Page 79 of Main Event

“I did.”

“How old were you the last time she made it for you?”

I think about it. “Maybe twenty. Twenty-one.”

Andi is quiet for a moment. Stirring.

“She’s a good mother,” she says. Quietly. Not wistful—appreciative. The recognition of someone who knows what good mothers are worth because she understands what it means to not have one.

I tighten my hands on her waist.

“Yeah,” I say. “She is.”

We stay like that for a moment—me behind her, the stove going, the music low. The stubborn ordinariness of a life that has been under sustained assault for months and is still here, still making dinner, still standing in a kitchen at six-thirty-two on a Thursday evening like two people who get to do this.

“Andi,” I say.

“Mm.”

“Thank you for tonight.”

She sets the spoon down, turns around in my hands, and looks at me. Her face in the kitchen light—the woman who reads rooms for a living, who has been reading the most dangerous one available for months, and who came home and made dinner.

“Thank you for trusting me with it,” she says. “The investigation. Knowing when to be in the gym and when not to be there.”

“You told me who to be in that gym.”

“You already were,” she says. “I just named it.”

We eat at the table with actual candles because Andi found them in a drawer and lit them without ceremony, the way she does things she decides are worth doing. We talk about small things—a MaxMorgan artist she’s been working with who has a genuinely extraordinary voice, the back gate contractor who finally showed up and actually fixed it, and whether Mack would come to the fight with or without being asked.

“With,” I say.

“Definitely with,” she agrees.

After dinner, she washes while I dry, a routine we’ve fallen into without needing to discuss it. The music still plays. At some moment, she’s quietly humming along to something, not singing it for an audience—just being in the kitchen with me in the evening.

I dry a bowl and watch her and think, “This is the fight. This is what I’m taking something for. Not the title. This.”

Later, we sit on the back deck with the coffee that has become our version of Southern porch living at the end of the day. The September night has gone fully cool—Atlanta finally letting go of summer, the air carrying the first real hint of what’s coming. She’s in my jacket, her feet bare on the step below, and she’s leaning against my shoulder, her coffee held in both hands.

“Five weeks,” she says.

“Five weeks.”

“How do you feel?”

“Sharp,” I say. Reyes’s word. It’s the right one.

She’s quiet for a moment. “Reyes is good for you.”

“Yes, he is. Mack was right to bring him in.”

“He sees what you’re becoming.” She looks at the pool, the yard, and the twilight sky. At the back gate, finally fixed. “Sometimes it takes someone outside to see that.”

I think about what she said in the kitchen. You already were. I just named it.

“You’ve been seeing it,” I say.