Page 104 of Split Decision

"And I kept trying to protect the window instead of using it."

"Yes." I look at him. "That's the thing we have to stop doing."

He moves from the coffee table to the couch beside me, slow and mindful of my leg, of the cast, of the way we have to fit back together again. He puts his arm around me, and I lean into his shoulder, and we sit with the documents on the table in front of us and the morning around us.

"Evelyn Carrington is the key," he says.

"Evelyn Carrington is, indeed," I confirm.

"She doesn't know we have this."

"No." I look at the memo's first page. The date. The language. Discredit the source before anyone asks for proof. "She thinks she's still running the playbook."

"She is," Luke says. "Until we're ready."

"Until we're ready," I agree.

Outside, a car door closes. Somewhere down the street, a dog starts barking at something and then stops. The ordinary morning, proceeding in its ordinary way, entirely unaware that on a couch in a house on a quiet street, two people are sitting with a document that is about to change the shape of everything.

Luke tightens his arm around me, just slightly.

I reach for Daniel’s card anyway, lifting it from the table. The source isn’t disappearing. This isn’t a warning—it’s an opening.

I set the card back on top of the file, leaving it where it could be seen.

"Okay," I say quietly.

"Okay," Luke says.

We sit together in the morning light, and neither of us moves for a long time.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

ANDI

The center smells exactly the same.

That's the first thing I notice when I push through the front door on a Monday morning—the specific combination of industrial cleaner and craft paint and someone's lunch warming in the break room microwave. Twelve weeks since I've been inside for anything other than a board meeting. Twelve weeks of the building proceeding without me.

I stand in the lobby for a moment.

The mural kids. The slightly crooked lettering on the sign was painted by the middle school art class. A new bulletinboard in the hallway—photographs from a spring field trip I didn't plan, to a nature center I don't recognize. The kids' faces grinning in front of something I didn't take them to.

The center didn't stop.

I knew it wouldn't. That was the point—I built it so it could run without me, so it wasn't dependent on any single person, so the kids would never walk in one day and find the doors closed because the founder had a terrible month. I built it that way on purpose, because I know what happens to things built around a single person. I watched it happen to people whose names I had to carry out of a house I will never fully forget.

So the center running without me is what was supposed to happen.

It still catches in my chest.

Mrs. Alvarez finds me in the lobby at eight-fifteen. She walks me through everything she'd normally have sent in a report—the programming changes, the new volunteer coordinator, the grant application she submitted in my absence that I didn't know about, that we got.

"You should have called me about the grant," I say.

"You needed to heal," she says.

"I can read a grant application with a broken leg."