Page 80 of Main Event

“I’ve been watching,” she says. “There’s a difference.”

I look at her.

“I watch everything,” she says. “That’s not the same as seeing.” She turns toward me. “I see you, Luke. What you’re building in that gym. What you’ve built here.” She looks at our hands. “What we’ve built together.”

I put my coffee down on the step, and I take her face in my hands.

She looks at me—the beautiful directness of Andi when she’s decided to let herself be fully seen.

“I love you,” I say. “Not despite all of this. Not in spite of what we’re carrying. Because of who you are in the midst of it.”

She closes her eyes for a second. Then opens them.

“I love you,” she says. “And when this is over, I want a week where nothing explodes.”

I almost laugh. “I’ll see what I can arrange.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know you are.” I brush my thumb across her cheekbone, then across her lips. “A week. Just us. Wherever you want.”

“Somewhere with a beach. Sun, salt, sand, and unlimited umbrella drinks,” she says. “And no governance councils within a hundred miles.”

“Done.”

She leans into my hands.

We stay on the back deck until the coffee is gone, the neighborhood has gone quiet, and the cool air has shifted from pleasant to actually cold. Then we go upstairs, close the door on everything waiting outside, and I have her all to myself for the rest of the night. I brand every last inch of her with my lips, my tongue, and my love.

The investigation is moving. The documentation is being assembled. Five weeks from tonight, there will be a fight, a story breaking, and a machine being dismantled piece by piece.

But tonight… tonight there is just this. Just us.

I’m in the gym by seven the next morning.

Reyes is already there. He looks up when I come through the door, reads something in my face that satisfies him, and says nothing about it.

“Footwork today,” he says. “Then we talk about the jab.”

“Sounds good,” I say.

I tape my hands, and I get to work.

Four weeks and six days.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

ANDI

On a Thursday morning in late September, my mother’s first cousin, Jean, leaves a voicemail. She took me in when I was six, then gave me to the state after realizing she couldn’t access my inheritance.

I don’t recognize the number. I almost don’t answer it. I’ve been managing my phone carefully since the story broke about the gas station footage, and unknown numbers have been a particular source of caution since then. But something makes me play it. The area code is in Georgia, not Atlanta.

Her voice is older than I remember. Thinner. The unsteadiness of someone who has rehearsed what they’re going to say and then, when the moment arrived, found that the rehearsal wasn’t enough.

“Andi. This is Jean. Jean Ledbetter. I don’t expect you to—I know we haven’t spoken, and there’s no reason you’d want to hear from me.”

She pauses, and I can hear her breathing.