Page 51 of Main Event

Luke helps me off the table. He doesn’t make it seem like help. He just positions himself at the right angle while I move, which is the same thing.

“Come to the gym tomorrow,” he says. “Not to train. Just to be somewhere that isn’t your apartment.”

I look at him. “Are you offering me the gym as a place to process grief?”

“I’m offering you the gym as a place to be,” he says. “Mack will be there. Mack doesn’t require anything from anybody.”

I look at the door to the hallway. At Marin, through the exit—not visible from here, but present in the waiting room in her gray cardigan, pretending concern, doing what she does.

“Okay,” I say. “Tomorrow. The gym.”

He nods. We walk out together.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

ANDI

Mrs. Alvarez calls me at seven-fifteen on a Wednesday morning.

She doesn’t call before eight unless something is wrong. I know this about her the way I know everything about the center—from years of paying attention to what doesn’t change, which is the only reliable way to notice when something does.

“You need to come in,” she says. “Before anyone else gets here.”

I’m there in twenty minutes.

She meets me at the side entrance. She’s been at the building since six—I can tell from the coffee situation, two cups in, the alertness of someone who has been alone with something unsettling for an hour and needs another person in the room before she can fully name it.

She walks me to her desk without speaking.

The files are there. Two of them, printed and placed in the center of her workspace with the deliberateness of someone who wanted them found. Not dropped, not scattered—centered. The way you place something when the placement is the message.

Deja’s file is on top.

Everything. Her placement history, her current foster address, her school, her schedule, and her case worker’s name. Her intake record from the center—the day she first walked through the door, the programs she attends, and the staff she’s worked with. Four months of her life in this building, compiled and printed and left where Mrs. Alvarez would find it first thing in the morning.

I set it down carefully and look at the file underneath.

Kelly.

I go very still.

Kelly’s file is thinner—she hasn’t been a center participant in the same way as Deja. She’s been a presence through Luke’s family rather than as a program member. But whoever accessed the server found her anyway, pulled from the administrative records, where Luke’s parents are listed as her emergency contacts for a program donation account. The file includes her school. Her grade. The Woods family address.

And at the bottom, printed from what appears to be a public court record search, is a case reference number. Protected testimony. Juvenile witness, sealed proceeding.They know Kelly was a witness. They found the record, even sealed, or found enough of it to know it exists. They left it here to make sure I understood they know.

I stand at Mrs. Alvarez’s desk for a long moment.

Two children. One who found this place on her own and doesn’t know she was already in the network’s peripheral vision. One who shot Jackson Rhoades in my kitchen nearly two years ago and has been living with Luke’s parents ever since, waiting for an adoption that keeps hitting inexplicable delays.

The machine has been in this building, and it knows about both of them.

“Who is the second girl? Kelly?” Mrs. Alvarez asks.

I look at her. She’s watching me with the expression she uses when she’s already decided she can handle the answer—she just needs me to trust her with it.

“Kelly is connected to Luke’s family. She’s been through things I can’t fully explain right now, but she’s a documented witness in a sealed proceeding. Someone accessed that record, or enough of it to know it exists, and left it here.”

Mrs. Alvarez absorbs this without visible reaction, which is one of the things I value most about her.