Page 1 of Main Event

CHAPTER ONE

ANDI

Idon’t sleep.

Not the restless kind—not tossing, not staring at the ceiling, not even with Luke’s arm finding me in the dark, silently lending his strength and protection as he rests. I lie still, and I think, which is different, and which I’ve learned to let happen rather than fight. The body needs rest even when the mind won’t take it. I’ve gotten good at that compromise.

Luke is asleep beside me. He went out the way he does after a hard day—completely, with no wasted effort, like a light switch someone threw. I watched his breathing slow, and I thought: this is what I’m protecting. Not in the abstract, the way most people think. But this. This man. This room. Our own version of ordinary—the life we’ve been building for almost two years, under sustained assault for most of that time.

Evelyn Carrington is sitting in my office right now in the abstract sense that she is sitting there in my mind, which may be the more dangerous version. I’ve replayed the meeting fourteen times since Luke’s truck crossed the intersection on the way home. Her composure. Her warmth. The way she looked at the photographs of the kids on the wall and said, “Your work speaks for itself,” and meant it, which is the most unsettling thing about her—she isn’t performing. She is genuinely committed to the version of herself she presents. That’s what thirty years of deceitful behavior produces—thirty years by Daniel’s count, and nothing I saw yesterday gives me reason to doubt it. Not a liar. Someone who has made the lie into an identity so completely that the distinction has ceased to matter.

She thinks she came into my center today and found a target who doesn’t know she’s a target.

She’s wrong about that.

I eventually slide out of bed at two, careful not to wake Luke, and go downstairs to get the notebook out.

The kitchen at five-thirty in the morning has become my favorite space. It has become something I depend on to start my day. The neighborhood is quiet. The light hasn’t committed to anything yet, as the world is breaking. I make coffee the way I always do—the habitual ritual of it, the same measurements, the same order—because ritual is a form of control, and right now I will take every form of control available to me.

I’m on my second cup when Luke appears in the doorway.

He’s still in what he slept in, his hair unbrushed. The rugged, sexy, tousled version of him that I love is exclusive to me. He gazes at me across the kitchen table, with coffee and a notebook, looking like someone who has been crunching numbers for hours.

He doesn’t ask, “How long have you been up?” or “You should have slept”. He crosses to the cabinet and gets a mug.

That’s one of the things this year gave us too.

“Walk me through it,” he says, sitting down across from me and wrapping both hands around the mug. He looks at me the way he does when he’s made a decision to understand something completely before he shares his opinions.

So I walk him through it. Everything from the moment Mrs. Alvarez appeared in the doorway—the card, the warmth, the two resources offered, and why both were real, because Evelyn doesn’t need to manufacture usefulness. She already has it. The way she looked at the activity room window and the photographs. The way she said, “I hope you’ll let me help protect it,” with the purposeful inflection of someone who has been in this room, inside this exact structure, long enough to know where the pressure points are.

Luke listens without interrupting. That’s new too—the version of him that came out of camp, that came out of the arrangement and its aftermath, and the six weeks of distance and the reconciliation and everything that followed. He used to interrupt when he got ahead of where I was going. He doesn’t anymore. He trusts me to arrive.

“She doesn’t know we have the file,” I say.

“No, not yet. Don’t underestimate her, though.”

“She came in as the solution. That’s the play—she positions herself as the person who stabilizes what she destabilized. She becomes indispensable to those she helps. Indispensable people don’t get scrutinized.”

“Same play as 2011,” he says.

“Same play.” I look at my coffee. “Older. More practiced. She’s had a lot of years to refine her tactics.”

Luke is quiet for a moment. Outside, the neighborhood is beginning its morning—a car starting somewhere, the first suggestion of a garbage truck in the distance, and the squeak of school bus brakes on the next street over. The ordinary world proceeds in its ordinary way, entirely unaware of the extraordinary circumstances we’re facing inside this house.

“We let her run it,” he says. “But we don’t take our eyes off her.”

“We’ll give her enough rope to hang herself,” I agree. “We’ll give her exactly what she expects to find—a woman who’s had a hard year and is grateful for institutional support. We move on her when we understand the full current scope, not just what Daniel’s file documents from 2011 forward. We need to know what she’s running now.”

“Bill?”

“Definitely need to talk to Bill. Today.”

He nods. He drinks his coffee. He looks at the notebook on the table between us—pages covered in my handwriting from the hours between two and five-thirty, the methodical mapping of everything Evelyn’s public profile shows about her current positions. I’ve been building the picture.

“You’ve been at this since two,” he says. Not an accusation.

“I sleep better after I’ve done the work,” I say.