Page 55 of Reckless

“How many have you finished?” She doesn’t answer right away, which is an answer in itself. “Sage.”

“Four,” she admits. “I keep losing my place. The numbers start swimming after a while.”

I pull the stack toward the middle of the table before she can stop me. “Give me the list. Names, registered agents, the works.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I know I don’t have to.” I open the laptop and start building a spreadsheet, because that’s faster than whatever cross-out system she’s using on the legal pad. “I’m offering.”

She watches me for a second, like she’s deciding whether to argue about it, then pushes the top folder across. “Sanderson Group Home. Occupancy reported at Twenty. Licensed capacity is twelve.” She taps the page, then rubs at her eyes again. “Cross that against the management company.”

“Blackstone Residential Partners.” I’ve had the entity structures memorized for weeks, though I don’t tell her that part yet. “Give me the next one.”

“You’re not supposed to make this look easy.”

“I’m not making it look easy. I’m making it look fast. There’s a difference.”

That actually gets a real smile out of her, small and worn out but real. She hands me the next folder, and the one after that, and somewhere in the third folder she stops watching to make sure I’m doing it right and then starts reading the next file out loud instead, her voice steadier now that she isn’t carrying the whole list in her head by herself.

Around midnight, I catch myself staring at the same cell for the fourth time.

The numbers aren’t the problem.

Sage is.

She’s reading quietly to herself, checking figures against reports, and somewhere over the last hour her voice has changed. It’s lower now, softer around the edges, the words blurring together just enough that I know she’s getting tired. She loses her place once, rubs at one eye with the heel of her hand, then reads the same figure twice without ever realizing she’s done it.

“Riverside Group Home. Occupancy reported at eighteen. Licensed capacity is twelve.” She taps the page, then rubs at her eyes again. “Cross that against the management company.”

I pull up the entity structure on my laptop, the one I’ve had open for three weeks now, the shell layered under a shell layered under something that used to be a legitimate accounting firm before Calloway got his hands into it. “Blackstone Residential Partners. Same registered agent as the other two.”

“Same registered agent as all of them,” I say.

“Yeah.” She sits back in her chair and looks at the mess spread across her kitchen table—three years of her life in Manila folders and printed photographs, next to three weeks of mine in spreadsheets and flowcharts nobody outside my head could follow. Two different maps of the same territory. Hers built from people, mine built from paper. Neither one complete on its own, but together, they tell a story that doesn’t leave much room for argument.

“We’re close,” she says.

“We’re close.”

She doesn’t say anything more for a while, and neither do I.

The apartment slips into that easy kind of quiet that only ever seems to happen after midnight. The laptops hum between us, papers scattered across Sage’s dining table in organized piles only she probably understands, while the lamp she’d dragged in from the living room throws a warm circle of light over the reports. Outside, traffic moves somewhere below the apartment, a constant reminder that Vegas never really sleeps, and upstairs Piper’s television keeps talking to itself until it suddenly doesn’t.

I don’t notice the silence straightaway.

I’ve been listening to Sage read figures to herself for so long that somewhere along the way it became part of the background. It’s only when I realize I haven’t heard her voice for a while that I finally look up.

I sit there a minute, looking at the shape of her, curled sideways in a chair that was never built to be slept in, a highlighter still loose in her hand like she meant to keep going. The case files are still spread across the table. Twelve families, twenty-three names. The same structure, over and over. Overcrowded and understaffed. A caseworker’s signature on a form that never should have needed one.

I’ve read that structure before. It used to be my life.

Riverside isn’t the first group home I’ve seen the inside of. I did four years across three of them before I aged out, different names on the letterhead, same file underneath. I know exactly what ‘occupancy eighteen, licensed for twelve’ looks like from the wrong side of it. A hallway you learn to avoid, a room shared with too many other kids, a caseworker rotating out before she learns your name properly.

Nobody gave me a computer to fix that.

There wasn’t a fucking computer.

There was a library two bus transfers away, four ancient terminals, and a thirty-minute limit I used like it mattered, because it was the only place nobody could reach me.