Ghost Code

Evan Calder knows how to read systems.

Budgets. Court dockets. Bureaucratic language designed to hide failure in plain sight. It's how he makes a living as a freelance investigative reporter-and how he keeps himself anchored in a world that has never quite felt stable.

Evan also lives with a schizophrenia-spectrum diagnosis. He tracks symptoms the way other reporters track sources. He trusts data more than intuition. He knows how easily a mind can turn coincidence into conspiracy.

So when small anomalies start appearing-visual glitches, moments of impossible certainty, a creeping sense that something is running in the background-he does what he's always done: documents them and moves on.

Until a late-night radio bulletin mentions several missing teenagers.

The story feels familiar in a way that unsettles him. Too familiar. As Evan begins digging, he uncovers gaps in the public record-cases that once existed and now don't, youth placements that vanish from the system, a shuttered facility that no one seems eager to remember. The deeper he looks, the more the evidence refuses to stay put.

Is this a real investigation-or a relapse masquerading as purpose?

As Evan races to verify what he's seeing, he's forced to confront a terrifying possibility: that the narrative everyone-including himself-has relied on to explain his life may be incomplete. And that the systems meant to protect vulnerable people are far more comfortable erasing them than saving them.

Told with dark humor, clinical precision, and emotional restraint, this novel explores the fault line between illness and insight, surveillance and care, truth and the stories institutions tell to survive.

Because sometimes the most dangerous question isn't "What's wrong with me?"

It's "What if I was right?"