Page 43 of Main Event

She lies down. I turn off the lamp and lie beside her and she finds my hand in the dark the way she always does.

Outside, the street is still empty. The neighborhood is still sleeping. He’s long gone—these people don’t linger—but the card is in a bag on the kitchen counter, and tomorrow it goes to Bill, and it joins a list of intrusions that started with a device behind a bookcase and has arrived, in the space of a few months, at our driveway on the night we read the worst thing we’ve ever read.

He’s getting closer.

We need to finish this before he decides to stop leaving cards.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

ANDI

Icall Linda first.

Not Sam. Linda. I’ve learned over two years that Linda is where the family’s heart lives, and Sam is where its hesitation lives. If I want a yes that holds, I need to start with her.

She picks up on the second ring.

“Andi.” Warm. She always sounds warm. It used to make me careful. Now I know it’s genuine, which is almost harder.

“I need to talk to you and Sam,” I say. “Together. Can I come over?”

“Of course. Tonight?”

“Tonight.”

When I get there, Sam opens the door.

He looks the way he always looks—composed, measured, with the polish of a man who has spent his life in rooms where composure matters. But there’s something underneath it when he sees me. There has been since the gala. An awareness that the distance between us has never been fully named.

“Andi,” he says. “Come in.”

Linda squeezes my arm once—her version of a full embrace when she’s reading that something serious is coming.

We sit in the living room. Kelly is upstairs—I hear music faintly through the ceiling coming from her room. Sam and Linda are across from me. Everyone here knows a question is coming.

“I need to talk to you about a girl,” I say. “Her name is Deja. She’s fifteen. She’s been coming to the center every day for four months.” I pause. “She’s been sleeping wherever she can find shelter for three years. Abandoned buildings. People she knows. She ran from a foster placement when she was twelve.”

Linda closes her eyes briefly.

“Why did she run?” Sam asks.

I look at him directly. “Because the adults responsible for her safety sold her to people who had no business being near her. She was eleven when it started.” I hold his eyes. “The same network that’s been targeting me. The same people.”

The room is quiet.

“I’m asking you to consider taking her in,” I say. “Not as a project. Not as a cause. As a daughter who needs somewhere that is actually safe, with people who have already proven they understand what that means.” I look at Linda. “Like you did with Kelly.”

Sam is quiet for a long moment.

“Andi,” he says. “Before we talk about the girl—I need to say something.”

I wait.

“What I did.” He looks at his hands. Sam Woods, who has never looked at his hands. “The investigator. Your records. I told myself it was due diligence. That I was protecting the family’s interests.” He looks up. “It was wrong. It was a violation of something that wasn’t mine to touch, and it caused harm, and I’ve wanted to say that to you directly for two years, and I haven’t found the way.”

The room is very still.

“The thing is,” he says, “I now understand what those records mean. Not only for you, but for anyone who’s experienced what you’ve been through. The system determines your limits. It also chooses which version of your history others can see. Essentially, the system weaponizes your past against you.” He pauses. “I’ve done the same. I disguised it as something different, but it’s the same thing.”