Page 117 of Main Event

“This is Delia Rhoades.” Something moves on her end—a door, a car door. “I understand you’re the reason I’m making this call from somewhere other than that psychiatric facility.”

“A lot of people are the reason,” I say. “Daniel. Bill. Luke and Brandon.”

“You’re the reason the machine had reason to be dismantled,” she says. “The others are the reason it actually was. I understand the difference.”

I sit down at the kitchen table.

“Luke said you wanted to meet,” I say.

“Yes. When you’re ready. I have something for you. I’d like to give it in person.” Delia pauses, as though I might say no. “The journal. Twenty years of documentation. Jackson’s operation, Evelyn’s instructions, everything I witnessed and recorded.” Her voice is steady, the voice of someone who decided what to do with what they knew and spent eighteen months in a facility without deviating from that decision. “I started it because I thought someday it would matter. I kept it because it was the only thing in there that still felt like mine.”

I think about her in that facility. Voluntary paperwork that rendered that word meaningless. Gerald Marsh, who resigned before we could reach him. The colleague at the bottom of the stairwell. The institutional protection that surrounded her for eighteen months as she wrote in a leather journal.

She kept writing.

“I’ll come to you,” I say. “Wherever you are. Just say when.”

She pauses. Then something moves in her voice that might be relief, or the release of something she’s been holding for a long time.

“Next week,” she says. “Bill has the address.”

“I’ll be there,” I say.

After we hang up, I sit at the kitchen table for a moment. Luke comes in from the back. He reads my face.

“Delia called you,” he says.

“She kept a journal,” I say. “Twenty years’ worth of documentation.”

He sits across from me.

“She wants to give it to me in person,” I say. “Next week.”

He looks at me. At the kitchen table where we’ve sat with so many things over the last three months. The files, the coffee, the quiet mornings, and the hard nights.

“I’ll drive,” he says.

“You don’t have to⁠—”

“I’ll drive,” he says again.

I look at him.

“Okay,” I say.

Outside, Atlanta continues its usual rhythm. Inside, the kitchen feels warm, the coffee remains hot, and the man across the table has already made his decision, as he always does—calmly, without fuss or debate, just with the quiet confidence of someone who knows where he belongs.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Always,” he says.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

ANDI

Luke drives.

Three hours north on a Tuesday in early December, the Tennessee hills are now bare, with all leaves fallen and the sky reflecting a season that has fully settled in. I hold coffee in a travel mug, the window slightly open, embodying a person who has been steadily moving toward a goal and now feels it within reach.