Page 108 of Main Event

My parents.

I close the laptop.

I pick up my phone, and I call Luke. He picks up on the first ring.

“Read me something,” I say.

He pauses. He knows what I’m asking—not information, not analysis. Just his voice in my ear while I sit with something that costs more than I want to show.

He reads me the sports scores. The Atlanta weather forecast for the week. A review of a restaurant we’ve been meaning to try. His voice is steady and unhurried and completely present, reading the most ordinary things in the world while I sit at my desk in a building my father built, letting the morning do what it needs to do.

After a while, I say: “Okay.”

“Okay,” he says.

“Thank you.”

“Always,” he says. “Come home for lunch.”

“I’ll be there at noon,” I say.

I open the laptop back up.

I approve the draft with one suggested change—a single word in the paragraph about my parents that makes the language more precise without making it less true.

Then I go back to the distribution dispute, because MaxMorgan needs what it needs, and I am still the person who runs it.

LUKE

She comes home at noon.

I made lunch—nothing complicated. Just something I wanted ready for her.

She comes in, sets her bag down, and looks at the table. Something in her face shifts—something in her face does that small, familiar thing—the one that means she feels seen before she says anything about it.

She sits down, and we eat together.

“The second piece references my parents,” she says after a while.

“I know. Bill called me too.”

She looks at her plate. “It’s handled carefully.”

“I know that too.”

She looks up at me. “It’s going to be strange to see it in print. Something I’ve known for weeks—that I’ve been keeping for months, really, even before I knew the full picture—just suddenly exists in the public record.”

“Yes,” I say. “It will be strange.”

“I approved the draft,” she says. “Changed one word.”

“Which word?”

She tells me. It’s the right word. Of course it is.

“After Thursday,” I say, “it’s just true. It doesn’t need to be carried anymore. It can just be true.”

She looks at me for a long moment.