is off.

I don’t have enough to call it yet. I don’t put names to things until the evidence holds up. But I’ve seen enough to know there’s a pattern. I am just waiting to find the piece that explains it.

Something is being hidden.

And I am going to find out what it is.

Not because I can’t let things go. I can let most things go—I do it constantly—the clubhouse generates more noise than anyone needs to process, and I process what matters and release what doesn’t. But Sage’s face in that parking lot at eleven o’clock at night, that I can’t release.

I pull the thread. Add another note. Set a monitor on Calloway’s public filings, his committee activity, the grant networks he sits inside. Passive intelligence. Background process. The kind of watching that runs quietly and tells me if anything moves. Then I close everything down, stand up from my workstation, find the cold coffee on the table, and take a sip.

I curl up my lip, but take another sip anyway.

Piper arrives soon, and weeks of sign language should be enough to hold a conversation.

The Calloway problem stays on the desk.

But Sage?

Sage is always with me.

Chapter Six

SAGE