Page 25 of Reckless

Partly because she trusts me, but mostly because she’s known me long enough to recognize the look I get when I have already made up my mind. At that point, arguing isn’t really a conversation. It’s just cardio with extra frustration.

I haven’t told Ghost because I know what he would do. I know because I have spent enough time watching the way he moves through this world to understand how his mind works. He would track the number. He would map the sender’s connections. He would pull on every thread he could find until he had a name, a location, a picture of exactly who sent it, exactly why, and then he would make himself the most obvious and available target in the state of Nevada.

He would do it without hesitating, and he would do it because of me. I have read the messages threatening him too many times to miss what the wording is actually threatening.

Unknown Number: The people closest to you.

I don’t know when Ghost became one of my people.

There wasn’t a moment, no grand declaration or conversation that changed everything.

One day I just realized I trusted him in that quiet, instinctive way you only trust people who have taken the time to really see you.

Ghost doesn’t hand that kind of attention out easily.

Maybe that’s why it means so much when he does.

I am not putting him into the crosshairs of this mess.

So I am carrying it alone. I am being sensible about it. I’m coming to work every morning, sitting at this desk, and doing the thing I have always done, which is to refuse to stop.

My desk at Unsilenced isn’t glamorous. No one will put it in a magazine. It’s a standard-issue government-adjacent nonprofit desk that’s passed through about four different occupants before me, with a surface scratched in the bottom left corner by somebody’s keys, a monitor that sits slightly too far to the right, and a drawer that lets go if you pull it too fast, dumping everything onto the floor.

I love it completely.

The walls on my side of the office are pinned with a system only I fully understand. A grid of documents, photographs, and printed financial tables arranged in the logic of three years of building something piece by piece. Family account summaries, some photographs I took with permission, faces carefully covered because nobody’s story becomes a statistic in my office, but the environments matter. A group home in the east of the city where the rosters show double the residents they’re funded to accommodate. Another facility on the west side where the reported therapy hours and the actual therapy hours are separated by a number that should have triggered a review two years ago.

The senator’s name doesn’t appear anywhere on this wall.

His money does.

His committees do.

The companies he’s appointed people to, the grants that flow through his networks, the contracts approved through channels that somehow circle back to the same three management organizations every damn time.

It’s in there.

It is all in there.

I just haven’t been able to connect the last pieces in a way that doesn’t leave enough room for a lawyer to drive a bus through.

Three years, and I can feel the edges of it.

I open the file on my screen, the one that currently holds the compiled testimony from seven of the twelve families. The interviews were long. Some started in one session and had finish in two or three more because the person across from me needed to stop, gather themselves, and come back when they had the words for the hardest parts.

I scroll to a section I’ve read so many times it has its own worn groove in my memory.

Patricia. Forty-three. Her younger brother spent eight months in a group home that was supposed to provide the mental health support he couldn’t access anywhere else. The support didn’t materialize. The reports that were submitted said it did. Her brother came home thinner, quieter, with gaps in his accounts of those eight months that she still doesn’t know how to close.

Patricia sat across from me in a diner. She held her coffee with both hands, and she didn’t cry until the very end, and then she apologized for it.

I told her there was nothing to apologize for.

I told her this mattered!

I told her we weren’t going to let it disappear.

And I meant every word of it, and I mean it still. Those threatening text messages on my personal phone don’t change that. They only change how I’m navigating it. It makes me more careful, more deliberate, more thorough about covering my tracks and ensuring everything I have is backed up somewhere the wrong hands can’t reach.