Page 106 of Split Decision

"From Marin. In person."

"Before Marin."

"Yes. In the documentation connected to Jackson's operation. And in board communications from before she was formally involved with the center."

He picks up his pen and sets it down again, which is what he does when he's deciding how much to say.

"There's a particular style of crisis management," he says carefully, "that emerged from political consulting work in D.C. in the late nineties. I encountered it when we were building your case against Jackson's network. Not Jackson himself—the people around him." He looks at me directly. "It was distinctive enough that I recognized it. Specific framing strategies. A particular approach to witness credibility. A sequence of institutional pressure that moves in a predictable pattern."

I hold very still.

"I couldn't trace the source at the time," he says. "Jackson's lawyers were too good, and the documentation was sealed. But the method had a signature." He pauses. "What you're showing me has the same signature."

"Someone trained Marin," I say.

"Possibly." He's careful. A lawyer's careful. "Or someone is running Marin. Or Marin is running something she was handed without fully understanding where it came from." He folds his hands. "Any of those is possible. You don't have enough to distinguish between them yet."

"What do I need?"

"Origin." He looks at the photographs on my phone, at the document summaries. "You need to find where the method came from. Who wrote it? Who owns it?" He pauses. "If you find that, you find everything."

I take the phone back.

"Be careful," he says. "Whoever is running this has been doing it for a long time. They're not careless."

"I know."

"And Andi." He waits until I look up from the phone. "Don't move until you have enough. Moving early givesthem time to reposition. You only get one real shot at this."

I nod.

"I’m sure the kids were glad to have you back," he says, which is how Bill ends hard conversations—with something true and grounding.

"Yeah," I say. "Me too."

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

LUKE

Istart keeping a list on the third Tuesday of July.

Not on my phone. In a small notebook I bought at a drugstore, the kind with a spiral binding and graph paper, which I used to take training notes. I write in it at the kitchen table after Andi goes to sleep, in the hour before I go to bed.

This isn’t about making accusations. I’m not trying to prove anything yet.

I’m watching patterns. Letting them reveal themselves.

Because one day I may have to lay it out for Brandon, and when I do, it has to be about what I’ve actually seen—not what I felt in a moment. I love my brother. I’m not going to blow something up in his life based on a suspicion I can’t stand behind.

So. Patterns.

Pattern one:Every time I've expressed doubt about Marin's recommendations to Brandon, he receives the concern and then returns to me a day later with a clarification—a context I didn't have, a reason the recommendation made sense that I'd overlooked. The clarifications are always reasonable. They address the specific concern I raised. They leave no room for argument.

They sound like Marin.

Not paraphrasing. The actual phrasing.

Pattern two:Brandon’s timeline. He was cautious about Marin in January. By February, he was defending her judgment. By March, he was finishing her sentences. Not in a mimicry way—in the way a person absorbs language from someone they're with constantly. The words have become his.