Page 119 of Main Event

She nods once, then looks at Daniel. Something passes between them—an unspoken understanding between two people who have been through something together and don’t need to narrate it.

“The federal investigators want the journal,” Bill says from his end of the table. “The original goes to them. But I’ve arranged for a full copy—every page—to be made before we turn it over.”

“I know,” I say. “That’s not what it’s for.”

Everyone looks at me.

“The copy,” I say. “I’m going to write a book.”

The room is quiet.

“Not a legal document. Not testimony. A book.” I look at the journal under my hand. “Everything that happened. What the machine does, who it does it to, and how it survives. The people it moved through.” I look at Delia. “With permission.”

She considers this.

“Will you use my name?” she says.

“Only if you want me to.”

“Will you use yours?”

“Yes,” I say. “As loud as I want.”

Something in her face—not quite a smile, but the precursor to one. “Then use mine too.”

The drive home is different from the drive up.

Not in any way I can point to. Luke still drives. I still drink coffee. The hills are still bare.

But something has shifted—the way it does when something you’ve been under for a long time finally lifts. Not finished, exactly. The book isn’t written. The federal case will take years. The machine is still moving, just in smaller, quieter ways.

But the part we were supposed to do is done.

I hold the copy of the journal in my lap.

“She said if you’re still standing, she can stand up,” Luke says.

“Yes.”

“You’ve been standing for a long time.”

I look at the hills going past.

“So has she,” I say. “She just did it in a different room.”

He drives.

I open the copy of the journal to the first page.

Deja finds me at the center two days later.

Not in my office—at the homework table, where she usually is, where she’s been coming every day for eight months now. I’m passing through when she looks up.

“Can I talk to you?” she says.

I sit across from her.

She closes her textbook. She’s been thinking about what she wants to say. I can tell from her unusual stillness, the way she’s holding herself together to deliver something she’s worked out in advance.