SARIAH DUBOIS | HIDDEN DISTRICT: The Weight of What Isn't Said
Updated: Oct 4
Sariah DuBois spends her life listening to what people say.
More importantly, she listens to what they don't.
Sariah DuBois in Hidden District knows how to recognize patterns, especially the ones people would rather keep hidden.
She is a therapist, a daughter, a sister, a niece, a friend, and part of a family whose definition of helping people is considerably more complicated than most.
Sariah understands patterns.
The pause before an answer.
The story someone tells twice but changes slightly the second time.
The thing a person carefully avoids saying.
Her profession taught her to listen.
Her family taught her that listening can come with consequences.
She carries other people's stories.
Before sunrise, Sariah usually runs. Running quiets her mind. It gives everything she's carrying somewhere to go. But some mornings require different medicine.
In Chapter 8 of Hidden District, The Weight of What Isn't Said, Sariah begins a Tuesday already feeling its weight. She trades the run for a very particular white chocolate mocha and five uninterrupted minutes of peace. She knows those five minutes won't last.
They rarely do.
Sariah spends her days hearing what people have learned to live with.
Control disguised as concern.
Fear disguised as routine.
Silence mistaken for peace.
Her instinct is to help. Sometimes immediately. Sometimes before she's had enough time to ask herself where helping ends and interfering begins.
That's where Sariah becomes complicated. Because she doesn't simply recognize patterns in strangers. She recognizes them in her own family.
There are levels to this work.
Sariah knows Hidden District has rules. What she is beginning to understand is that knowing the rules and understanding who made them are two different things.
She recognizes patterns. She notices when something shifts, when something doesn't fit, when a silence carries more weight than an answer. But recognition only gets you so far when you're standing inside a structure you haven't fully mapped.
And Sariah has never been particularly good at leaving a question alone.
Then there's Zandra.
Some relationships are too old to explain cleanly. Sariah and Zandra have history that existed long before the reader arrives.
Friendship. Family. Loyalty. Hurt.
There was a time when Sariah could tell Zandra the ugliest truth to her face, and they could still split a plate afterward.
What remains between them now isn't that simple.
Sariah keeps reaching.
Zandra keeps deciding how much access reaching earns.
Neither woman is entirely wrong.
Neither woman is untouched by what happened between them.
Sariah knows how to sit across from someone and recognize the weight of everything they aren't saying.
The harder question is whether she can do the same when the silence belongs to the people she loves.
In Hidden District, listening is part of Sariah's work.
Knowing what to do with what she hears is something else entirely.
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