Page 30 of Main Event

“I need a little while,” I say. “I’ll call you this evening.”

I hang up, and I set the phone on the table. My entire body feels numb, yet my nerves are frayed like live wires thrashing wildly. I sit in the kitchen of the home that Luke and I have been building for going on two years, and I let the truth hit me full force.

Jackson Rhoades is dead.

I’ve known this in some part of myself since the yacht, since the investigation, since the shape of an absence that doesn’t feel like flight. I’ve known it the way you know things you can’t afford to examine directly until you have enough ground to stand on.

Now I have ground.

He’s dead, and Delia has been in a facility for eighteen months under paperwork that claimed voluntary admission, and Evelyn arranged it the same way she arranged everything—through institutional access, through people in the right positions, through the patient method of someone who has spent thirty years learning how to use the system against the people the system is supposed to protect.

I think about Delia getting off that yacht. The two days she had between understanding what was coming and losing the person she went to for help. The week between that betrayal and the facility.

I think about being fifteen. The report I filed. The adults who told me I was confused, unstable, unreliable. The record that became a weapon.

The same play.

She’s been running the same play for thirty years, and I have been inside versions of it since⁠—

I stop.

I sit motionless at the kitchen table. Not because I choose to. Because something in me has gone quiet, the way a room does when a sound you didn’t realize was constant suddenly cuts out. Something is pressing at the edge of my thoughts. I can feel it—not distant, not theoretical, but close enough that it’s interfering with everything else. This isn’t a pattern you stand back from and admire. This is one you live inside. One that only becomes visible when it no longer has you in it.

I keep turning it over in my mind, looking for a clean angle, a perspective that isn’t mine.

But I can’t find one, no matter which angle I try to look from. All I can see is that I’m still in the middle of it.

I reach for it.

It slides away.

I sit in the absence for an hour. It doesn’t come.

Eventually, I close the laptop, go upstairs, lie on the bed, and stare at the ceiling.

I wait for Luke to come home.

LUKE

Reyes runs me until six.

The session is the kind that doesn’t leave room for anything else—full presence required, the deliberate design of a trainer who has decided that the best thing for me right now is to be so physically occupied that the noise outside the gym becomes irrelevant. He’s not wrong. For six hours, the only thing that exists is the work.

I come home at six-thirty.

Andi is in the kitchen. Not cooking, not working—sitting at the table with both hands wrapped around a cup of tea she hasn’t touched. She’s looking out the window, but her eyes aren’t tracking anything.

The laptop is closed. The files are stacked.

She looks like someone who brought something home with her and set it down carefully, only to realize hours later that she doesn’t know where to put it.

I’ve seen this version of her before. Not often. She doesn’t let things accumulate on the surface—she processes fast and files clean, keeps moving. When something stops her like this, it’s because the thing is larger than her usual processing can contain.

I pour myself a glass of water. I sit across from her.

“Tell me,” I say.

She tells me. All of it—Bill’s call, Daniel’s second file, the yacht timeline, Jackson confirmed dead, Delia’s admission to the psychiatric hospital, the same method applied to a woman in her fifties that was applied to a fifteen-year-old girl. Marsh gone. The colleague died. The evidentiary thread is cold at both ends.