Page 125 of Main Event

“Go,” she repeats. Her tone isn’t unkind—just resolute, like someone confident in their purpose and prepared to act.

I go.

Luke arrives in eleven minutes, which tells me something about how he drove.

He comes through the center’s front door—the one that faces the street, the one I built to face outward on purpose—crosses the activity floor, finds us in the corridor, and he’s already taking my hand before he’s fully stopped moving.

He looks at me.

“Hey, baby,” he says.

“Hey, yourself,” I say.

“How are you doing.”

“Ready,” I say. “Let’s go.”

LUKE

Mackenna Grace Woods arrives at three twenty-two a.m. on a Wednesday in August.

She’s small and emphatic, and she announces herself to the room with a clarity that immediately and completely reminds me of her mother. She has dark hair, and when she opens her eyes and looks up at me for the first time, they are the unsettled blue-gray of someone who hasn’t decided yet what color they’ll be.

I’m holding her before I’ve fully processed that I’m holding her.

“Hey,” I say softly. My voice comes out different—lower, quieter—like some part of me already knows she deserves careful speech. “Hi, my little love. We’ve been waiting for you.”

She looks at me.

I don’t know what she sees. I know what I see—something that didn’t exist yesterday, exists now, will exist for the rest of my life, and has already reorganized everything in about thirty seconds flat.

I look at Andi.

She’s watching us. Her face has the expression it takes when she’s decided something is exactly right and is letting herself believe it.

“Mackenna,” she says, trying the name out loud for the first time outside the conversations where we chose it. It fits. I knew it would—we chose it because of Mack, because of what it means to show up and keep showing up, and because we wanted her to carry that in her name from the beginning.

“Mackenna Grace,” I say.

Andi extends her hand and gently touches the baby’s small fingers. The tiny fingers instinctively grasp hers—a natural, automatic response of someone just beginning life, reaching for what is within reach.

“Hi, my little love,” Andi says. Quietly. Just for her. “We built you a door.”

ANDI

My parents died in a car wreck in August when I was six years old.

I’ve been reflecting on that this morning, in the unique way you do when you’re home from the hospital, the baby sleeps in the next room, and the world feels like it has just shifted in a way that remains unfixed.

August. The same month.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence. In fact, I now believe that very little is truly accidental—not as I once thought—since I understand that many events I considered random are actually the workings of the machine. But this one is different. This one feels like life showing you how far you’ve come.

My parents died in August when I was six, and Mackenna Grace Woods was born in August when I was twenty-nine.

I crossed that whole distance. All of it. Through every iteration of the system and the machine, through the loneliness of someone who realized too early what it means to be alone in the world.

And I’m still here.