Page 110 of Split Decision

It's exactly the kind of organization you'd need if you wanted to run influence across governance structures without appearing to. Marin's professional history lists her as an associate of Carrington’s from 2007 to 2010, which is after the D.C. gap Bill apparently told Andi to look into.

I know that. I write it in the notebook because writing things down is how I hold myself accountable.

Same logic as the arrangement. Protecting the moment from what it needs to hold.

I'mat the gym when Andi calls.

Not training. Just using the bag—the daily habit I haven't been able to break since Vegas, the one that starts my day in a way nothing else replicates. I've been here an hour when my phone lights up on the bench.

I answer before the second ring.

"Someone was in the house," she says.

Her voice is controlled. That's the first thing I read—not panicked, not performing calm, actually controlled in the specific way she gets when something has happened and she's already past the initial reaction and into assessment.

"Are you okay?"

"Yes. I got home from the center twenty minutes ago, and the back door was unlocked. I always lock it."

"Where are you right now?"

"Kitchen. I've been through every room."

"Stay on the phone." I'm already off the bench. "Don't touch anything."

I'm in the truck in four minutes. She keeps talking while I drive—not because she needs to, but because it gives me something to track. Her voice stays even. She describes what she found: the back door, the study where she keeps her laptop, the filing cabinet she'd left organized in a specific way, which's no longer the case. Nothing taken. Everything slightly wrong.

"The laptop was moved," she says. "I can tell. I left it at an angle, and it's been straightened."

"Someone accessed it."

"Or tried to." A pause. "I have a password. But there are things that don't require access. Things visible on the screen before it locks."

I think about what she had open yesterday. The document with the board communication analysis. The sealed filing research. The governance organization name I'd written in the notebook that she'd added to her own file.

"They know where we are," I say.

"Yes." She's quiet for a moment. "Luke. Don't call the police."

I understand why immediately. A police report becomes public record. Public record gives Evelyn's people a way to frame this—a break-in at the home of a professional boxer and a woman who's been under regulatory scrutiny,already positioned as volatile, now generating incident reports. I can see the exact headline of the story it hands them.

"I know," I say.

"They didn't take anything because they didn't need to. They just needed to confirm."

"That we're close."

"That we're close," she agrees. "Which means we are."

I pull into the driveway. She’s at the kitchen table when I come in—laptop open, the document she’s been keeping pulled up on the screen. She looks up at me, and I can see the effort of the last twenty minutes in the slight set of her jaw.

She’s holding it together. She’s choosing to keep holding it together.

And I make a quiet decision right then—not to ask her to carry me too. Not to make her perform okayness just to ease the weight of my arrival.

I check the back door. Clean entry—no forced lock, which means a key or a pick. Professional. The kind of job that leaves no evidence because there's nothing to leave.

I check the study. She's right about the cabinet. The files have been read and replaced in order, butslightly too aligned—the way someone organizes when they're being careful, rather than when they live there.