Page 103 of Main Event

Thirty days.

Eighteen months in a facility with voluntary paperwork that made that word meaningless. A twenty-year journal in her possession that documents everything Jackson’s operation did and everything Evelyn instructed. Thirty days.

“Tell Daniel yes,” I say. “Whatever he needs from us.”

Bill nods. He makes a note. “There’s one more thing.” He looks at me over his glasses. “The second piece runs on Thursday. The journalist has been working the trafficking layer separately—a different reporter, different outlet, coordinated release with the first piece but held for seventy-two hours to give the FBI time to position.” He stops with the folder half closed. “It goes deeper than governance consulting.”

The room is quiet for a moment.

“How deep?” Luke asks.

“Deep enough that three of Evelyn’s former advisory positions are expected to be suspended by the end of the week. Deep enough that two placement agencies named in the documentation have already retained criminal defense attorneys.” Bill closes the folder. “Deep enough that it’s going to be loud for a long time.”

I think about Deja at eight years old in the system. About the girl who disappeared from a placement in a family reunification that had no family. About a fifteen-year-old who saw something, reported it, and was told she was unstable.

“Good,” I say.

I go to the center at noon.

Not because there’s a crisis—there isn’t. The communications team has everything under control, the board has been briefed, and the statement has run. I go because it’s where I need to be. The place I built, knowing what it needed to be, is still standing, still running, still doing what it was built to do.

Mrs. Alvarez is at her desk. She looks up when I come through the door, and her expression does that thing it does when she’s decided something and is waiting for the moment to say it.

She stands up.

“I read it this morning,” she says. “All of it.”

“I know,” I say.

She crosses to me and wraps both arms around me—not the brief professional contact of a colleague, but a real embrace—and I let her. She’s been in this building for six years. She called me before eight a.m. the morning she found those files. She kept her face neutral as I told her what Kelly’s file meant. She started calling the security company before I asked.

She’s been in this with me for a long time.

“Is it over?” she asks.

“The loud part is starting,” I say. “The over part comes later.”

She pulls back and looks at me. Nods once. The nod of someone who understands the distinction and accepts it.

“Deja is here,” she says. “She came in early.”

I look through the window into the activity room. Deja is at the homework table with two of the younger kids, helping them with something. She doesn’t know the full scope of the story—not what it means for her specifically. She just came in because this is where she comes.

She looks up when I walk past the window. She gives me a small nod—her version of acknowledgment, the one she reserves for moments when something has happened that she doesn’t have words for yet.

I nod back.

Then I go to my office, and I get to work.

LUKE

I spend the day at the gym.

Not training—Reyes has given me a mandatory week off—an enforced rest for someone who understands that a body needs recovery before it needs the next thing. I’m there because it’s where I think clearly, moving through the space without purpose, letting the day settle.

The phone has been going since we landed. Mack called at ten—two words, his version of congratulations. Reyes texted something that was characteristically efficient. My parents called at eleven, and I talked to them for twenty minutes, my mother asking questions she’s been holding for months, my father quiet the way he gets when something has confirmed what he always believed but never said.

“Kelly’s adoption,” my mother said at the end.