Page 22 of Main Event

“Luke, you are everything to me. If you think I can let you step into that ring in eleven weeks with a man who can kill you without being fully prepared—mentally and physically—you’ve obviously been hit in the head one too many times.” She smiles sweetly at me, as if that ends the conversation.

Apparently, it does, because she immediately moves on to the next topic.

“Reyes wants dinner.”

“What?”

“He called while you were in the shower this morning. He wants to take us to dinner on Thursday. Some place on the west side he likes.” The corner of her mouth. “I think he wants to assess my knee and determine whether I’m a liability to your camp schedule.”

“He would absolutely do that.”

“I told him Thursday works.” She picks up her book. “He’s not as frightening as he thinks he is.”

I think about Reyes’s expression in the gym. “He’s exactly as frightening as he thinks he is.”

“Then it’ll be an interesting dinner,” she says.

Thursday dinner is, in fact, interesting.

Reyes is different at a restaurant table than he is in the gym. He’s quieter, more observational, the version of him that watches rather than directs. He asks Andi three questions over the course of the meal that are ostensibly about her advocacy work but are covertly about her pain tolerance, her decision-making under pressure, and her capacity to let me do what I need to do without pulling my focus.

She answers all three correctly without knowing she’s being tested.

At the end of the meal, walking out, Reyes falls into step beside me while Andi speaks to someone she recognizes near the exit.

“She’s good,” he says quietly.

“You have no idea, man.”

“She’s not going to pull you. Not even if it gets harder.” He glances at her. “That’s the right woman for what you’re doing. Keep her close.”

I watch her across the restaurant—the way she stands, the careful distribution of her weight because of the knee, the way she’s laughing at something the other person said, like the last two weeks didn’t happen.

“I intend to,” I say.

She tells me about the invitation to the governance council over dinner the following evening.

We’re at the kitchen table—just us, chicken and pasta, the ordinary comfort of a weeknight at home. She’s been thinking about it since the invitation arrived. I can tell by the way she brings it up—directly, no preamble, the way she handles things she’s already decided.

“I’m going to accept it,” she says. “The governance council meeting. Evelyn’s territory.”

I set my fork down.

“She’ll be there,” I say.

“That’s why I’m going.”

I look at her, waiting for the rest of the story.

“She’s had a week of footage, Commission filings, and a dead man in a hospital,” Andi says. “She’s watching the news cycle the same way everyone else is. If I don’t show up in her space—if I change my behavior, reduce my exposure, pull back from anything that touches her network—she knows she’s getting to us.” Andi holds my eyes. “I’m not giving her that. She gets zero satisfaction from me.”

“She’ll read you,” I say.

“I know.”

“She’s been doing this for thirty years. She’ll look for anything that tells her you know more than you should.”

“I know that too.” She’s steady. Completely steady. “I know what her playbook looks like from the inside. I’ve been living inside versions of it since I was fifteen. She doesn’t know I have the file. She doesn’t know what we know. That’s the one thing she doesn’t have.” She pauses, steady as anything. “I can hold on to that.”