Page 23 of Reckless

The Next Day

I’ve been sitting with the weight of these stupid text messages for a month, and some mornings it presses down on my chest before my eyes are even properly open.

Before coffee.

Before the desert light has had a chance to push through the gaps in my blinds and remind me where I am.

Before I can choose not to think about it.

I sit at my desk at Unsilenced on a Tuesday morning that looks exactly like every other Tuesday morning, and stare at the screen in front of me. I think about how good people are at pretending everything is fine. About how well I’ve gotten at it. How practiced.

Unsilenced didn’t start as anything close to what it is now. Sandy built it from nothing almost a decade ago, back when she was doing intake for families out of the trunk of her car and a borrowed office above a laundromat, because nobody else would. Legal advocacy, housing support, and emergency resources for the people the system has decided are too inconvenient to help properly. Domestic violence survivors navigating courtrooms that weren’t built with them in mind. At-risk kids falling through gaps that shouldn’t exist. Adults with disabilities warehoused in group homes that take the state’s money and spend it on everything except the people it was meant for.

I didn’t start it. Sandy did. I’ve just spent three years trying to make sure I deserve to be part of it.

I came on as a caseworker straight out of my master’s, half convinced I’d burn out inside a year like everyone warns that you will. Sandy hired me because I was thorough to the point of obsessive, and it turns out that’s exactly what this work needs. Somewhere in those three years, the group home investigation stopped being one file among fifty and became the thing I built almost entirely on my own. An idea scribbled in the margins of a notebook that turned into twenty-three individual accounts and a case Sandy trusted me enough to let me run with.

She still signs off on the budgets and answers to the board, but I’m still the one she calls in when a case needs someone who won’t let it go.

Three years of building something important will do that to you. Three years of learning exactly which faces to show in which rooms, of protecting families whose lives are already cracked down the middle, of caring about something so much you’d rather carry the threat alone than risk any part of it landing somewhere it shouldn’t.

The office is quiet right now. It gets like this before ten o’clock, the hum of the air conditioning and the low shuffle of one of the other researchers moving files somewhere down the hall. I loved this calmness before the day picks up speed.

I used to arrive early on purpose just to have it.

Now I use it to worry.

The first text came on a Thursday. I remember that because I was standing in the Unsilenced break room, pouring the second coffee of my morning, when my personal phone buzzed against the counter. Not my work phone, my personal one. The number I give to maybe a dozen people in the world.

I picked it up.

The message was encrypted, with no sender ID that led anywhere real. It sat in my messages like an uninvited guest making itself comfortable, and I read it four times before I understood I hadn’t misread it once.

Unknown Number: You’re getting close to something that will ruin people who don’t deserve to be ruined. Back away from the group home inquiry. Or the people closest to you start paying the price.

I remember setting the coffee down very carefully on the counter.

I remember the way the break room suddenly felt too small for all the air I was trying to breathe.

The group home inquiry. Three years of my life sitting in folders on this desk and on the encrypted drive I keep at home and in the memory of twelve families who trusted me with the worst thing that had ever happened to them—twenty-three individual accounts. Children, siblings, parents who came to me in person, sat across from me, and handed over their stories with shaking hands because they needed someone to tell them it meant something, that somebody was going to listen.

I’ve listened.

I’ve documented.

I’ve mapped the funding streams, traced the contracts, and sat in coffee shops with sources who asked me three times to double-check who would see their names.

I’ve driven to addresses that weren’t in great parts of town and sat in living rooms where the furniture was mismatched, the carpet was worn thin, and I have heard things that kept me awake at two in the morning for months.

Because behind the group homes with the glossy brochures, the politician photo opportunities, and the clean websites with stock photographs of smiling children, there is a different story entirely.

A system has been failing Nevada’s most vulnerable people while a man named Senator Calloway launders his public reputation through it. Cuts to services, redirected funding, and a paper trail I’ve been quietly following for so long it’s become the background noise of my entire year.

And now someone wants me to stop.

I look at the message again now, the way I’ve looked at it approximately four hundred times over the past three weeks. Pulling it up and reading it as if there’s some version where the wording becomes less deliberate, less specific, less clearly written by someone who knows exactly what I am doing and who I am doing it for.

There isn’t.