Page 154 of The Off Limits Captain
Ryan’s phone on my kitchen counter.
Team thing.
It’s handled.
The room has moved a quarter inch in a direction I cannot name, and we both let it sit there.
I did let it sit.
That is the part I hate.
Not because I should have known. I did not know.
Because some part of me had felt the shape of Ryan’s silence and chosen the gentler interpretation.
My phone is in my hand before I have decided to call.
Sierra answers on the fourth ring, breathless. “If this is about whether I have finished outlining for torts, the answer is spiritually no.”
“I need to run something by you.”
“That sounds ominous.”
“It is vague on purpose.”
“Even worse.”
I look through the windshield at the diner windows, at the booth where a man just gave me enough to make the day dangerous and not enough to make it clean.
“No names,” I say. “No identifying details.”
Sierra goes quiet in the way she does when she stops being my friend and starts becoming the person who color-codes case notes. “Okay.”
“Hypothetically. Someone hands a reporter a lead about a vulnerable person inside a big institution. But the story isn’t about that person. It’s about the institution. The incentives. The people with power around them.”
“Okay. What are you actually asking?”
“Whether the reporter uses the person to prove it.”
Sierra is quiet for a second. “Pey, that’s not a law question. That’s a you question.”
“That’s not helpful.”
“I’m a 2L, not your conscience. You want me to tell you it’s fine?”
“No.”
“Then you already know it isn’t.”
I close my eyes. Inside the diner, the waitress clears the untouched coffee and does not know she is handling the edge of a story.
“If they’re the only visible piece,” I say slowly, hearing how it sounds out loud, “I’m not ready. I have to find someone who actually had a choice.”
Sierra doesn’t jump in to agree. She just lets me hear it.
“And if waiting lets the institution keep doing it?”
“That one I can’t give you,” she says. “That’s the part that’s supposed to keep you up.”
