Page 114 of Main Event

“That’s the only offer,” I say. “Everything. Or nothing.”

Marin looks at me for a long moment.

“Everything,” she says.

I stand up.

I find Brandon in the hallway outside the conference room. He’s standing at the window at the end of the corridor, looking at Atlanta doing what it does in late October—gray sky, the city running, indifferent and continuous.

I stand beside him. We don’t say anything for a moment.

“She spent two years building a record,” I say.

“I heard,” he says. The walls aren’t thick. “She knew eventually it was coming.”

“Yes.”

He looks at the city. “That doesn’t fix it.”

“No,” I say. “It doesn’t.”

“But it might help someone.”

“Yes,” I say. “It might.”

He nods. He is a man putting something in the right place—not forgetting it, not forgiving it, just deciding where it lives so he can keep moving.

“Come on,” he says. “I’ll buy you coffee.”

We take the elevator down.

Outside, Atlanta greets us as it always does—quietly and without fanfare, with the city seemingly assuming that whatever occurred in the conference room upstairs is our concern, not its.

We find the coffee place on the corner.

We sit together, taking in the heaviness of the day, the information Marin just confirmed, and the impact this monster has had on everyone we love.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

LUKE

Daniel calls Bill on a Monday in early November.

The facility has been cooperating with the state medical board for two weeks. The institutional protection that kept Delia contained is gone, the network that placed her there is under federal investigation, and the legal process Bill initiated in October has concluded. Her discharge is scheduled for Wednesday morning.

Daniel wants us there.

Not because he thinks she needs protection, exactly. Because he knows the machine’s methodology—he’s spent two years studying it—and he knows that the morning of a discharge is when you move if you’re going to move. When paperwork is changing hands, staff are distracted, and a new face in the hallway has a plausible reason to be there.

Bill agrees. I call Brandon.

“Wednesday,” I say.

“I’ll be there,” he says. No hesitation.

The facility is in Tennessee.

Three hours north of Atlanta, a private campus set back from the road behind a gate and a long driveway lined with trees shedding their leaves. It looks exactly like what it claims to be—a well-funded residential treatment center, quiet and orderly, the kind of place that communicates care without requiring you to examine what care means behind that gate.