Page 116 of Main Event

Not doing anything. Just standing. The November air coming off the Tennessee hills, the trees mostly bare now, the sky the flat gray of a late-autumn morning. She tilts her head back slightly and closes her eyes.

Eighteen months.

Daniel stands beside her. He doesn’t speak. He just waits, the way you wait for someone who needs a moment to understand that the moment is real.

After a while, she opens her eyes. She looks at the journal under her arm, then at Daniel, then at me.

“Tell Andi I want to meet her,” she says. “When she’s ready. Not before.”

“I will,” I say.

She nods. She looks at the facility behind us—the long driveway, the trees, the gate standing open.

“All right,” she says.

She walks to Daniel’s car and she gets in.

The gate closes behind us when we leave.

ANDI

I spend the morning at the center.

Not because any one program needs me there. Mrs. Alvarez runs the morning programs with the kind of competence that doesn’t require my presence. I’m there because I need to be somewhere with purpose while Luke is three hours north of Atlanta watching a gate open. I’m there because I can’t sit in my kitchen and just wait.

I do the things that need doing. I review the month’s programming notes. I respond to the emails I’ve been deferring. I sit at the homework table for twenty minutes while two of the younger kids work through their reading assignments, and I listen to them sound out words the same way I sat at a table just like this one, in a building nothing like this one, and sounded out words no one made sure I understood.

At eleven-thirty, Luke texts.

She’s out. She’s okay. Heading to Daniel’s now.

I read it twice, then place my phone face down on the table to reflect on its meaning.

Bill confirmed weeks ago that the FBI considers her a witness, not a subject. Delia Rhoades walked out of a facility in Tennessee this morning. She held a leather journal under her arm. She stood in a parking lot, closed her eyes, and felt the November air. The world had changed. It doesn’t undo eighteen months, doesn’t undo what Jackson did, doesn’t undo the years before that—but it means the gate opened. The gate that should have opened a long time ago, through channels that should have been clean, operated by people who should have been trustworthy. The gate opened late. But it opened.

I think about Maria. About the girl in Daniel’s file whose name I know but whose face I’ve never seen. About the others—the ones the investigation confirmed, the ones it hasn’t reached yet. The ones for whom no gate opened.

Luke asked if I wanted to come. I said no. Not because I didn’t want Delia out, but because I wasn’t ready to be the first thing she saw when she walked through that door. She spent eighteen months in there, partly because of what I set in motion, among other forces, and the right order matters. Luke first. Daniel first. People she has an uncomplicated history with. Me when she’s had a day to breathe and has chosen to reach out. That’s what she said she wanted—when she’s ready, not only when I’m ready—and I’m going to respect that even when respecting it means staying busy in Atlanta while she regroups and figures out the next step in her life.

One of the kids at the homework table looks up at me. “Miss Andi, do you know this word?”

I look at the page. I know the word.

I lean over and help him sound it out.

I go home at three.

The house is quiet. Luke is still on the road—three hours each way, plus the time at the facility. He won’t be back until evening. I make tea I don’t particularly want and stand at the kitchen window and look at the backyard and the pool and the ordinary evidence of a life that exists in this house, regardless of what happens outside it.

I think about what I’ll say to her. When she’s ready to meet. What the right words are for a woman I haven’t seen since I was a child, who chose to keep a record of everything she witnessed, who stayed in that facility for eighteen months rather than sign whatever they needed her to sign—and who, when the gate finally opened, asked to see me first. I don’t arrive at the right words. That’s probably as it should be. Some things you don’t prepare; you just show up and let them be what they are.

She calls that evening.

I’m in the kitchen when my phone rings—a Tennessee number I don’t recognize. I pick up.

“Andi Morgan,” she says. Not a question. The voice of someone who has been thinking about this call for a while and has decided how to begin it.

“Yes,” I say.