Page 126 of Split Decision

I just haven't walked through it yet.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

ANDI

We’ve been dancing around it for two weeks.

Not with each other—between us, the information has been shared, and the picture is the same. We know about Evelyn. We know the gap in Marin’s history. We know the methodology was built before Marin existed, and that she was trained in it, and that it’s been operational against us since before we understood what we were dealing with.

What we don’t have is what we’ve needed since thebeginning.

The original document. A name signed to a specific action at a specific time. Proof rather than pattern.

That’s what we’ve been dancing around.

It’s nearly ten o’clock. Luke is on the couch with his notebook on the coffee table, open but untouched for the past 20 minutes. I sit across from him in the armchair, with my leg brace on, and my physical therapy is progressing better than the therapist anticipated. We’ve been in this position for an hour—reading, not reading—simply sitting with the familiar shapes of what we understand and what remains uncertain.

“Someone above Marin is running this,” I say.

Luke looks up.

“Evelyn,” he says. Not a question.

“Evelyn,” I agree. “Marin’s not the source. She’s the implementation. Which means even if we expose Marin, the machine continues. Evelyn repositions. Finds another Marin. She’s been doing this for thirty years, and she has redundancy built in because that’s how you survive thirty years.”

Luke sets the notebook down.

He looks at the coffee table for a moment. We took photographs of the documents we made before putting them somewhere safe. At the notebook with its sixpatterns. At the printed donor list, Katelyn’s family name was circled.

“She knows we have all of this,” he says.

“She knows we have the pattern and a name.” I look at the window. “She doesn’t know we have the documents. Daniel sent them before she knew to stop them.”

“That’s the window.”

“That’s the window.” I turn the leg brace slightly, the habitual adjustment I’ve been making for weeks. “Bill says we need to understand her current positions before we move. Every board she sits on, every advisory council, every governance structure she’s built herself into. We move on her, and she needs to have nowhere to reposition.”

“How long?”

“Days. Maybe a week.” I hold his eyes. “Luke—when we move, we move on everything at once. Not just Marin. Not just the documents. Everything, simultaneously, so she can’t get ahead of any individual piece.”

He nods slowly.

“Brandon,” I say.

Something moves through his face. Not resistance—thespecific weight of a man who loves his brother and has been carrying this for months.

“I know,” he says.

“He’s going to need you.” I keep my voice level. “Not to be protected from it. To have someone standing next to him when it lands.”

“I know.”

“He already knows something is wrong. He’s been at the door for weeks. When the documents become evidence and Marin’s connection is in front of him on paper?—”

“He’ll need to hear it from me,” Luke says. “Before he hears it anywhere else.”

“Yes.”