Page 114 of Reckless

“My mom didn’t leave,” she continues. “She just wasn’t… there. Not in the ways that counted. Depression, and then the drinking got worse after that, and nobody ever called it a crisis because it never looked like one from the outside. She got up. She went to work most days. It just meant somebody had to notice when Piper stopped responding to sounds she used to jump at, had to sit through the audiologist appointments, and had to fight the school district when they wanted to put her in a program that would’ve buried her instead of helping her.”

“You,” I simply say.

“I was eleven.” She turns her coffee mug a quarter turn on the table, watching the ring of condensation smear. “Eleven-year-olds can’t sit in a school meeting alone and be taken seriously, so I found Mrs. Blythman, the guidance counselor at my school. I used to eat lunch in her office some days, back before any of this started, and she was the only adult who ever seemed to actually look at me instead of past me.” She slightly shrugs. “So, I asked her to come to the meetings. Told her my mom worked a lot. Which wasn’t exactly a lie.”

“And she just… helped?”

“She just helped.” Something almost like a smile crosses her face… there, then just as quickly, it’s gone. “She never asked too many questions about why an eleven-year-old was the one calling to schedule them. She just showed up every time, sat next to me at that table full of adults, and made sure nobody could talk over a kid who didn’t have anyone else in the room on her side.”

She looks up at me. “She’s the one who actually taught me what an Individualized Education Program was, sat with me after school, and broke the whole thing down so I wasn’t just nodding along in those meetings, pretending I understood the paperwork. She knew exactly what to ask for, what Piper was entitled to, what the school would try to get away with if nobody pushed back. So, she walked me through building the plan piece by piece until I understood it well enough to sit at that table myself and not let anyone talk over me.”

She stops turning the mug. “But none of it meant anything without a signature at the bottom. Doesn’t matter how well I understood it, or how loud I was in that room. No treatment plan goes into effect on an eleven-year-old’s word. It needed my mom’s name on the page, and every time I had to carry the paperwork home and get her to sign it before anything actually happened. Half the time she barely looked at what she was signing. I don’t think she ever once read a page of it.” She exhales.

“Mrs. Blythman could sit beside me and make sure I wasn’t talked over. She couldn’t make me anybody’s parent. Eventually, people stopped asking where my mom was, but I always knew they were wondering. You can only be the smartest kid at the table for so long before somebody starts asking why there isn’t an adult who actually belongs there.”

For a second, all I can see is Sage at eleven years old, sitting at a table full of adults and somehow being the one who had her shit together.

It pisses me off more than I expect. She should never have had to be that kid.

But I know better than most what happens when the adults who are supposed to show up don’t.

She wraps both hands around her mug and continues, “Mrs. Blythman taught me the whole damn plan for making sure Piper got the support she needed at school. And she taught me something else, too, that most people won’t hand you help unless you go looking for the one person who will, and even then, you still have to fight for every piece of it once you find them. But I also learned that sometimes one person deciding to show up makes all the difference. Mrs. Blythman didn’t fix anything. She just made sure I wasn’t fighting it completely alone.”

I go still as another piece of Sage clicks into place. I keep my face blank, or try to, but apparently, I’m not as unreadable to her as I used to be.

“That’s why you’re so focused on Unsilenced?” I say.

“Yeah, twelve families, twenty-three accounts.” She glances down at the files spread between us. “Same damn fight I’ve been having since I was eleven. There’s just more of us now.”

“And Piper knows this is why?”

“Piper’s the reason I know how to do it.” She looks up at me. “She’s also the reason I never learned how to let anyone else do it with me. I built an entire life out of making sure nobody had to protect her except me. Because when it mattered, nobody else did. And somewhere in there, I stopped being able to tell the difference between protecting people and just being the only one standing in front of them.”

I don’t answer straightaway. I’m still putting together everything she’s handed me.

“That’s not a flaw,” I say eventually. “It’s a scar that’s still doing its job.”

“Feels like a flaw most days.”

“It kept your sister safe when nobody else was going to.” I hold her eyes when I say it, making damn sure she hears me. “The problem isn’t that you learned to do it. It’s that you never learned when it was safe to stop.”

She doesn’t answer, and I don’t push for one. Some things need more than late-night silence to sit with.

Instead, she reaches for the next folder and starts telling me about the families she hasn’t documented yet, the ones still too afraid to put their names on anything. I input what she gives me into the file, cross-referencing dates against the financial map, watching the two halves of this thing lock together piece by piece until there’s no gap left for Calloway to hide inside.

Somewhere past two in the morning, she starts losing the fight with her own eyelids, blinking longer each time, her sentences trailing into silence before she catches herself and picks the thread back up. I don’t tell her to stop. I know what it costs her to admit she needs rest, and I’m not going to make her say it.

But by three, she loses. Her head comes to rest against her folded arms on the table. Her breathing slows until it settles into an easy rhythm.

I let myself look.

The lamp catches her face in profile. A single strand of hair has escaped its tie and drifted across her cheek.

My hand twitches before I stop it.

Touching her would be easy.

Walking away from it again wouldn’t.