Page 101 of Main Event

Luke shifts beside me. His hand finds mine in the dark without either of us speaking—the habit of two people who’ve learned each other’s rhythms.

I hold his hand.

I close my eyes.

Monday is coming.

We’re ready.

BRANDON

I’m in my hotel room down the hall by ten-fifteen.

I sit on the edge of the bed, and I look at the Vegas skyline through the window, and I think about Marin in the hospital waiting room. The gray cardigan. The performance of presence.

She texted me yesterday.

Heard about the fight. Congratulations to Luke.

Nothing about us. Nothing about the week. The careful calibration of a message designed to keep a line open without revealing anything.

I didn’t respond.

I’m ending it Monday. Carefully, as promised—incompatibility, distance, the natural conclusion of something that ran its course. Nothing that tips anything. I’ve drafted the conversation in my head enough times that I could deliver it in my sleep.

I look at my wrapped hand. My broken nose, mostly set now. My jaw that had to be reset, thankfully without surgery. The ribs that make deep breathing a considered choice. She knew what was coming when I walked out of her apartment. She made a call. Someone was waiting.

I think about Kelly at the kitchen table in our parents’ house, arguing with me about her history paper source. The way she looked when Luke confirmed it was connected to Jackson. I’m not a child. I’ve been waiting for someone to say it out loud.

She’s been waiting two years.

The adoption is going to happen. Bill is handling it directly now, and Bill doesn’t lose. He decides to win. Kelly is going to have our last name, a bedroom that’s permanently hers, two parents who chose her, a brother who showed up damaged and didn’t make it about himself, and another brother who would fight anyone anywhere to protect her.

She said okay when I told her I wanted to be in the room.

I’m going to be in the room.

I lie back on the hotel bed, stare at the ceiling, and think about what Monday brings and what comes after it, and about the settled, certain knowledge that whatever it costs, it was worth doing.

The story runs in eight hours.

We did the work.

I close my eyes.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

ANDI

The story goes live at six-oh-three Monday morning.

I know the exact time because I’m awake when it happens—sitting on the hotel deck in Vegas with coffee and my phone, watching the timestamp on the first article flip from pending to published. Three outlets simultaneously. The investigative piece, the financial network documentation, and the institutional suppression operation laid out over eighteen months, with names, dates, and paper trails that don’t leave room for deniable interpretation.

I read it once.

Then I put my phone face down on the table and watch the sky over Las Vegas go from dark to gray to the burnt orange of a desert sunrise.

I built the center because I knew what it needed to be. I testified before a legislative committee because the record needed to reflect what the system does to children. I sat across from Evelyn Carrington three times and performed gratitude while holding everything I knew about her behind my eyes.