Page 27 of Main Event

“Andi.”

“I know.” My voice stays level. I can feel the pressure behind my ribs, and the work it takes not to let it surface. “I know what she does. I know the methodology.”

But sitting in that room while she looked at through the window and watched those kids and said, “Your work speaks for itself⁠—”

My throat closes. I breathe past it.

“That’s what I had to hold,” I say. “The room—the weight of her credibility, the children in that room reduced to proof, and my own response shaped carefully enough that no one could see what it cost.”

“And you held it.”

“I held it.” A beat. “But I wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. Not in that room performing gratitude for a woman who wrote instructions on how to destroy me before I was old enough to fight back.”

“I know, baby.”

“She’s very good at making you feel like she’s on your side,” I say. “That’s the part that’s hardest to sit with. Not the threat. The warmth. Because she means it, Luke. That’s what I couldn’t stop thinking about the whole time. She genuinely believes she helps the things she touches.” I look out the window. “She believed it when she wrote that memo too.”

A silence.

“I can see you from here, baby. Just walk past the next intersection. I’m right here.”

I look up. Half a block ahead, his truck is at the curb, the window down. He doesn’t wave. He just looks at me through the windshield and lets me come to him.

I get in.

He doesn’t say anything. He places his hand gently on the back of my neck—its comforting weight, his palm radiating warmth—and I briefly close my eyes, allowing myself to simply feel everything flowing through me at the moment. I don’t try to suppress the emotions. I don’t have to pretend when I’m with him. He simply lends me his strength until I’m sure I can hold my own again.

“Okay,” I say.

“Okay,” he says.

He pulls out into traffic.

We’re three blocks from home when I say it.

“She’s gathering information in real time. Not just from the board positions. From watching people.” I look at the city passing by. “She looked at me the way she looks at everything—like she’s reading the architecture underneath the surface. Deciding what’s load-bearing and what isn’t.”

“What did she decide about you?”

“That I’m useful and manageable.” I hear myself say it. “That’s what she came for. Confirmation that the approach is working. That I’m where she wants me.” I watch the streetlights begin to come on in the early evening. “She left satisfied.”

“Good,” Luke says.

“It doesn’t feel good.”

“I know.” He glances at me. “But her being satisfied is the only thing that keeps us ahead of her. And allowing your opponent to think you’re weak and vulnerable doesn’t let them read you in advance. They make the wrong assumptions, and it costs them in the end.”

I know he’s right. I completely understand the strategic logic of it. That doesn’t make it easier to sit in a room with her for ninety minutes and hand her the performance she came for.

He pulls onto our street. The house remains as usual—ordinary, unremarkable, reflecting the life we’ve been creating together. Someone swept it today. The gym bag is still in its spot. The space behind the bookcase is where it belongs, with the device we left still transmitting the carefully maintained silence of two people who have stopped discussing the important things in their living room.

“Luke,” I say.

“Yeah, baby.”

“I need twenty minutes.”

He looks at me. He knows what twenty minutes means—not rest, not processing, not decompression. The twenty minutes when I sit somewhere quiet and let the day reorganize itself into something I can carry forward.