“McShane said last night the university had declared itself a sanctuary campus,” he said at last. “But he said little could be done if ICE conducts raids off-campus. They might not even know about it. Let’s see what Cage finds out tonight before we make any decisions about what we’re doing.
“There’s a hundred people who connect to the newsroom in some fashion,” he continued, thinking out loud. “I can’t risk them all for one person who left years ago.”
“But...,” Will prompted.
“When in doubt, print,” Emily murmured.
Ryan nodded at Cage to go. “And you’re right, I need to read what she left me,” he said. “And I will. Em, we good on everything else?”
She gave that question serious thought. “I think so. We’ve got Folio covered. We’ve Eyewitness News covered for tonight. Story assignments are out.” She spread her hands wide. “I think we’re good. Lam might need you to double-check his page layouts. And I believe you owe him an editorial?”
“Did the editorial already,” Ryan said. He rolled his eyes at Emily’s exaggerated surprise. “I get it done before deadline occasionally. Anything else?”
“J.J.,” Cage said. “Dad picked him up today. Sarah and I were there. He wants to come back to the newsroom tomorrow. I kinda lied and said you had an assignment waiting for him, Em, an on-campus thing you’d email him about. Can you?”
She nodded. “Sure. I have things he can do. You think he’s ready to come back?”
Cage shrugged. “We’ll find out. Carroll was there to welcome him out on release, too.”
There was silence.
“Just how innocent is J.J.?” Ryan asked.
“I don’t know,” Cage admitted. “We’ve talked about Carroll while waiting at the protests for something to happen. Talked about people who use ‘they’ as their pronoun. That kind of thing. But in a personal sense? I don’t know. And to be honest? I’m not the person to have that talk with him, because I don’t know anything either.”
Cage grinned at his friend. “Besides, you’re the one who’s rooming down the hall from him. You get to have the birds and the bees talk if it’s needed.”
Ryan winced. “Great. I get a teenager to raise and a 3-year-old?”
“If he was your teenager, you’d be the last person he’d ask about someone like Carroll,” Will pointed out.
Cage was laughing as he left the office and headed out. Will followed him to find a computer and type his story. Emily lingered. “Ryan, if you’ve got a migraine, go home while you can still drive,” she advised. “We’ve got this.”
He nodded. “I want to read these papers and then lock them up here,” he said. “And then I’ll go, I promise.”
She closed the door behind her. Ryan pulled the file out of the locked desk drawer. More than a file, really. The folder was an inch thick, and there was a thumb drive. He pocketed that, then hesitated, and returned it to his locked drawer. He started through the papers.
One notebook appeared to be Teresa’s journal. Her thoughts and feelings about her pregnancy, about Rafael’s birth. And then about being outed to ICE. Outed? Ryan frowned. He pulled out a notebook and started making a list of questions, and things to follow up on. He needed to call Teresa’s mother. To reassure her that Rafael was with him if for no other reason.
He set the journal aside. It would be hard to read. And it could wait. Safety first. He needed to make sure his son was safe.
Rafael’s papers were what he expected, but it gave him goosebumps to see his name as the father on his birth certificate. There was a document that gave him parental authority. Most interesting there were some attorney names scattered throughout the documents. And one was in Portland. He added them to his list and flagged the one in Portland.
He sat back, having gone through everything but her journal, and now his headache was painful. He should have gone home when Emily had told him to. Nights like this he might have just gone to sleep upstairs in the Crow’s Nest. But there was Rafael....
Emily knocked on the door as if thinking of her conjured her. “Come on,” she said. “I’m taking you home.”
“Need car tomorrow,” he protested.
“Take the bus in,” she said briskly. “You can’t drive like this. You can’t take chances anymore, Ryan. And add one more thing to your list: figure out who will be Rafael’s guardian, if something happens to you. I’d ask the Washingtons, but maybe his own grandmother would be better?”
Ryan was up and walking toward the door before he had even made the decision to do so. Emily had always been like that, he thought fondly. She wasn’t nasty about it, but you found yourself doing what she said, without even considering a protest. It was why she’d been news editor for so long. Now he wondered. Did she have a ton of younger siblings? Was that where she’d learned it? And why didn’t he know? Really, the only person who he knew their personal life prior to the newsroom was Cage. And hard not to when both his brothers were working here too.
The rest of the staff seemed to just spring from Zeus’s head. Well no. He also knew about Ben Waters and how much he missed his family and his town on the Yakama Nation reservation in Washington. He knew Miguel was Hispaño, that Joe Castro was third generation Mexican American and didn’t speak any Spanish and regretted that. He even knew some of Sarah’s story.
But he didn’t know Emily’s. He hadn’t shared his own. Yet he and Emily and Cage were as close as family. Closer than his own family. He snorted.
He got into Emily’s Volkswagen bug — the original kind — and she didn’t talk to him. A good thing, because he really had
