Page 41 of Main Event

I pick the page back up.

“Andi,” he says.

“I see it,” I say.

My parents died in 2002. I entered the system in 2003. The case number on this memo is not my name. But the timeline is mine.

I set the page down on the table. I look at it. The hard discipline of staying in your body when your body wants to leave.

“It’s not conclusive,” Luke says carefully. “The case number could match other estates. Bill needs to cross-reference⁠—”

“It’s mine,” I say.

He doesn’t argue. He knows what I know.

We sit with it for a moment. Then I pick the page back up, and we keep going.

The second folder is Jackson.

His last few months alive. The federal investigation was closing in. The communications between his people and Evelyn’s network as the walls moved. The sequence of decisions made in the seventy-two hours before he disappeared.

And then the last document in the folder—a single page, sparse, the language of someone writing for a record they intend to survive them.

Daniel’s handwriting.

I knew what was going to happen to him. I told myself it wasn’t my business. I told myself he’d made his choices. I told myself a lot of things. None of them was true. I want whoever reads this to know that I knew and didn’t stop it, and that I have to live with that. But will not die with it too.

I read it twice.

Then I close the folder.

The kitchen is very quiet. The AC hums. Outside, the neighborhood moves through its evening—a neighbor’s car, a dog down the street, the ordinary sounds of a world that doesn’t know what’s sitting on this table.

Luke is watching me.

I look at the closed folder. I think about a man who has been living carefully for two years, who sent a package and then a second file, who walked into Bill’s office and said I should have been louder in 2011.

I think about my parents. About a six-year-old who remembered warmth and hands but not faces. About a system waiting to receive her.

I think about Deja at eight years old.

About the network that had already identified her before she found my door.

I think about what it means to build something in the middle of all of this and still have it standing.

“Okay,” I say.

Just that.

Luke doesn’t say anything. He reaches across the table, takes my hand, and pulls me gently out of my chair and into him. I let myself be held. Fully. Both arms, his chin on my head, the planted solidity of someone who is not going anywhere.

I don’t cry. I’m not sure what I do. Something releases—not grief, not yet, that’s coming—but the long-held tension of carrying something alone that you haven’t let anyone else hold yet.

He holds it with me.

After a while, he says quietly, “We’ll call Bill tomorrow.”

“Yes.”