Page 109 of Main Event

“That’s exactly right,” she says. “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“Sometimes it takes someone outside,” I say.

The corner of her mouth lifts slightly. She remembers saying that to me—about Reyes, about what he saw in the gym. She knows I’m giving it back to her.

“Insufferable,” she says.

“You love it,” I say.

She does.

We finish lunch. She goes back to MaxMorgan. I go back to the gym—not training, just movement, the body doing what it does when the mind needs somewhere to put itself.

The fallout continues outside our walls. The FBI issues a statement confirming an active federal investigation. Two more of Evelyn’s organizations announce governance reviews. The second piece is forty-eight hours from running.

And somewhere in Atlanta, in a building Andi chose, furnished and staffed with people who believe in the work, Deja is helping the younger kids with their homework.

She doesn’t yet know what Thursday’s piece will say. What it will mean for the system she came through. What it will mean for the girls still in it.

She’ll find out.

And when she does, I think she’ll understand that the door Andi built wasn’t just for her.

It was always for all of them.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

ANDI

The note arrives on Wednesday.

Not delivered by hand—left with the building’s front desk at MaxMorgan, no courier service, no return address. A cream envelope, high quality, my name written on the front in the same careful hand that wrote a very specific date on a whiteboard at my center in January.

The same hand that wrote a memo in 2011.

I recognize it before I open it.

I put on a glove, and I open it anyway.

One card. Heavy stock. Three lines, written in the same careful script:

I underestimated you in 2011.

I won’t make that mistake again.

— E.C.

I read it twice.

Then I set it on my desk, and I look at it for a long moment.

She’s not offering an apology; that’s not the intent. An apology would mean she believes she did something wrong, which Evelyn Carrington has never accepted. Instead, this is an acknowledgment—a professional evaluation from one operator to another. You exceeded my expectations. I’m updating my assessment accordingly.

She’s also not finished. That’s the other thing about this. “I won’t make that mistake again” is not a concession. It’s a statement of intent. She’s retreating—the institutional infrastructure is collapsing, the federal investigation is open, and the cooperation agreement will eventually become public record. She’s retreating the way she does everything—deliberately, with control, without pretending she’s doing anything other than what she’s doing.

She’ll be back. Not like this. Not aimed at us. We’ve become too expensive. But the machine will adjust. It always does. It will find a new front, new people to carry it forward. It’s been running for thirty years. It won’t stop just because this version collapsed.

And somewhere in the system, right now, there are girls who don’t know they’re already in the network’s peripheral vision.