Page 120 of Reckless

Piper waits across from me at Sage’s kitchen table, hands folded, her expression unreadable. The silence doesn’t bother her. If anything, she seems more comfortable in it.

It’s an easy mistake to think that means she’s waiting.

She isn’t.

She’s watching.

Listening.

If anything, she’s more dangerous in the quiet.

Sage sits beside me. Close enough that our knees almost touch under the table. Neither of us planned that, but it happened anyway, the way most things between us have started happening lately, without a decision attached to them.

I sign first, because Sage asked me to, and because some part of both of us understands that Piper will trust this more if it comes from me directly instead of filtered through her sister. ‘We need to tell you something.’

Piper’s eyes flick between us. She doesn’t sign anything back yet. She watches, reading the two of us the way she reads everyone, looking past the words to what we’re trying to hide.

I lay it out the way Sage and I agreed on the ride over. The group home inquiry. The families Sage has spent three years documenting. The politician who doesn’t want that inquiry to finish. The pressure that’s been building around Sage’s work for weeks now.

I don’t mention the texts.

I don’t mention my bike photographed outside the clubhouse by someone we still haven’t fully identified.

I keep my hands steady, my signs clean, and I watch Piper take in every piece of it, her jaw tightening slightly when I get to the part about the political pressure, her eyes narrowing when Sage explains, in her own signs, what the campaign has cost her these past few months.

When we finish, Piper doesn’t say anything for a long moment.

Then she signs at a pace that leaves no room for misunderstanding. ‘You’re not telling me everything.’

Sage’s hands still. ‘No.’

‘Am I in danger?’

I answer that one myself, holding her gaze the way I’d hold anyone’s when I need them to trust that I’m not softening the truth for comfort. ‘We’re working to make sure you’re not.’

Piper studies me. She has Sage’s intelligence but none of her sister’s instinct to look away first. She holds my eyes for three full seconds, maybe four, long enough that I feel it settle into my chest like something being weighed and measured.

Then she nods once.

She turns to Sage, and something in her expression shifts, softens, and sharpens at the same time. ‘Don’t protect me by keeping me ignorant. I’ve been managing things people thought I couldn’t handle my entire life.’

Sage’s hands come up slower this time. ‘I know.’

‘Then stop!’

Two words.

I’ve watched Sage absorb a great deal over the past several weeks without flinching, threats delivered through a phone screen, an SUV trying to take her off the road, the exhaustion of carrying something enormous while pretending to everyone around her that she isn’t. But I watch something different move through her now, watching her sister sign those two words across the kitchen table.

Because it’s the exact thing I told her last night about myself when I laid a phone screen in front of her with six weeks of encrypted traffic on it. ‘Stop deciding what I can and can’t carry. Stop protecting me by keeping distance instead of closeness.’

She couldn’t hear it from me yet. I understand that now, sitting here. Some walls only come down for the people who built them alongside you, and Piper built half of Sage’s before I ever showed up in her life.

Sage looks at her sister for a long moment, something unlocking behind her eyes, and I feel it, too, sitting beside her, because whatever just happened at this table between the two of them belongs to me as well in a way I hadn’t expected it to.

Then, I do what I always do when I don’t know what to do with what I’m feeling. I work.

“Can I borrow your devices?” I ask out loud, but Piper reads my lips anyway.