Page 56 of Main Event

“I try,” I say.

“She said you testified. In front of people.”

“Yes.”

Deja looks at the window. At the activity room beyond it. At the door that faces the street that she found herself, that she kept coming back to even when she wasn’t sure she could trust what was behind it.

“Okay,” she says.

Just that.

I reach across the desk and put my hand over hers.

She doesn’t pull back.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

BRANDON

Luke comes to my office on Thursday.

I’ve been back at my desk for a few days after spending one day in the hospital and one day at home with cracked ribs, a broken nose, an injured jaw, and a right hand that a doctor wrapped without asking too many questions. The bruising has settled into something spectacular. My assistant did an outstanding job of not reacting when I walked in this morning.

I called ahead and told her I’d had a fall.

She’s worked for me for four years, and she knows I don’t fall.

Luke knocks on the open door at ten. He’s in gym clothes—he came straight from training, which tells me he scheduled this for the first break Reyes allows. He looks at my face without making a sound. Then he comes in, closes the door, and sits down across from me.

He sets a file folder on the desk in front of me.

“Everything,” he says. “Like I promised.”

I look at the folder. Then at him. “Walk me through it.”

He walks me through every page of it. Every jot and tittle. Every dark, horrible secret. Everything I’ve never wanted to know but now can’t unknow.

He doesn’t give me the watered-down version he would have given me before—the careful, managed version that protected me from the Marin variable. This is the full, unedited, unadulterated version. He walks me through all of Evelyn’s positions and how Bill mapped them. Daniel’s package and what was in it. The 2011 memo on Andi and her mental hospital incarceration. He shows how the same verbiage that was used to condemn her was used against her again recently. With my help. Then he walks me through the second file and what it establishes about Jackson and Delia Rhoades. I can clearly see the trail of bodies through the witness chain and what’s been happening to everyone who stood in Evelyn’s way. Then he shares his discovery of the listening device in their home. The gas station ambush. The hospital death.

The center’s server. The files that were left on Mrs. Alvarez’s desk. Two specific children’s names were printed and placed where Andi would find them. One of them was Kelly, the young girl who has stolen our family’s hearts. The one I’ve called my little sister from day one and would protect with my life. The purposeful adoption delays that are preventing her from claiming our last name as her own. Legally, at least. She’s ours, regardless of their tactics.

I listen without interrupting. I’ve been good at this my entire career—receiving information in sequence, not reacting to each piece but putting the puzzle pieces where they belong until they assemble into one large picture in front of me. I do it now the way I do it in every case that matters—without rushing the picture toward a conclusion before it’s complete.

When he finishes, the office is quiet.

I look at the file on my desk.

“Kelly’s adoption,” I say.

“Yes.”

“She’s been blocking it.”

“Bill thinks so. The pattern fits her MO—administrative friction, regulatory questions, nothing that looks deliberate from the outside. But it keeps stalling at the same points, through the same channels.” He looks at his hands. “Our parents have been fighting this for almost two years. They didn’t know why. Neither did I.”

I think about dinner at my parents’ house. Marin was at the table while my mother described the delays. The small sound of sympathy Marin made. Filing it. Knowing exactly why the process kept stalling was because she was connected to the person making it stall.

“Marin was in the room when Mom mentioned the delays,” I say.