Page 91 of Main Event

“Yeah, I heard.”

“Psychology Board, Boxing Commission, Bar Association.” She looks at the skyline. “She’s thorough.”

“She’s desperate,” I say. “Bill said so. You said so. Desperate people get thorough.”

Andi is quiet for a moment. “Luke?”

“Yeah, baby?”

“I want to say something, and I need you to actually hear it.”

I look at her, then turn my body toward her, fully open to accepting what she has to say.

“What you’ve built—the psychology license, your volunteer work at the center, what you did for Marcus and the other kids—doesn’t go away because someone filed a thin complaint using an anonymous form. The board will clear it. The timeline is thirty days, and we respond on day twenty-nine.” She holds my gaze. “But I want you to know that I see what that license means. What it cost you to put it away when you went to camp, and what it meant to pick it back up.” She doesn’t look away. “She’s not taking that from you.”

I look at her for a long moment.

“She’s not taking any of it,” I say.

“No,” Andi agrees. “She’s not.”

We sit on the deck until the Vegas morning gets too warm to stay outside comfortably. Then we go in, order room service, and eat at the small table by the window, talking about things that aren’t the investigation—Mack’s expression when he watched the Friday session, whether Reyes has ever smiled in a professional context, and the absurdity of a city that never goes quiet.

At some point, she reaches across the table and takes my hand.

“Win tomorrow,” she says. She doesn’t wait until morning or when she’s ringside. She says it now, the way she says the important things before the moment arrives rather than in it.

“I’ll do my best, baby,” I say.

She looks at me, this time with obvious intensity.

“Win,” she says again.

That night, I lie awake for a while after Andi is asleep.

It’s not from nerves—I have made peace with the fight, similar to how you settle into something you’ve fully prepared for and can’t prepare for any additional details. It’s the calm of someone who has done the work and now just needs to trust it.

I lie in the dark and think about three licensing boards, a machine running out of moves, and a woman who has been operating for thirty years and is now filing anonymous complaints on a Saturday morning because the documentation is coming together and the clock is running, and she’s doing what cornered animals do.

She remains dangerous, possibly even more so in this setup. Mack explained that a fighter who believes they’re losing fights with less strategy and more desperation, making them harder to read than someone who thinks they’re winning.

But we’ve been reading her for months.

I close my eyes.

Four days.

I think about everything on the other side of it—the story breaking, the documentation going to the journalists, her hired henchman’s testimony linking the physical actions to the institutional ones, the machine finally having to answer to something other than itself.

I think about Andi saying ‘win’ across the room service table, like it was the simplest thing in the world.

I think about a beach somewhere with unlimited umbrella drinks and no governance councils within a hundred miles.

I go to sleep.

CHAPTER TWENTY

LUKE