Page 53 of Main Event

“Their address is in the file. Bill will call you about the next steps. I wanted you to hear it from me first.”

“Are they⁠—”

“They don’t know yet. Bill will help us figure out the right way to tell them.” I keep my voice steady. “Luke. Stay in the gym. Finish the session. There is nothing you can do in the next two hours that Bill and I can’t handle, and Reyes needs you there.”

A long pause.

“Okay,” he says. The word settles like something he had to work to produce.

“I’ll call you the minute I know anything else.”

“Andi?”

“Yeah?”

“Be careful today.”

“Always,” I say.

I go back inside.

The center begins its morning routines, with programs underway and Mrs. Alvarez at her desk, while the building goes about its usual activity. At 3:15 p.m., Deja enters the door as she always does—carrying her backpack, wearing headphones around her neck, embodying the relaxed confidence of someone who feels secure here. Deja has been at Sam and Linda’s for two weeks. She still comes to the center every day, which surprises exactly no one who understands that the door she found is hers, regardless of where she sleeps.

She doesn’t know someone printed her file and left it on a desk this morning.

I watch her cross the activity floor and sit down with two of the younger kids to help with homework.

She doesn’t know. And I am going to make sure that the people responsible for that file wish they had never walked into this building.

LUKE

Reyes has me sparring at nine.

My partner today is a welterweight named Castillo, who fights out of a gym in Decatur—fast, elusive, doesn’t stand and trade, makes you chase him, and punishes you for it. He’s the kind of fighter who exposes what you do when your plan stops working—exactly why Reyes brought him in to spar with me.

This is a test.

Three weeks ago, I would have been frustrated by him. I’d have pushed forward, tried to impose my game, gotten tagged coming in because I was thinking about controlling the fight instead of reading it.

Today I let him move.

That’s what Reyes has been building toward—the understanding that patience isn’t passive. That waiting isn’t losing ground. He’s been in my ear for four weeks about the difference between protecting something and taking something, and it’s starting to live in my body rather than just my head.

Castillo throws a combination and steps left. I don’t follow. I reset, cut the angle, and he runs into me instead of away from me. My straight right hand punch lands clean. He covers up.

Reyes, from the corner, says, “There it is.”

Three words. That’s Reyes’s version of a standing ovation.

We go four rounds. By the third, Castillo has figured out that running doesn’t work on me the way it used to, and he’s trying to make me come to him. The old version of me would have obliged. The new version makes him wait, controls the center, and forces him to commit first.

When Reyes calls time, I’m breathing hard but not spent. There’s a difference between tired and damaged. Reyes has been teaching me to know which state I’m in.

Castillo touches gloves. “You’re different from what you were on the footage,” he says. Meaning the gas station footage that’s now an online viral sensation. “In that footage, you look like a brawler. In here, you’re something else.”

“Working on it,” I say.

Reyes hands me water and looks at me the way he looks at things he’s satisfied with but won’t say yet.