Page 33 of Main Event

After a while, she says, “The woman who came in last week.”

I keep making coffee. “What about her?”

“What did she want?”

“She said she wanted to support the center’s work. She’s on a philanthropic review board. She offered resources.”

Deja is quiet.

“Did you take them?” she asks.

“I’m still evaluating.” I turn around. “Why?”

She looks at the table. “I’ve seen her before.”

I go very still. “Where?”

She’s quiet long enough that I understand she’s deciding something.

Then, she continues. “There was this place. When I was eleven. My foster mom took me to a party at someone’s house—a big house in a nice neighborhood. She told me to be on my good behavior. Be polite. Be friendly.” She turns the juice cup a half turn before she goes on. “She was there. The woman. She talked to my foster mom for a while. I remember thinking she seemed important.”

I carry my coffee to the table and sit across from her.

“What happened at the party?” I ask.

“Nothing happened to me.” She says it carefully. Like the distinction matters. “My friend—another girl from placement—she came too.

“After that party, my foster mom started asking about her. What she was like. Whether she was close to her case worker.” She looks at her hands. “A month later, my friend was moved to a different placement. No explanation. I looked for her later. She was gone.”

The center is very quiet around us.

“What did you think happened to her?” I ask.

Deja looks up at me. The wary look of a fifteen-year-old who has spent four years understanding something incrementally and has now arrived at the full weight of it.

“I think I know now what I didn’t know then,” she says.

“Yes,” I say. “So do I.”

She holds my eyes. “You’re not going to call anyone?”

“Not without talking to you first.” I hold her gaze. “Nothing happens without your permission. That’s not a rule here. That’s just how it works.”

She looks at me for a long moment. Something measuring. Then she nods, not agreement, not trust, just acknowledgment—and picks up her juice.

We sit together while the center wakes up around us.

She doesn’t tell me about herself yet. She told me about her friend.

That’s enough for today.

BRANDON

Marin makes dinner on Tuesday.

This is not unusual. She cooks when she’s thinking through something—the same way I run when I need distance, the way Luke goes quiet in gyms. I’ve come to read the meals as a kind of emotional barometer. Simple food means she’s content. Elaborate food means she’s working on a problem. Tonight it’s pasta, which is somewhere in between—not absent, not urgent. Holding something lightly.

I’ve been running my own barometer on her since the governance council meeting. Since the name that didn’t produce the right reaction. I’ve been watching the way she reads the news, what she reaches for first on her phone in the morning, how she frames questions about Luke and Andi. The data is inconclusive. The instinct isn’t.