Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
ANDI
The coffee meeting with Evelyn is on a Thursday morning.
I don’t know Deja sees it.
She arrives early—earlier than usual, before the morning program staff—and she’s coming through the side entrance when she passes the window of the small conference room where I’ve set up for the meeting.
I don’t see her. I’m managing the performance of being a woman who is grateful for institutional support, which requires my full attention.
She sees me.
She sees Evelyn across the table—the woman from the party. Sitting with me. Talking. Laughing at something.
She turns around and leaves.
She doesn’t come back that day. Or the next.
I notice on the second day. I don’t know what it means yet. I just notice the absence.
She comes back on Monday.
She doesn’t go to the homework table. She goes to the activity room and helps with the afternoon program and doesn’t seek me out.
I watch her from my office window, trying to read what’s changed.
She’s present but differently—a half-step more contained, the careful posture of someone who has made a recalculation.
I give her space.
Tuesday, same.
Wednesday, she’s at the homework table when I come through, and she looks up, and something in her face asks a question she hasn’t formed into words yet.
I sit down.
“The woman who came to the center,” I say. “I know you saw us talking.”
Her jaw tightens slightly. “I wasn’t spying.”
“I know. You came in early and saw us through the window. That’s not spying—that’s bad timing.” I hold her eyes. “I want you to know something about that conversation. I need you to understand what I was doing in that room.”
She waits.
“That woman has been connected to things that have hurt people,” I say carefully.
“People like your friend. I’ve been building a picture of what she’s involved in, and part of how I do that is by letting her think she has access to me.
By giving her exactly what she expects to find—someone who needs her help.
” I pause. “The coffee wasn’t what it looked like. ”
Deja is very still.
“How do I know that’s true?” she says.
“You don’t,” I say. “Not yet. That’s fair.”
She looks at me. The measuring look again, longer this time.
“My friend wasn’t the only one,” she says. “At that party.”
I wait.
“It was me too,” she says. “Not that day. But after. My foster mom made an arrangement. I didn’t understand what it was until later. Until I was old enough to understand what the word means.” She’s very controlled.
The control of someone who has rehearsed this. “I ran away from that placement when I was twelve. I’ve been on my own since then.”
The center is completely quiet.
“Where have you been sleeping?” I ask.
She pauses. The kind that means she’s deciding whether the test is over.
“Wherever I can,” she says. “Abandoned buildings sometimes. With people I know sometimes. The shelter on Peachtree once, but they report to the system, so I only went the once.”
I look at her. Twelve years old, running. Three years surviving the way kids survive when they’ve learned that the system’s version of safe is not the same as actual safe.
“Deja,” I say.
She looks at me.
“I was in the system from the time I was six,” I say.
“I know what it taught you about where safe actually comes from. And I know that every adult who has put you somewhere they called safe has been wrong about what that word means.” I pause.
“So I’m not going to tell you I have somewhere safe.
I’m going to ask you to let me try. And I’m going to tell you that if it doesn’t feel right, you can leave.
Nobody is going to make you stay anywhere. ”
She looks at the table.
“I’ve heard that before,” she says.
“I know,” I say. “I said it anyway because it’s true this time, and I need you to have heard it even if you don’t believe it yet.”
She’s quiet for a long time.
“Who?” she says finally.
“People I trust,” I say. “Which I don’t say easily. There’s a girl named Kelly—she’s fifteen, she’s been with them for almost two years. She came through the system too. I think you should talk to her before you decide anything.”
Deja looks at me.
“Can I think about it?” she says.
“Yes,” I say. “Take whatever time you need.”
She nods. She picks up her pencil. She goes back to the homework infront of her.
I go back to my office.
LUKE
Nine weeks out from the fight, the Commission calls Bill again.
This time it’s not a preliminary inquiry.
It’s a formal hearing notice. The conduct file has been reviewed by the standards committee, and they want me to face them in a room and answer questions about the gas station.
About the footage. About the man who died at Grady two days later with no identification and a medication error in his chart.
Bill calls me on the way to the gym. I pull over on Northside Drive, sit in the truck with the engine running, and listen.
“They’re not pulling your license,” he says.
“Not yet. The self-defense argument is holding,a nd the police report supports it. But the standards committee has questions about the unidentified man. The fact that he had no ID, no phone, a false name at intake—they want to understand what you knew about who these people were before you engaged.”
“I knew they were pulling my fiancée out of her car,” I say.
“I know that. I’m telling you what they’re going to ask.” His tone flattens. “Luke. The hearing is in three weeks. Three weeks before the fight. Whoever scheduled it on that timeline did it deliberately.”
I look at the cars going past on Northside. In Atlanta in September, the heat is finally starting to ease, and the city is running its ordinary morning routine.
“Evelyn,” I say.
“She advises two of the organizations that have filed formal complaints with the Commission in the last six months. I found that this morning.” Bill’s voice is level. “She didn’t manufacture the hearing. She just made sure it landed on a calendar that creates maximum pressure.”
I sit with that for a moment.
“What do I do?” I ask.
“You show up. You answer every question honestly and completely. You let the police report and Andi’s statement do the work they were designed to do.
” Then, slower, each word set down on its own: “And you do not—under any circumstances—let this affect your training. Because the timing is designed to get inside your head, and the best answer to that is a performance in that ring that makes the conduct file irrelevant.”
“Reyes is going to love this,” I say.
“Tell Reyes after the session,” Bill says. “Not before.”
I pull back into traffic.
I don’t tell Andi until that evening.
Not because I’m protecting her—we agreed a long time ago that protecting means standing next to, not deciding what someone can handle.
I don’t tell her until evening because she has a full day at MaxMorgan and a board call at the center, and she’s been managing Deja, the Delia file, and the Evelyn meetings, and I want her to have a day that’s just normal work before I add this to it.
She reads it in my face the minute I come through the door, anyway.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
I tell her about the hearing. The three-week timeline. Bill’s read on the scheduling. She listens with her arms crossed and her jaw set—the way she absorbs something she’s angry about and will not express it.
“She intentionally scheduled it three weeks before the fight,” Andi says.
“Bill thinks so.”
“It’s not a coincidence.” She uncrosses her arms. “It’s designed to split your focus. Hearing preparation, camp intensity, and Commission scrutiny all at once. She wants you distracted.” She looks at me. “Are you?”
“No,” I say.
“Good.” She nods once. “Then we prepare for the hearing the same way you prepare for a fight. Methodically. No shortcuts. Bill handles the legal piece, you handle the room, and the police report handles the rest.”
I look at her, studying her beautiful face, the set of her jaw, and the fire in her eyes.
“You’re not worried,” I say.
“I’m furious,” she says. “That’s different from worried.” The corner of her mouth lifts slightly—not quite a smile, but something in that neighborhood. “Go shower. Daniel’s file came today. Bill messengered the second one over. I’ve been waiting for you.”
ANDI
The file sits on the kitchen table between us.
Two folders. Daniel’s second file—the one he held back from the package he sent months ago, the deeper documentation he wasn’t ready to surface until he trusted the channel. Bill’s cover note says:
Read it together. Call me after.
Luke comes downstairs clean from the shower, hair still damp, in the worn gray t-shirt he wears when he’s done with the day. He pours two glasses of water. He sits across from me. He looks at the file.
“Ready?” he says.
“No,” I say. “Let’s go.”
He opens the first folder.
We read it the way we read everything important—together, at the same pace, neither of us getting ahead of the other. Luke reads slower than I do on dense documentation, but I’ve learned to match his pace because when he stops, it’s always because he found something worth stopping for.
He stops three times in the first folder.
The first stop: a 1997 communication between a financial management firm and a governance consulting group. The governance consulting group’s name has changed twice since then. Its current name is in Evelyn’s professional biography.
“She was running this before Jackson was in office,” Luke says.
I say, “Before he was viable.” This clarifies what Bill meant: Jackson was just a vessel. The operation predated him and will continue to exist beyond everything we do unless we dismantle it at its core.
The second stop: a client list. Partial, redacted in places, but enough names to map the network’s reach across two decades. Politicians, developers, placement agencies, and private medical facilities.
Private medical facilities.
I look at the list for a long moment.
“Delia’s facility is on here,” I say quietly.
Luke looks where I’m pointing. He doesn’t say anything.