Epilogue
ANDI
August again.
The center in August is its own thing—the afternoon program running at full capacity, the AC working harder than it should, the sound of fifteen kids in a building designed for twenty when the weather outside makes the inside the only reasonable option.
I’ve been on my feet since nine. My back has been making its opinions known since noon.
The baby has been making her opinions known for about three months, and today she has opinions about everything.
I’m at my desk reviewing grant applications when Mrs. Alvarez appears in the doorway.
She looks at me. She looks at my expression. She looks at the situation.
“Now?” she says.
“I think so,” I say.
She crosses the room, picks up my phone from the desk, and calls Luke’s number.
He picks up on the first ring—he always does now, since August of last year.
She tells him. I can hear his voice from across the desk, the low register of controlled urgency that is Luke deciding how fast to drive without saying he’s going to drive very fast.
“He’s leaving the gym,” she tells me.
“I know,” I say. “Tell him to drive carefully.”
She relays this. His response is not printable.
She guides me to the couch in the small waiting area off the main corridor.
I sit and follow their instructions to breathe, then look through the window into the activity room.
The afternoon program is in progress, typical of children who are deeply focused on what’s in front of them and unaware that anything is happening in the office corridor.
Deja notices.
She looks through the window, sees Mrs. Alvarez beside me, and reads the situation in about four seconds. She holds up one finger—one minute—to the kid she’s been helping with homework, then she comes into the corridor.
She stands in front of me.
“Is it time?” she says.
“It’s time,” I say.
She nods, and then, with the brisk efficiency she brings to everything she’s decided matters, she says, “I’ve got the afternoon program. Go.”
I look at her. Seventeen years old, with three college acceptance letters on the kitchen table at Luke’s parents’ house, the first place she called home, even before the adoption was finalized.
Deja Woods. She’s been using the name consistently, making sure everyone knows it fits better than she expected and that she’s still getting used to it.
“Thank you,” I say.
“Go,” she repeats. Her tone isn’t unkind—just resolute, like someone confident in their purpose and prepared to act.
I go.
Luke arrives in eleven minutes, which tells me something about how he drove.
He comes through the center’s front door—the one that faces the street, the one I built to face outward on purpose—crosses the activity floor, finds us in the corridor, and he’s already taking my hand before he’s fully stopped moving.
He looks at me.
“Hey, baby,” he says.
“Hey, yourself,” I say.
“How are you doing.”
“Ready,” I say. “Let’s go.”
LUKE
Mackenna Grace Woods arrives at three twenty-two a.m. on a Wednesday in August.
She’s small and emphatic, and she announces herself to the room with a clarity that immediately and completely reminds me of her mother.
She has dark hair, and when she opens her eyes and looks up at me for the first time, they are the unsettled blue-gray of someone who hasn’t decided yet what color they’ll be.
I’m holding her before I’ve fully processed that I’m holding her.
“Hey,” I say softly. My voice comes out different—lower, quieter—like some part of me already knows she deserves careful speech. “Hi, my little love. We’ve been waiting for you.”
She looks at me.
I don’t know what she sees. I know what I see—something that didn’t exist yesterday, exists now, will exist for the rest of my life, and has already reorganized everything in about thirty seconds flat.
I look at Andi.
She’s watching us. Her face has the expression it takes when she’s decided something is exactly right and is letting herself believe it.
“Mackenna,” she says, trying the name out loud for the first time outside the conversations where we chose it. It fits. I knew it would—we chose it because of Mack, because of what it means to show up and keep showing up, and because we wanted her to carry that in her name from the beginning.
“Mackenna Grace,” I say.
Andi extends her hand and gently touches the baby’s small fingers. The tiny fingers instinctively grasp hers—a natural, automatic response of someone just beginning life, reaching for what is within reach.
“Hi, my little love,” Andi says. Quietly. Just for her. “We built you a door.”
ANDI
My parents died in a car wreck in August when I was six years old.
I’ve been reflecting on that this morning, in the unique way you do when you’re home from the hospital, the baby sleeps in the next room, and the world feels like it has just shifted in a way that remains unfixed.
August. The same month.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence. In fact, I now believe that very little is truly accidental—not as I once thought—since I understand that many events I considered random are actually the workings of the machine. But this one is different. This one feels like life showing you how far you’ve come.
My parents died in August when I was six, and Mackenna Grace Woods was born in August when I was twenty-nine.
I crossed that whole distance. All of it. Through every iteration of the system and the machine, through the loneliness of someone who realized too early what it means to be alone in the world.
And I’m still here.
The book is half-written. I work on it in the mornings, during the two hours before Mackenna wakes, in the quiet of a house where Luke is already at the gym, and the neighborhood is still asleep.
I write it the way I do everything that matters—methodically, completely, without softening the parts that cost something to say.
Delia’s name is in it. My parents’ names are in it.
Maria’s name is in it. Jean’s voicemail is in it, transcribed from memory, every fragmented word.
The federal case is moving. Slowly, as federal cases do, but moving.
The machine is still out there—Evelyn, wherever she is, is still a woman who spent thirty years building something and will spend whatever years she has left trying to find ways to keep building.
The institutional version of her is gone. The impulse isn’t.
But Daniel’s file and Marin’s testimony are in federal hands.
Deja has testified before a closed legislative session and will testify again when the case reaches the next stage.
The second piece ran in November, and the third—the one that goes deeper into the trafficking layer—is scheduled for spring.
The machine is still out there.
So am I.
And now so is she—Mackenna Grace, sleeping in the next room, named for the man who built a gym and showed up and never left. My daughter. Luke’s daughter. Ours.
I finish the paragraph I’m working on.
I save the document.
I go check on the baby.
LUKE
Kelly’s adoption was finalized on a Tuesday in March.
Brandon was in the room, just as he had promised. My mother cried as she had said she would, and she did. Afterward, my father shook the judge’s hand and expressed his gratitude with the genuine sincerity of someone who had been waiting for a formal acknowledgment to match a recognized truth.
Kelly signed her name on the document.
Kelly Woods.
She briefly held the pen, gazing at her writing before lifting her eyes to meet ours—all of us in the room, a unique group brought together by the chance of loving the same people—and she spoke.
“Okay. Now it’s real.”
Brandon put his arm around her.
“It was always real,” he said. “Now it’s just also legal.”
She laughed. The full version—the one that arrives when she stops managing it.
Then Deja, beside her, chimes in. “Does this mean I can steal your hoodie?”
“You’ve been stealing my hoodie for six months,” Kelly said.
“Legally now,” Deja said.
The room went up.
The center is still running.
Mrs. Alvarez sits at her desk. The mural has become a bit more crooked than last year because two students repainted a section in April, and their measurements were optimistic. The homework tables are consistently full each afternoon. The door still looks out onto the street.
Deja is headed to Georgia State—criminal justice, which surprised no one who has been paying attention. She wants to understand the system from the inside so she can change it. She asked Andi to write her a recommendation letter.
Andi wrote four pages.
The dean of admissions called to tell her personally that, in twenty-two years of reading applications, she had never read a recommendation letter like it. Deja got in.
She’ll start in January.
Shane is in camp for his title fight, which everyone in the gym knows will be the fight of the year. Mack is running him the way he runs everything—completely, without shortcuts, with the demanding care of someone who believes in what he’s building.
Brandon is seeing someone new. He’s approaching this relationship with the carefulness of a man who understands its importance.
Her name is Claire, a federal prosecutor.
She holds strong views on primary sources and gets along very well with Kelly, which Brandon considers a more reliable indicator than anything else.
The beach happened. We spent two weeks there last November, just us, somewhere with no governance councils for a hundred miles.
I slept for four days straight, then spent the rest of the trip being myself in a way that only happens when nothing is pressing.
Andi wrote six thousand words, swam every morning, ate things we can’t name, and didn’t check her phone until noon.
We also enjoyed unlimited umbrella drinks daily.
We’d do it again.
We’re going to do it again.