Page 127 of Split Decision

He reaches across the coffee table and takes my hand. His thumb moves once across my knuckles—the habitual gesture I’ve come to know as his version ofI hear you.

“He’ll do the right thing,” Luke says. Not hope. Certainty.

“I know he will.” I look at our hands. “That’s not what I’m worried about. I’m worried about what it costs him.”

“Me too.”

We linger with this scene for a moment. The house surrounds us—the unique feel of a July night in Atlanta,with the neighborhood engaged in its usual activities outside. A sprinkler system runs nearby. A car drives by. The mundane atmosphere of a world unaware of the carefully put together moments that have taken place in this living room over recent weeks.

“Time for bed,” he says eventually.

He picks up the notebook and puts it in the kitchen drawer. The photographs are secured. The donor list. Everything is in the right place.

I turn off the lamp.

We go upstairs.

He helps me with the leg brace, and we find our arrangement in the dark—my leg elevated, his arm across my waist, the specific configuration we’ve come to rely on. The house is quiet around us.

I should sleep. My body is tired in a specific way, like someone who has been holding tension for months and hasn’t fully released it. The leg is healing. The case is building. We are further along than we were.

And yet.

I lie in the dark, unable to identify what’s wrong. There’s no sound or thought—only the peculiar atmosphere of a room that seems to hold something. It’s that feeling yousometimes get in a familiar space when it feels different, even though you can’t explain why, and you tell yourself it’s nothing.

I close my eyes.

I tell myself it’s nothing.

LUKE

I wake at two in the morning for no reason I can name.

That happens sometimes after camp—the body trained to a schedule it hasn’t fully released, surfacing at odd hours looking for the alarm that isn’t there anymore. I lie still for a moment, listening. Andi’s breathing beside me, steady and deep as she rests comfortably. The house is quiet.

Something is wrong with the quiet.

I don’t have a better word for it than that. Not a sound. Not a presence. Just the specific quality of a house that is holding something it shouldn’t be, which I couldn’t have articulated before Mack spent twenty years teaching me to read the environment rather than just the opponent in front of me.

I get up.

I don’t turn on the lights. I move through the house the way I move through a gym at closing—familiar enough to navigate without them, careful enough to notice what’s changed. The back door first. Locked, undisturbed. The study. The kitchen. Nothing visible.

I stand in the living room.

The bookcase is where it always is. The photographs on the shelf are where they always are. The small gap behind the bottom shelf where the baseboard doesn’t quite meet the wall is where it always is.

I look at it for a long moment.

Then I go to the kitchen and get a flashlight.

The device is the size of a thumb drive. Matte black, no markings, wedged into the gap at an angle that is invisible without direct light. The kind of thing a professional plants within thirty seconds, capable of transmitting indefinitely on a good battery.

I don’t touch it.

I straighten up and stand in the living room.

Every conversation we’ve had in this room since the break-in. The session where we spread everything out on the kitchen table. The night I came home after calling Brandon and told Andi about the fifthpattern. The exchange about Daniel—he’s been watching, the whole time, if it was Daniel, he knows we’re close.The discussion about Evelyn’s current positions, about the timeline, about Brandon, and when we tell him.