Page 32 of Main Event

A long silence.

Then she looks up at me, and what’s in her face isn’t grief—not yet. That will come later, when there’s more ground under it. What’s there now is the look of someone whose line of sight has just cleared. She can now see the full shape of the thing for the first time.

“Daniel’s second file,” she says.

“Might go further back than 2011.”

“Bill needs to look at it with that question specifically.”

“Yes, he does. Something tells me he was so focused on protecting you right now, he didn’t review everything that was prior to 2011.”

She nods slowly. Once. The measured nod of someone filing a new coordinate into an existing map and understanding that the map is larger than she thought.

I reach across the table and take her hand.

She holds it.

We sit in the kitchen while the evening comes in through the window, and neither of us speaks for a long time.

There’s nothing to say yet. There’s only what we know and what we’re about to find out, and the absolute certainty that whatever is in Daniel’s second file, we’re going to look at it together.

CHAPTER NINE

ANDI

Deja has been coming to the youth center every day for four months.

It’s not because she has to. The center doesn’t operate on obligation, and the kids who seek us out on their own terms do so because they want to—either they stay or they leave. She discovered the door herself and keeps returning on her own. This is significant to me in a way I don’t consciously analyze, because those who find their way here on their own are often the ones who needed it most and recognized that need before anyone else pointed it out.

She’s fifteen. She’s been in foster care since she was eight—that much she told Mrs. Alvarez on her second visit, the way you offer a credential, something that explains your presence without explaining too much. She started helping with the younger kids about six weeks ago—not asked, just started, the way some kids understand instinctively that contributing is a form of belonging.

I’ve been watching her since Evelyn’s visit. But I’ve also been watching her for something else.

She wears the same clothes in rotation. Three, maybe four sets—I’ve counted without making it obvious, the way you count when you’re trying to understand a situation without embarrassing someone. Clean, always. She takes care of what she has. But the rotation is too small for someone with a home to go back to, with a guardian doing laundry, with the ordinary accumulation of a life that has closet space.

She’s not going home to anything.

I know this because I’ve been that person. I know what it looks like from the inside—the careful management of scarce resources, the deliberate discipline of making yourself look ordinary when everything you own fits in a bag. I don’t say anything. I just notice.

Mrs. Alvarez noticed first. She flagged Deja to me months ago—before Evelyn’s visit, before any of this—in the quiet way she flags things that need my attention without requiring immediate action. “That girl. She stays until we close. Arrives before we open. Watch her.”

I’ve been watching.

Three days after Evelyn’s visit, I arrive early and find Deja sitting on the front steps.

Not waiting for the center to open. Just sitting. Like she has nowhere else to be at seven-fifteen in the morning.

She looks up when she hears my keys.

“You’re here early,” I say.

“So are you,” she says.

I unlock the door. “Come in. I’ll make coffee. There’s juice in the kitchen.”

She follows me inside without asking whether it’s okay. She’s been here enough times that she knows the kitchen. She finds the orange juice without being shown. She sits at the homework table and watches me make coffee and doesn’t say anything.

I don’t say anything either.