Page 24 of Main Event

“He’s escalating.” A beat. “Not just the methods. The intimacy of his intrusions. He’s getting closer to both you and Andi.” He gives it a moment to land. “I want you to think about that.”

I stand in the parking lot in the August heat, and I think about a man who can enter a gym with a security code, a house that was swept clean that same morning, and a hospital pharmacy.

“I’m thinking about it,” I say.

“Good.” Mack hangs up.

I stand in the lot for another minute. Then I go back inside.

Reyes is waiting on the floor.

“All of you this time,” he says. Not a question.

I roll my shoulders. I think about eleven weeks. About what has to happen in them and what I have to be on the other side.

“All of me,” I say.

I tape my hands, and I get to work.

Mack calls back at two in the afternoon.

Not about the new locker codes. Not about Reeves or the security protocols. Something else entirely, in the voice he uses when he’s decided to say something he’s been sitting with for a while.

“The device,” he says. “The one behind the bookcase.”

“Still there,” I say. “Reeves confirmed it’s still transmitting.”

“I know it’s still there.” Something in his voice changes. “That’s what I want to talk about.”

I wait. Mack doesn’t explain things before he’s ready to explain them, and I learned a long time ago not to push.

“She’s listening to that room,” he says. “Which means she hears whatever you and Andi decide to say in it. You’ve been keeping the important conversations elsewhere. That’s smart. But you’re only playing defense.” He waits. “I want you to think about what you could do if you stopped.”

I stand in the gym parking lot in the August heat and think about what he’s saying. The device is still transmitting. Evelyn is still listening. And every conversation we’ve had in that living room since Reeves swept the house has been calculated silence—two people who stopped discussing the things that matter in the room she owns.

But calculated silence is one thing.

Calculated noise is something else entirely.

“I’ll call Andi,” I say.

“Call Bill too,” Mack says. “You need him to know what you’re doing before you do it. This only works if the story holds.”

They come to the house that evening—Mack and Bill, separately, within twenty minutes of each other. Andi is already home. I didn’t tell her what it was about on the phone, just that Mack had an idea and that Bill needed to be in the room when we talked about it. She read enough from my voice to be waiting in the kitchen when I arrived, coffee made for four.

We sit at the kitchen table. Not the living room. Never the living room anymore, not for anything real.

Mack puts his hands flat on the table and looks at Andi. Not the way he looks at fighters he’s assessing. The way he looks at things that matter to him personally, which is a shorter list than most people realize.

Andi looks at him. She doesn’t ask what this is about. She waits.

That’s all he needs from her. That’s always been all he needs.

Mack lays it out simply. The device is still active. Evelyn’s operative has been inside the house twice—once to plant it, once to move the gym bag—which means the device is the one piece of this operation that belongs to them that we still have access to. Every other advantage they have is invisible to us. This one isn’t.

“You’ve been using it as a negative,” he says. “Not saying things because she’s listening. I want you to use it as a positive. Say things because she’s listening.”

Bill takes it from there. What they need her to believe is simple: that the documentation is incomplete. That Bill is weeks away from having enough to move on anything actionable. That Andi and Luke are still in the early stages of mapping her network—building the picture, not yet ready to hand it to anyone.