Page 109 of Split Decision

"My office." He stands. "Andi—you came to me in June with a language pattern and a two-week window. Now you have the origin document and a name." He looks at me steadily. "That's not nothing. That's most of it." A pause. "Find Daniel."

I think about what Bill said at my last visit.You only get one real shot at this.

When I leave his office,I head straight to mine at the center. I’m combing through every document I can find until I feel my eyes crossing. I close the laptop and look at the youth center from my office window.

Marcus starts at Georgia State in four weeks.

The girl who found the door herself has been coming every day for three months. Mrs. Alvarez told me this week that she's started helping with the younger kids after school—just sitting with them, not saying much. Just being there.

That's what this place does.

That's what I built and what they've been trying to dismantle and what they have not, in fact, managed to dismantle, despite six months of coordinated institutionalpressure from a woman who hides behind others as a matter of practice. And they let her.

LUKE

She calls me from the parking garage before she leaves Bill’s building.

"Bill confirmed it," she says. "The documents are what they are. The methodology chain holds—Carrington to Marin to us. What we're missing is evidence of instruction. Something that shows Marin was specifically deployed against us, not just coincidentally running the same playbook."

"Daniel," I say.

"Daniel," she agrees. "Bill needs him for the chain of custody and testimony. The documents without the person who sent them have limits."

I look at the notebook on the kitchen table. Three weeks of patterns. Six entries. None of it is guesswork anymore—because the original document is sitting in Bill’s office on the fourteenth floor of a Midtown building.

"He's not hiding from us," I say. "He sent the package to our house. He knows where we live."

"That's what I told Bill."

"Which means he's waiting."

A pause on her end. "For what?"

"To see if we can use what he sent," I say. "He didn't hand us this because he thought we deserved it. He handed this to us because he thinks we can deliver something with it. He's been watching this operation run for thirty years. He knows exactly what we still need."

Andi is quiet for a moment.

"He'll come," she says. Not hope. Certainty. The same certainty she had when she told me men like Daniel don't carry things forever without doing something with them.

"He'll come," I agree.

"I’m going by the center before coming home," she says. “I need to comb through some documents again. Then we’ll sit down together and go over everything.”

"I'm already at the table," I say. “I’ll be here when you’re ready.”

"Your notebook?" she asks.

"My notebook," I confirm.

I sit at the kitchen table and look at what we have and what we still need, and I think about a man who watcheda machine operate for thirty years and finally decided the moment had arrived.

He sent us the means.

We just have to be ready when he sends us himself.

I've been pulling on the thread of Marin's D.C. network since the phone call with Brandon, where he mentionedpolicy peopleandintroductions into the regulatory environment.I've been looking for the hub. Every network has one—the node that everything connects through, the relationship that validates all the other relationships.

The Southeastern Governance Initiative is small. No website beyond a landing page. No press coverage. A post office box in Midtown Atlanta and a list of affiliated organizations that reads like a map of the oversight structures that govern nonprofits, regulatory bodies, and institutional compliance in this state.