Page 83 of Main Event

Not the information—I’ve been processing information my whole life. The admission that it’s been his too, all this time. That he’s been in this with me without my knowing. That I’ve had someone on my side longer than I realized.

I look at him. At the man who put me to work at sixteen in a gym full of fighters, taught me everything he knew, called me darlin’, let me call him Pop, and showed up every time without being asked.

“Did you know him well?” I ask. “My father.”

“Well enough,” he says. “He would’ve liked Luke.” He pauses. The kind that comes when someone chooses the next words carefully because they’re the truest. “He would’ve made him work for it first.”

Something shifts in my chest.

Because Mack did that. He did exactly that. He put Luke in the ring, made him prove himself, and handed him to me only when he decided Luke was worth handing. He did the thing my father would have done because he knew my father, understood what my father would have wanted, and has been—without either of us saying it, without a ceremony or a document—my father.

He’s been my father this whole time.

I look at him across the coffee table and fully, without qualification, understand that this is what family looks like when it builds itself from what survives. Not the family you were born into. The family that showed up.

I reach across the table and put my hand over his.

He looks down at it. Then up at me.

He doesn’t say anything.

Neither do I.

We don’t need to.

After a while, I ask the thing I’ve been holding since he started talking.

“What was he like?” I ask. “My father. Tell me something I wouldn’t find in any file.”

Mack is quiet for a moment. Looking at something that isn’t in this room.

“He was funny,” he says. “Not in a way that just happens naturally. The other kind—where the observation hits you before you realize it, and then you can’t forget it.” He pauses. “He used to say that the music business was simply the fight business with better lighting. He wasn’t wrong.”

Something shifts in my chest. Because I have said almost exactly that. Not to anyone who would have told me it came from somewhere.

“He was also stubborn,” Mack says. “In the way people are stubborn when they’re usually right and know it. He didn’t apologize for that. He just made sure he was usually right.” The corner of his mouth moves. “You come by it honestly.”

I look at him. At the man who has been watching me apply my father’s qualities to every room I’ve been in for the last fifteen years, in a gym he built, toward a life my father would have recognized.

“Thank you,” I say. “For telling me. For the last fifteen years. For all of it.”

He looks at our hands on the coffee table. Mine over his.

“He would have liked this,” he says. “Seeing you like this. The center. The man you chose.” He pauses. “All of it.”

Luke comes in from the kitchen with three cups of coffee. He sets them down without a word, sits beside me, and rests his hand on my back. We all three sit together in the den as a family as the Atlanta evening comes in through the window, and nobody says anything for a long time.

It’s enough.

It’s exactly enough.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

ANDI

The third meeting with Evelyn is a private one.

It’s not the entire governance council—just the two of us, meeting over coffee at a spot she recommended on the west side. It’s meant to be neutral ground, though it isn’t really—she picked it, after all. She knows the staff and has been here in different contexts I can’t see, which is precisely the point.