Page 120 of Main Event

“I know what’s happening,” she says. “With the investigation. The federal case. The placement agencies.” She holds my gaze. “I know because I lived it. I have names. I have descriptions. I have—” She stops. “I remember specific things. The kind of things that would matter in a federal case.”

I look at her. Fifteen years old. In the system since she was eight. Found this door herself four months before the machine identified her.

“You want to testify,” I say.

“You went,” she says. “To the legislative committee. You stood up and told what happened to you.” She looks at the table. “I want to go too.”

I think about the legislative committee, the prepared remarks, the chair putting her phone down at the two-minute mark, and the cost of it.

“It’s hard,” I say. “Not the testifying. The before and the after. People will know your name. People will know your history.”

“People already know,” she says. “The network already knows who I am. My file was on Mrs. Alvarez’s desk.” She meets my gaze. “I’d rather they know because I stood up than because they pulled a record.”

I hold her gaze for a long moment.

She’s fifteen. She’s had this since she was eight. She found this door herself because she needed somewhere to go, and she kept coming back because she decided it was safe.

She’s asking me if it’s safe to do this.

“I’ll talk to Bill,” I say. “And your caseworker. And we’ll find you the best attorney available who does this kind of work. And we won’t move until you’ve had time to think about it—really think, not just the first feeling.” I hold her gaze. “This is your decision. Not mine, not Bill’s, not anyone else’s. Yours.”

She nods. The nod of someone who has never been told that before and is deciding whether to believe it.

“Okay,” she says.

“Okay,” I say.

She opens her textbook.

I sit with her at the homework table for a while—not doing anything specific, just being present. The afternoon program runs around us, the building does what it does, and the front door still faces the street.

After a while she says, without looking up from her work: “Andi?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you for building this place.”

I look at her bent head. At the textbook. At the homework she’s doing in a building she found herself in because she needed somewhere to go.

“Thank you for finding it,” I say.

“Andi?”

“Yes, sweetheart?”

“Do you think Same and Linda meant it when they said they wanted to adopt me too?” Deja looks down at the homework table, removing an invisible mark from the surface with her finger. “Do they really want to be my family?”

“Yes, Deja, they mean exactly what they say. They love you. Is that what you want?”

“I think so.”

That’s as close to a “yes” to my questions as I’ll get from Deja.

But it’s enough for now.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

LUKE