Page 35 of Main Event

Which means I didn’t lie to Marin. I just told her the last thing I believed to be true before my brother started using the device as a weapon.

That’s the cleanest kind of lie.

“She’ll ease off,” I say. “Think she has time she doesn’t have.”

“That’s the idea,” Luke says. He breathes out. “Brandon. I’m going to tell you everything. Soon. I just need a few more days to⁠—”

“I know,” I say. “The order matters. You told me.”

“Yeah,” he says. “It does.”

I hang up. I get in my car. I sit in the parking garage for a moment before I start the engine, the same way I did when I found my research files on the passenger seat three weeks ago.

A different garage, with new information, yet the same quietness of a man who has just grasped something he can never forget.

Marin went home last night thinking she’d done her job. Thinking she’d confirmed the timeline through an unimpeachable source. Thinking she had a month and a half to keep things in place before anything moved against the network she serves.

She’s wrong about all of it.

I start the engine, and I go to work.

LUKE

She comes in at seven, and it only takes me one look at her face to know something has been sitting on her all afternoon, but she hasn’t set it down yet. Her expression is set with the underlying determination I admire most about her. Even when she feels the weight of the world on her shoulders, she devises a plan to eradicate the threat and help those in need.

I’m in the kitchen. She sets her bag down, comes to where I’m standing at the counter, and puts her forehead against my shoulder.

Just that. No words.

I put my hand on the back of her head, and I hold her there. With my other arm wrapped around her waist and my hand splayed across her back, she melts into me like I’m the only man capable of holding all the pieces of her together. She’s reached the end of what she can carry alone.

She doesn’t want to need anyone. She doesn’t want to ask for help. This action is one of her tells. Her silence, combined with the intentional physical contact, is how she confirms I’m here and not going anywhere, no matter what hell rains down on us.

We stand like this for about sixty seconds. Then she straightens and says, “I’ll tell you over dinner. I need a minute first.”

“Take what you need, baby,” I say. I can do this for her. I can be this man. For her.

She goes upstairs. I finish making dinner.

She comes back down twenty minutes later, looking like someone who has put something heavy in the right place—not gone, but organized, carried differently. We sit at the kitchen table, and she tells me about Deja. The conversation. The name she recognized. What it connects to in Bill’s documentation.

I listen without interrupting. When she finishes, the kitchen is quiet for a moment.

“She trusted you,” I say.

“She did.” Andi looks at her hands. “I don’t know what that cost her. To say it out loud to an adult. After however many times she’s tried before and had it turned against her.”

“She chose the right person this time,” I say.

Andi looks up at me. Something in her face that isn’t quite a smile but is in that neighborhood.

“Yeah,” she says. “I think so.”

We eat. The conversation finds its way to smaller things—a MaxMorgan distribution call she has tomorrow, Reyes’s adjustment to my footwork that’s been clicking in the last two sessions, and whether the contractor is ever going to fix the back gate. The ordinary texture of a life that runs underneath everything else. A life that remains solid in spite everything else.

After dinner, we sit on the back deck with coffee, watching the water in the pool twinkle with the night lights. The August night in Atlanta is more than warm—it’s still downright sweltering. But the neighborhood is doing its normal late-evening things—a dog, a car, and someone’s television through an open window. I have my arm around her, and she’s leaning against me, and neither of us is talking.

“Luke,” she says eventually.