Overview

Jamie Tran is a barista with steady hands and a quiet life—one she built on purpose, far from the vault systems and surveillance tech that nearly broke her. She doesn’t talk about what she walked away from. She doesn't have to. Because no one’s looking.

Until someone is.

Kate McIntosh is a former NSA hacker turned cybersecurity researcher, still haunted by a system she helped design and nearly destroyed. She’s precise, brilliant, and emotionally barricaded—until Jamie stirs something she didn’t think she could feel anymore. Love. Safety. Wanting to stay.

But when a cryptic message surfaces—one word, Elegy—the life they’ve built together begins to unravel. What follows isn’t just a return to the secrets they buried. It’s a reckoning with the systems that shaped them, the silence that protected them, and the parts of themselves they’ve never been brave enough to name out loud.

With the help of Rowan Calder, an ethics researcher with ghosts of her own, and Sky, a non-binary analyst who once leaked the truth through the most unexpected conduit—Eliza Morero, a hardened journalist trying not to fall for Sky in the middle of all this—Jamie and Kate must confront the question that has followed them both from the beginning:

What do you do with the truth when it doesn’t save you?

Spanning themes of ethical tech, queer intimacy, identity, and healing from surveillance-induced trauma, What We Don’t Say is a slow-burn love story wrapped in a digital ghost story—one where the real power lies not in what’s exposed, but in who chooses to stay once it is.