Page 60 of Main Event

Kelly nods slowly. It’s a different nod—expanding the frame beyond her own situation to include everyone still inside the one she came from.

My father speaks for the first time. “What do we need to do?”

“Keep your routine,” I say. “Don’t change anything visible. Bill will be in touch about the adoption file this week. Beyond that—just keep doing what you’ve been doing.”

My father nods. My mother is looking at Kelly the way she has looked at Kelly since the first day she came to this house—like she already knows exactly what Kelly is to this family and has been waiting for the paperwork to catch up to what she already knows.

Kelly looks at her. “I already have the name,” she says. Not to me. To my mother. “The paperwork is just the paperwork.”

My mother reaches over and puts her hand on Kelly’s. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to.

We stay for an hour. My mother makes tea nobody asked for but everyone accepts. Kelly goes back to the kitchen for her homework—math, which Andi helps her with for twenty minutes with the same precision she brings to everything, treating Kelly like someone fully capable of understanding if given the right frame.

I sit with my father at the kitchen table. He doesn’t say much. Neither do I. We’ve always been able to be in a room together without filling it.

At one point he looks at me and says, “You’re okay.”

Not a question.

“Yeah,” I say.

He nods. That’s it. That’s the whole conversation, and it’s enough.

When we leave, Kelly walks us to the door. She hugs Andi first—a real hug. Then she looks at me.

“Luke,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“Win the fight,” she says. “For all of us.”

I look at her. Fifteen years old, pencil still tucked behind her ear, standing in the doorway of the house that is already hers regardless of what any document says.

“Count on it,” I say.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

LUKE

Mack sends me home at nine-thirty in the morning.

Not suggests. Not recommends. Sends.

I’m three rounds into a mitt session that should have been easy work, maintenance work, a rhythm I can usually find even when the rest of the world is trying to crawl under my skin. But I’m chasing the punches instead of throwing them. I’m forcing the timing. Trying to manufacture sharpness through effort, which is how you turn a small problem into an expensive one.

Mack catches the right hand on the pad and lowers both mitts.

“Nope.”

I reset my feet. “Again.”

“No.”

“Mack.”

He strips the mitts off and tosses them onto the bench with a finality that ends arguments before they properly form. “You’re done.”

“I just got here.”