Page 128 of Split Decision

Evelyn has heard all of it.

Which means she knows we have her name. She knows we’ve mapped the methodology. She knows we’re looking for documentation, and we don’t have it.

Which means she has most of the picture. Not all of it.

I think about what she’ll do with what she has.

I go back upstairs.

Andi is half-awake when I come in—the specific surface that happens when a presence leaves a space. She opens her eyes and reads me in the dark.

“Something is wrong,” she says. Not a question.

I sit on the edge of the bed.

“There’s a listening device in the living room,” I say. “Behind the bookcase. I haven’t touched it.”

She falls silent, not in shock—Andi doesn’t do shock—but in the precise stillness of recalibration. I can almost see her adjusting the internal map she carries, laying this new detail over what she already understands and registering, with quiet clarity, how it changes the terrain.

“Since the break-in,” she says.

“Yes.”

“She knows everything we’ve said in that room.”

“Yes.” I look at my hands. “But not what we’ve said everywhere else.”

Another silence. Then, very quietly: “We leave it.”

“Yes.”

“We use it.” Her voice has the focused precision she gets when something has shifted from threat to tool. “We say things in that room that are true but incomplete. Things that tell her we’re moving slower than we are.”

“She’ll think she still has the window.”

“She’ll think she still has the window.” Andi is already working through it. “Luke—the real conversations happen outside this house until it’s over.”

“Agreed.”

“Come back to bed,” she says.

I lie down. She fits herself against my side, careful of the ribs that are still finishing their work and puts her hand flat on my chest.

Outside, the device conveys the quietness of a house where two people have ceased talking.

Let her hear that.

Let her think we’ve stalled.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

ANDI

Idon't sleep again.

I lie in the dark and think about the details of what Evelyn knows.

She knows we have her name. She knows we've mapped the methodology. She knows we're looking for documentation, and we don't have it. She knows Daniel is the thread we're pulling and that we don't know how to find him.