Micah pulled a folder from the stack on her desk and set it on top of the one already open, the corners overlapping. Her cubicle had disappeared under the material. Folders fanned across the surface in layers, printouts paper-clipped to charging sheets, photocopied court documents with case numbers highlighted in yellow, a legal pad with handwritten notes running down the left margin in her own shorthand. The manila folder Babin had given her at the courthouse sat nearest the keyboard, its contents pulled out and sorted into three piles by case type. Her coffee had gone cold in the mug wedged between the monitor stand and a stack of record requests she still needed to file.
The newsroom moved around her in its midmorning rhythm, keyboards clicking from the row of cubicles behind her, a phone ringing at the metro desk three stations down, the hum of the printer running a job for someone in features.
She looked at the spreadsheet she had built, the first tab open. Column A held names. Column B held the charge. Column C held the school or program. Column D held the outcome. Tyrese Carter, arrested for murder. Three Holy Cross athletes arrested for a fight on Bourbon Street, their names stacked in consecutive rows, the charge column reading the same for all three. Juwan Offray, public intoxication in Stillwater. Khari Coleman, indecent exposure. Each name had a hyperlink in column E that led to the digitized record she had pulled from the clerk's office or Babin's folder.
She scrolled down. The rows multiplied. Former high school standouts from what the older reporters at the paper still called the Chopper City era, the stretch from the eighties through Katrina when the city's crime rate and the police department’s crackdown was legendary. Ward by ward, school by school, the spreadsheet held them. Karr. Warren Easton. St. Augustine. Edna Karr again. L.B. Landry. McDonagh 35. John Curtis. Stars who burned through the sports pages and then showed up in rap sheets attached to drug rings, human trafficking operations, gang activity, murders. She had color-coded the rows by severity, blue for misdemeanors, orange for felonies, red for violent felonies.
The red stretched further than the blue.
She clicked the second tab. This sheet held the tangled ones, the cases where the names connected to other names in ways that took her hours to map. Casey Kebodeaux and Ryan O'Shea, arrested for drug distribution in an operation that brought down thirteen other people in a ring that ran from the Westbank to Slidell. She had the organizational chart for that one printed and pinned to the cubicle wall above her monitor, the hierarchy drawn in her own hand, lines connecting names to names. Greg Robinson sat further down the sheet, another drug bust, the most high-profile public figure from the city with a record next to John "Hot Rod" Williams and the point-shaving scandal that shut Tulane's basketball program down in the eighties. UNO's basketball players showed up heavy on this tab, the ones who had been shaving points in 2025, the investigation still working its way through the courts. And one name connected to that program through a brief enrollment that ended with an arrest for aggravated assault: Trell Robinson. He was connected to the shooting death of a woman in the Marigny but someone else had taken the fall. NOPD had been tailing Robinson for months before his shooting death earlier in the year, suspecting him of running a drug crew in the city. His row was red. The outcome column read DECEASED.
She clicked the third tab. It held one name.
Caine Guerra. The Heisman winner. Two wins from a national championship.
She read through the charges column, each one entered from the court documents she had pulled and cross-referenced against the records in Babin's folder. Attempted carjacking. Conspiracy to commit a felony. Possession with intent to distribute. Grand theft auto. Unauthorized use of a vehicle. Gang enhancements. The list filled the row and ran into the cells beside it where she had entered the dates, the docket numbers, the presiding judge.
The plea deal sat in the next column: simple possession and accessory to attempted carjacking. A fraction of what the original charges carried.
Babin had pointed her to the connected cases. She pulled the folder closer and found the pages she had flagged with Post-it tabs. Ricardo Fernandez, co-defendant, same charges. Served time, released, deported to Mexico. Whereabouts unknown. Andre Helaire, co-defendant, same charges plus attempted murder of a sheriff's deputy, a state's witness, and Babin herself. Currently at Dixon Correctional, serving seventy-five years. The witness, Percy Jackson, had been found dead outside his grandmother's house after the case collapsed. The incident report was in the folder, the pages photocopied from a file that had been closed for years.
She turned from the spreadsheet to the printed photos arranged across the right side of her desk. Screenshots from Guerra's Instagram, pulled and printed on the newsroom's color printer, the resolution grainy but the faces clear. Guerra with Fernandez and Helaire, the three of them young, the backgrounds shifting between parking lots, porches, rooms where the light came from lamps instead of overhead fixtures. Then, again at Babin's direction, Guerra with Ramon Stevens, Eric Allary Jr., and Tyree Johnson, all three flagged in the NOPD's gang database. Guerra with known 39ers. Guerra with known Bloods. The photos spread across her desk in a line that told a story she could write without looking at her notes. Local kid, bad associations, system catches him, system lets him go, kid makes it out. Except Babin hadn't given her the folder to write that story.
She had gotten word from California that Guerra's probation had ended earlier in the year, cut short for good behavior. The confirmation email sat in her inbox, two paragraphs from a clerk in the LA County probation office.
Micah shook her head. She minimized the spreadsheet, opened her email, and started typing a request for more records.
~~~
Caine lay on the couch with his head resting on Autumn's stomach, his body stretched the length of the cushions, his legs draped over the far armrest. Autumn sat against the other armrest and her legs over his shoulders. One of her hands rested on his chest and the other worked through his hair, her fingers finding a loc and running it between her thumb and forefinger from root to tip before moving to the next one. A half-empty glass of water sat on the coffee table beside the remote and his phone, the screen dark. He could feel her breathing through the rise and fall of her stomach under his head, the rhythm steady, her body loose in the cushions.
"What did you think about living in Georgia?"
Caine snorted a laugh. "You forgetting that I was living in Statesboro, Georgia. Shit real different from living in Atlanta or fuck even like Savannah, Macon or Augusta."
Autumn rolled her eyes. Her fingers kept moving through his hair, separating a loc from the ones beside it. "But you went to Atlanta."
"We were in and out of that bitch. Didn't even stay the night up there." His hand found her knee where it rested near his shoulder and his thumb settled against the side of it. "It was straight, though. For what it was. If you like that slow, country shit since that's what I was living in."
"I could probably do that."
"It was fucking rough to me."
Autumn laughed. "Nigga, living in New Orleans is country life. Just because y'all got a few skyscrapers doesn't mean that's some kind of big city."
"You go spend a couple hours in Statesboro and you gonna think the city like fucking NYC compared to that shit."
"It's BFE to me."
Her fingers moved to a different section of his hair, working through the locs near his temple, her nail tracing the edge of his hairline where the hair met skin.
"You thinking about moving somewhere like that or something?"
Autumn shrugged. "I figured whether you go to the draft this year or next, I'm going to have to get used to being somewhere else. I've lived in LA all my life so months in some fucking place like Nashville with all those fucking white women will feel foreign."
Caine turned his head on her stomach, his cheek pressing against the fabric of her shirt, the smile pulling at his mouth. "You planning on following me around and being a WAG?"
Autumn's hand came off his hair and smacked the top of his head, the contact flat and quick. "Nigga, please. I'd rather be single, but I'll give you a week or two a month during the season. Then you come back to LA for the offseason, works out perfectly."
"Oh, you got this all planned out."
Autumn laughed. "You shouldn't be surprised."
"I ain't. Just ain't know you were even thinking that far."
"As long as you don't plan on going anywhere, I don't see why not."
Caine reached up and ran his hand down her shin, his palm following the line of the bone from her knee to her ankle,. He turned his head and pressed his lips to her knee.
"Nah. I'm where I want to be."
Her fingers came back to his hair and settled, just resting. He let a few seconds pass, his mouth still close to her knee.
"Why don't you just move in here now?"
Her fingers stopped in his hair. Her legs shifted on his shoulders. "Are you serious?"
He nodded against her stomach. "You over here five, six days a week anyway unless we out of town."
"Caine."
He waved his hand once, the gesture loose. "I know you about to say some shit about Mireya. Your mama and daddy live across the city. You can just leave if you don't want to be here when she here."
"Caine, look at me."
He turned on the couch so his body angled toward her, his shoulder pressing into the cushion, his face tilting up to where she sat against the armrest.
"You really want me to move in?"
He nodded. "Yeah, I really want you to move in. That's why I'm asking you."
Autumn looked at him. Her thumb moved once along his hairline, tracing the edge above his ear. Then she nodded.
"Alright."
~~~
Sara came around the corner into the kitchen as the oven beeped. Jabari was already at the stove with a dish towel over his shoulder, sliding a pan into the oven with both hands, the oven mitts she kept in the drawer by the sink pulled up past his wrists. The kitchen smelled different than it did when she cooked, something with thyme in it, heavier than what she used, the garlic sharper. A cutting board sat on the counter beside the stove with the ends of carrots and the papery skin of an onion pushed to one side, a knife resting across the board's edge. He had used her cast iron skillet, the big one she kept above the refrigerator, and a pot she could see on the back burner with the lid tilted to let the steam escape. He pushed the pan onto the rack and closed the oven door, the seal catching with a soft pull, and straightened up, pulling the mitts off and dropping them beside the cutting board.
"I told you that I'm cooking tonight. You just gone and sit your ass down somewhere."
Sara rolled her eyes, but the smile pulled at her mouth. "I thought you were bullshitting."
"Or you thought I was going to have a hungry man dinner in here."
Sara nodded toward the oven. "You could've got that there out of a hungry man dinner and you just heating it up."
Jabari tossed the mitts onto the counter and folded the dish towel back over his shoulder. "I guess you won't know until you try it. Now, come on. Get your ass out of my kitchen."
"This is my kitchen, sir."
Jabari laughed and walked over to her, his hands finding her shoulders, turning her around and pushing her toward the living room with pressure that was mostly show, his palms flat against her back. Sara laughed as he walked her past the dining table and into the living room. She dropped onto the couch and he sat beside her, his arm coming up over her shoulders and settling along the back of the couch. She let her weight fall into his side, her shoulder pressing into his chest, her legs pulling up onto the cushion beside her. She reached for the remote on the arm of the couch and turned the TV on. A local news broadcast came up, the anchor's voice filling the room.
"When are y'all leaving for Georgia?"
Sara found a channel running a rerun and left it. "The day after tomorrow. I almost skipped this one because, fuck, all this flying is taking it out of me."
"Yeah, but it could be his last game in college."
Sara shook her head against his chest. "It's not going to be his last game."
"Because he's skipping the draft or because he's gonna win and get to the championship?"
"Both. But I know he wants Mica there even though she's not going to remember any of this shit."
Jabari's thumb moved once along the top of her shoulder. "You can't knock a young Black man for wanting to be a good father. You know it's a lot of us out there that ain't got no desire to do that."
"You not wrong. It's just a lot more than you think it'll be when you're looking at the schedule at the beginning of the year. Fly, come back, two or three days then back on a plane." She reached for the remote and turned the volume down a notch. "Guess it's a good thing you only have to do this once."
"Yeah, I guess so."
The rerun played on the screen, the laugh track cycling through a joke. Jabari's body was warm against her side, his arm heavy and still across her shoulders, his breathing steady.
"Would you have another one?"
Sara snorted a laugh. "I'm damn near 40 years old."
Jabari shrugged. "And you got money which is what women need to have kids later in life."
"I never really thought about it. It ain't exactly easy to get pregnant at my age." She pulled the towel off his shoulder where it had been sitting since the kitchen and folded it in her lap, her fingers running the crease flat.
"You not wrong."
"And it'd be weird having a kid younger than my grandchildren. Imagine Camila at 18 arguing with an aunt or uncle who is 10."
Jabari laughed. "There is someone in New Orleans right now doing just that."
Sara snorted a laugh. "Probably." She let a beat pass, the rerun's laugh track filling the gap. Then she turned her head on his chest and looked up at him, his face close from this angle, the stubble along his jaw dark against his skin. "I'm being insensitive. You don't have kids. And I'm just shutting it down."
"Nah, you're good. I was just asking."
"It's just not something I've thought about."
Jabari's arm settled a fraction heavier on her shoulders. "I guess that's a conversation for if I survive meeting Caine."
Sara laughed.
~~~
Mireya lay between Sena's legs with her cheek pressed flat against Sena's stomach, the skin warm under her face, the rise and fall of Sena's breathing moving her head. Her eyes sat on the far wall where the light from the hallway came through the door she had left cracked, the strip of it running across the floor and up the baseboard in a narrow band. The sheets were pulled to her waist, tangled at the foot of the bed where they had kicked them, one corner dragging the floor. Sena's fingers moved through her hair in long slow passes, separating the strands, running them from the crown to the ends, her nails grazing Mireya's scalp. The ceiling fan turned above them on its lowest setting, the blades pushing a current that reached Mireya's bare shoulders and dried the sweat that had pooled at her collarbone.
"You want to go to the championship game?"
"Don't they have to win the next game to get there?"
Mireya snorted a laugh. "Do you think they're not gonna win?"
Sena shrugged. "I don't know anything about football to know if they're supposed to or not."
"You don't need to know nothing about it. You know Caine. Clearly, he ain't losing shit right now."
"I guess I can't argue with that. I'll come if it's okay with him."
"It don't matter if it's okay with him. They're giving him 10 tickets. He ain't got 10 people to bring so I'm taking one for you."
Sena's fingers found a knot near the ends of Mireya's hair and worked it apart, her thumb and forefinger separating the strands with small pulls. "One day, you're going to piss him off with that."
Mireya snorted a laugh. "If it ain't piss him off yet, I don't think it will."
Sena's fingers kept moving through Mireya's hair. Mireya's fingers found the skin at Sena's side, just above her hip, and traced along it, following the line where the muscle ran beneath the surface, her fingertips sliding back and forth in a slow pattern.
"I want to go to Oaxaca and find my father."
Sena's body shifted beneath her. Her stomach tightened and she propped herself up on her elbows, the pillows bunching behind her back, her face appearing above Mireya's head.
"When did you decide that?"
Mireya shrugged. "A couple weeks ago. Locked in around Christmas, probably."
"Do you even know where to start looking?"
Mireya shook her head against Sena's stomach. "I don't even know if he's still in Oaxaca. He had family in Veracruz, Chiapas. Probably in the US, too."
Sena's fingers slowed in her hair but kept their path, each pass shorter now, staying near the crown. "I would be worried that wouldn't end the way I wanted it to."
"If he hates me, oh well. Maria does, too. It wouldn't make a difference either way." Her fingers stopped tracing Sena's side and rested flat against her hip, her palm warm on the bone. "I just want to ask him why he left me here with her, whatever his reason is."
"You're saying that, but that's different. You don't have any bad memories of him. Just that he left. It could crush you."
Mireya turned her head on Sena's stomach so she was looking up at her. "It would check out for me to own a pair of grippy socks."
Sena rolled her eyes and laughed. Her fingers tightened once in Mireya's hair, the pull brief, then loosened.
"I want Camila and Mica to see where their people are from, too."
"Sounds like that's a bigger trip than you're saying since they'd have to go to Honduras, too."
Mireya shrugged, the motion small against the mattress. "Good thing I got money now then." She pulled the sheet up from where it had fallen to her waist and let it drop again, the fabric settling across her back. Sena's hand came down from her hair and rested on Mireya's shoulder, her thumb pressing once against the muscle there. Mireya looked up at Sena again, her eyes finding Sena's face in the half-dark. "You ready for round two?"
Sena bit her lip. Her fingers stopped in Mireya's hair and she nodded.
Mireya smiled, pushed herself up to her elbows, and slid down the bed.
~~~
Oklahoma walked to the line of scrimmage, the clock running down. The Sooners’ sideline was all hands and knees, nerves radiating up from the players and coaches to their fans in the stands.
On the other side of the field, USC’s sideline jumped up and down, trying to encourage their fans to get as loud as possible and throw off Oklahoma’s quarterback.
"Six seconds left for Oklahoma to save their season and force overtime here in the Peach Bowl. Overton lines up with five wide on the USC 37 and they'll have to get to the endzone and convert the two-point conversion if they have any hopes of pulling this off."
"The Trojans' offense did their jobs on that last drive, putting three points up on the board to make it an eight-point game. Overton gets set and calls for the snap. This is for all the marbles! There is pressure off the edge, but Overton steps up and gets out of the pocket, buying his receivers time to get to the endzone."
"He steps up and launches the ball downfield. Everyone's crowding under it at the back of the endzone. Leon gets his hands to it, but IT'S RIPPED AWAY AND BATTED DOWN BY WILLIAMS. USC IS GOING TO THE NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP! AFTER MORE THAN 20 YEARS, THE TROJANS ARE GOING TO PLAY FOR COLLEGE FOOTBALL'S BIGGEST PRIZE!"
"Look at them streaming out onto the field. You can just see what it means to this team, what it means to Lincoln Riley to do this against his former team. Caine Guerra had to dig deep for the 23 points the Trojans scored tonight but when the chips were down the Heisman winner came through despite a non-existent run game against this fierce Oklahoma defense."
"It'll be a battle of the blue bloods again for Riley's Trojans in two weeks' time as they will play Alabama in the national championship, broadcast live from Tampa, Florida at Raymond James Stadium!"
