Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
ANDI
Deja has been coming to the youth center every day for four months.
It’s not because she has to. The center doesn’t operate on obligation, and the kids who seek us out on their own terms do so because they want to—either they stay or they leave.
She discovered the door herself and keeps returning on her own.
This is significant to me in a way I don’t consciously analyze, because those who find their way here on their own are often the ones who needed it most and recognized that need before anyone else pointed it out.
She’s fifteen. She’s been in foster care since she was eight—that much she told Mrs. Alvarez on her second visit, the way you offer a credential, something that explains your presence without explaining too much.
She started helping with the younger kids about six weeks ago—not asked, just started, the way some kids understand instinctively that contributing is a form of belonging.
I’ve been watching her since Evelyn’s visit. But I’ve also been watching her for something else.
She wears the same clothes in rotation. Three, maybe four sets—I’ve counted without making it obvious, the way you count when you’re trying to understand a situation without embarrassing someone.
Clean, always. She takes care of what she has.
But the rotation is too small for someone with a home to go back to, with a guardian doing laundry, with the ordinary accumulation of a life that has closet space.
She’s not going home to anything.
I know this because I’ve been that person. I know what it looks like from the inside—the careful management of scarce resources, the deliberate discipline of making yourself look ordinary when everything you own fits in a bag. I don’t say anything. I just notice.
Mrs. Alvarez noticed first. She flagged Deja to me months ago—before Evelyn’s visit, before any of this—in the quiet way she flags things that need my attention without requiring immediate action. “That girl. She stays until we close. Arrives before we open. Watch her.”
I’ve been watching.
Three days after Evelyn’s visit, I arrive early and find Deja sitting on the front steps.
Not waiting for the center to open. Just sitting. Like she has nowhere else to be at seven-fifteen in the morning.
She looks up when she hears my keys.
“You’re here early,” I say.
“So are you,” she says.
I unlock the door. “Come in. I’ll make coffee. There’s juice in the kitchen.”
She follows me inside without asking whether it’s okay. She’s been here enough times that she knows the kitchen. She finds the orange juice without being shown. She sits at the homework table and watches me make coffee and doesn’t say anything.
I don’t say anything either.
After a while, she says, “The woman who came in last week.”
I keep making coffee. “What about her?”
“What did she want?”
“She said she wanted to support the center’s work. She’s on a philanthropic review board. She offered resources.”
Deja is quiet.
“Did you take them?” she asks.
“I’m still evaluating.” I turn around. “Why?”
She looks at the table. “I’ve seen her before.”
I go very still. “Where?”
She’s quiet long enough that I understand she’s deciding something.
Then, she continues. “There was this place. When I was eleven. My foster mom took me to a party at someone’s house—a big house in a nice neighborhood.
She told me to be on my good behavior. Be polite.
Be friendly.” She turns the juice cup a half turn before she goes on.
“She was there. The woman. She talked to my foster mom for a while. I remember thinking she seemed important.”
I carry my coffee to the table and sit across from her.
“What happened at the party?” I ask.
“Nothing happened to me.” She says it carefully. Like the distinction matters. “My friend—another girl from placement—she came too.
“After that party, my foster mom started asking about her. What she was like. Whether she was close to her case worker.” She looks at her hands. “A month later, my friend was moved to a different placement. No explanation. I looked for her later. She was gone.”
The center is very quiet around us.
“What did you think happened to her?” I ask.
Deja looks up at me. The wary look of a fifteen-year-old who has spent four years understanding something incrementally and has now arrived at the full weight of it.
“I think I know now what I didn’t know then,” she says.
“Yes,” I say. “So do I.”
She holds my eyes. “You’re not going to call anyone?”
“Not without talking to you first.” I hold her gaze. “Nothing happens without your permission. That’s not a rule here. That’s just how it works.”
She looks at me for a long moment. Something measuring. Then she nods, not agreement, not trust, just acknowledgment—and picks up her juice.
We sit together while the center wakes up around us.
She doesn’t tell me about herself yet. She told me about her friend.
That’s enough for today.
brANDON
Marin makes dinner on Tuesday.
This is not unusual. She cooks when she’s thinking through something—the same way I run when I need distance, the way Luke goes quiet in gyms. I’ve come to read the meals as a kind of emotional barometer.
Simple food means she’s content. Elaborate food means she’s working on a problem.
Tonight it’s pasta, which is somewhere in between—not absent, not urgent. Holding something lightly.
I’ve been running my own barometer on her since the governance council meeting.
Since the name that didn’t produce the right reaction.
I’ve been watching the way she reads the news, what she reaches for first on her phone in the morning, how she frames questions about Luke and Andi.
The data is inconclusive. The instinct isn’t.
We eat at the kitchen counter. She asks about a client meeting I had this afternoon. I tell her about it—a foundation board considering a new governance structure—and she listens with the attentiveness I used to find completely reassuring. She asks good questions. She always does.
Then she brings up Andi.
Not directly—she doesn’t do things directly when there’s a sideways approach available.
She brings up the Athletic Commission hearing, the three-week timeline, the way the press has been running with the gas station footage alongside the conduct file.
“It’s a lot of pressure on them both,” she says.
“All of this at once, on top of everything they’ve been dealing with. ”
“They’re managing,” I say.
“Of course they are.” She picks up her wine. “And the other thing—the investigation, the documentation she’s been building with Bill. I know Luke’s worried about the timeline on that too. How close are they, do you think?”
I look at her.
She’s asking the way she always asks things she wants to know—sideways, through the door of concern for someone else.
And the thing is, it does sound like concern.
It sounds exactly like concern. She knows how to make it sound like concern because she’s had enough practice, and because some part of her probably does feel it, and that’s the part that’s hardest to account for in any model I build.
I think about what Luke told me. Keep your routine. Don’t give anyone a reason to think your posture has shifted. Including Marin.
I think about the conversation I wasn’t in, the one that happened somewhere in Luke and Andi’s house in the last week.
The one I can tell happened because of a shift in how Luke carries himself when this subject comes up—something settled that wasn’t settled before.
Like a decision was made that he hasn’t told me about yet, and the making of it gave him ground to stand on.
I keep my voice easy. “They’re still working through the documentation.
Bill thinks it’ll be at least another month before they have enough to bring to anyone with real authority.
Maybe six weeks.” I take a bite. “Andi’s frustrated with the pace.
You know how she is—she wants to move faster than the evidence allows. ”
Marin nods. “That makes sense.” She sets down her wine.
Something in her face has relaxed—a small thing, barely visible, the quiet easing of someone who just received information they were looking for and have filed it where it belongs.
“At least she has Bill. He’ll keep her from getting ahead of what they can prove. ”
“Yes,” I say. “He will.”
I watch her reach for her fork. The conversation moves on. She asks about the fight’s press conference, whether Luke seemed ready. I answer. The dinner continues in its ordinary way.
And I think about that small easing in her face. The filing of information. The relief—because that’s what it was, relief—of a woman who needed to know how much time she had, and now does.
A month. Maybe six weeks.
She believed it completely.
I call Luke from the parking garage the next morning.
He picks up immediately. No gym sounds—he’s between sessions, or he saw my name and stepped out. Either way, he’s there before the first ring completes.
“She asked about the documentation last night,” I say. “The timeline. How close they are.”
Luke takes his time with the next question. “What did you tell her?”
“A month. Maybe six weeks. Bill keeping Andi from getting ahead of the evidence.” I pause. “She relaxed when I said it, Luke. Not visibly—you wouldn’t have seen it. But I saw it. She got what she came for.”
The silence on his end is the silence of someone absorbing confirmation of something he was already fairly certain about.
“Good,” he says. Quiet. Certain.
“You want to tell me what you did,” I say. Not a question.
He takes his time before he answers. “We used the device,” he says. “The living room. Said what we needed her to hear.”
I look at the parking garage ceiling. The concrete columns. The ordinary infrastructure of a building going about its business.
“So she heard the false timeline,” I say. “And then she sent Marin to confirm it through me.”