Page 115 of Split Decision

"The license review. The board pushing you away from the youth center. The fake pictures of Travis and you. Trying to destroy our relationship. All of it."

"Yes. I know."

I'm quiet for a moment.

"She made a mistake," I say.

Andi looks at me.

“She didn't put me in Vegas," I say. "But she used it. Six months of me being gone was supposed to leave you isolated, give Marin unobstructed access, let the pressure build without me in the room to push back." I look at the road. "Instead, it put me in a training camp with nothing to do but think. I had six months of Mack, frustration, and not being able to help you—and I used it. I started tracking patterns. Pulling threads. Asking questions I couldn't answer yet." I pause. "She exploited my absence. I used it back."

Andi is very still for a moment.

Then she says, "She underestimated what you'd do with the distance."

"She underestimated both of us," I say. "She's been running this methodology for thirty years, and it's always worked because the targets don't have each other." I glance at her. "We have each other."

She looks at me for a long moment.

"We have each other," she agrees.

We pull onto our street. The house receives us the way it always does—ordinary, familiar, ours.

Somewhere in this city, Evelyn Carrington is making calculations based on incomplete information.

She thinks she's still running the playbook.

She doesn't know we're already inside it.

"We have to find Daniel," I say. “There’s no way out of this without him. Not that I can see.”

"You’re right,” she says, nodding slowly while staring at her plate, lost deep in thought. “What if he refuses to get involved? He walked away from Jackson for a reason.”

"He reached out to Brandon once," I say. "That's how Brandon got the name—someone called him, after Jackson died, identifying themselves as Daniel Rhoades. Brandon thought it was just a matter of closing out his brother's business. He didn't understand what was being offered."

Andi is very still. "You didn't tell me that."

"I didn't understand what it meant until just now." I look at her. "He reached out once. He might reach out again. But we can't wait for that."

"No." She's quiet for a moment. "Bill said at some point, you need a person. Someone who was inside." She looks at the table. "Daniel was inside. He had access to Jackson's records. If anyone built a file—original documents, original communications—it's him."

"He's been watching," I say. "The sedan that was idling outside the house before I left for camp. The pattern in how each escalation was timed, the specific targets chosen—someone who knew the operation intimately has been watching it run from the outside for a long time." I pause. "If it is Daniel, he knows we're close. He might already be deciding."

"Or he already decided, and we just haven't received it yet."

We don't say much else, because there isn't much else to say until there's something to act on.

But for the first time since December, I feel like we're not behind anymore.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

LUKE

My mother calls at two in the afternoon.

She doesn't call me during the day unless something is wrong. That's just how she is—she texts, she waits, she doesn't interrupt. So when her name comes up on my phone while I'm at the kitchen table with the notebook, I answer before the first ring finishes.

"Brandon was in an accident," she says.