Page 126 of Main Event

The book is half-written. I work on it in the mornings, during the two hours before Mackenna wakes, in the quiet of a house where Luke is already at the gym, and the neighborhood is still asleep. I write it the way I do everything that matters—methodically, completely, without softening the parts that cost something to say. Delia’s name is in it. My parents’ names are in it. Maria’s name is in it. Jean’s voicemail is in it, transcribed from memory, every fragmented word.

The federal case is moving. Slowly, as federal cases do, but moving. The machine is still out there—Evelyn, wherever she is, is still a woman who spent thirty years building something and will spend whatever years she has left trying to find ways to keep building. The institutional version of her is gone. The impulse isn’t.

But Daniel’s file and Marin’s testimony are in federal hands. Deja has testified before a closed legislative session and will testify again when the case reaches the next stage. The second piece ran in November, and the third—the one that goes deeper into the trafficking layer—is scheduled for spring.

The machine is still out there.

So am I.

And now so is she—Mackenna Grace, sleeping in the next room, named for the man who built a gym and showed up and never left. My daughter. Luke’s daughter. Ours.

I finish the paragraph I’m working on.

I save the document.

I go check on the baby.

LUKE

Kelly’s adoption was finalized on a Tuesday in March.

Brandon was in the room, just as he had promised. My mother cried as she had said she would, and she did. Afterward, my father shook the judge’s hand and expressed his gratitude with the genuine sincerity of someone who had been waiting for a formal acknowledgment to match a recognized truth.

Kelly signed her name on the document.

Kelly Woods.

She briefly held the pen, gazing at her writing before lifting her eyes to meet ours—all of us in the room, a unique group brought together by the chance of loving the same people—and she spoke.

“Okay. Now it’s real.”

Brandon put his arm around her.

“It was always real,” he said. “Now it’s just also legal.”

She laughed. The full version—the one that arrives when she stops managing it.

Then Deja, beside her, chimes in. “Does this mean I can steal your hoodie?”

“You’ve been stealing my hoodie for six months,” Kelly said.

“Legally now,” Deja said.

The room went up.

The center is still running.

Mrs. Alvarez sits at her desk. The mural has become a bit more crooked than last year because two students repainted a section in April, and their measurements were optimistic. The homework tables are consistently full each afternoon. The door still looks out onto the street.

Deja is headed to Georgia State—criminal justice, which surprised no one who has been paying attention. She wants to understand the system from the inside so she can change it. She asked Andi to write her a recommendation letter.

Andi wrote four pages.

The dean of admissions called to tell her personally that, in twenty-two years of reading applications, she had never read a recommendation letter like it. Deja got in.

She’ll start in January.

Shane is in camp for his title fight, which everyone in the gym knows will be the fight of the year. Mack is running him the way he runs everything—completely, without shortcuts, with the demanding care of someone who believes in what he’s building.