Page 121 of Split Decision

I look at the notebook. Six patterns. A name in the margin. Everything was assembled except the original documentation that would turn pattern into proof.

"That's hard," I say.

"I know," she says. "It's the hardest part of this kind of fight. You do the work, and then you wait for the world to catch up with what you know."

ANDI

After I hang up, I don't move for a long time.

Carrington's name came up in Syndi's dinner conversation. Brandon was sitting with a half-open door, especially after a suspicious wreck that happened immediately after he left Marin’s house. The break-in confirmed she knows how close we are. And somewhere, a man with original documentation who has been watching thisoperation run for years is deciding whether the moment has arrived.

Everything is in motion. None of it is in our hands.

I've operated under threat before. I know the unique discipline of continuing to function when the ground is uncertain—of going to the center, answering the email, eating breakfast, existing normally inside a situation that isn't normal. I learned it at fifteen, and I've been practicing it ever since.

What I haven't had before is what I have right here—someone across the table doing it with me.

Luke knows everything I know. He's been building the same picture from his side, and we've laid it out together, and we're both clear-eyed about what we have and what we still need. That shared clarity—the specific relief of not carrying it alone—is something I didn't know I was missing until I had it.

I think about the arrangement. The sixty days that felt like abandonment, even though I understand now what he was trying to protect. I think about the fracture and the hospital and the suite and the door I was almost through before he caught me. I think about sitting at the kitchen table three weeks ago with both of our documents open between us, finally working on the same problem in the same room at the same time.

We got here the wrong way, through too much distance and too much managed silence.

But we got here.

I open my laptop and pull up the document I've been keeping since June. I read through everything from the beginning—the board communication language, the Garrett Cole connection, the 2011 sealed filing, the donor list, the governance organization, the break-in, Syndi's accidental confirmation, Bill's research, and the operational history.

It's a thorough picture of what someone did to us.

What I want—what I've wanted since December, when the first statement arrived without my name in it—is to be the person who ends it. Not just survives it. Ends it. Traces the line all the way back to its source and holds the source accountable in a way that makes it impossible for the methodology simply to relocate to a new target.

For that, I need Daniel.

And Daniel, if he's been watching as long as I think he has, needs to be ready.

I close the laptop and go to find Luke.

He's in the kitchen, making the kind of dinner you make when you're thinking about something else—competent and absent, ingredients in the right order, nothing wasted.He hears me come in and glances over his shoulder and reads my face the way he always does.

"She's moving," I say.

"I know."

"We can't stop her from moving. We can only be ready when she does."

He turns the burner down and looks at me fully.

"I'm ready," he says.

I look at him. This man who carried me when I couldn’t walk another step—literally. Who sat in the armchair watching me sleep the night he came home. Who kept a notebook in a kitchen drawer and said, “Same logic as before,”out loud to himself because he'd learned enough to hold himself accountable.

"I know you are," I say.

I sit down at the table. He brings dinner, and we eat together in an easy, practiced quiet—the kind that belongs to normal people after a normal day at work. It almost feels convincing, except our lives together have never worked that way. Not once.

Still. We’re ready.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR