Page 129 of Split Decision

What she doesn't know—because we haven't said it out loud in that room—is that I've already been back to Bill. That he's already confirmed the history of theStrategic Crisis Consulting Group. That the 2011 sealed filing exists and that someone who was inside knows where the original documents are.

We've been careful about that. Not deliberately—we've had those conversations in the car, in the kitchen, in hushed exchanges at the center. Just not in the living room.

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

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

A woman who has run institutional operations for thirty years, who has never needed to escalate beyond the methodological, who has repeatedly failed to neutralize the same target—she'll make a calculation. The institutional approach has a finite window. The documentation, if it exists, represents an existential threat to everything she's built. And we're close enough that she can hear us getting closer.

At some point, the calculation tips.

Not toward exposure. Toward removal.

I don't say this out loud. Luke is breathing steadily beside me—whether asleep or running the same math I am, I can't tell. I don't say it because saying it in this room would be overheard, and I need to hold it in for a few hours while I figure out what it meansfor tomorrow.

It means tomorrow I go to the center the way I always do.

And it means I don't go alone.

LUKE

I don't want her to go.

I say it once, clearly, at seven in the morning over coffee. Not as a demand—I know better than to make demands of Andi Morgan—but as a stated position.

"I don't want you going to the center alone today."

She looks at me across the kitchen table. She's already dressed. Leg brace, crutches, and the specific competence of someone who has made the physical limitations part of her routine. She looks like herself. She also looks like someone who slept for about ninety minutes and is running entirely on resolve.

"I know," she says. "But if I change my routine, she knows the device has been found."

"If you get hurt?—"

"Luke." Her voice is steady. "She's been trying to hurt me institutionally for eight months, and it hasn't worked. Moving to something physical is a risk for her—it createsevidence, it creates witnesses, it changes the nature of what she's done. She won't do it unless she's decided the institutional approach is completely exhausted."

"She heard us say we're looking for Daniel," I say. "She heard us say we don't have documentation. She knows the window she has."

Andi looks at me.

"Yes," she says. "So come with me. I’m not stupid, you know."

I walked right into her plan.

The center istwelve minutes from the house. I drive. Andi sits in the passenger seat with her crutches angled against the door and her phone in her hand, not looking at it, watching the neighborhood streets give way to the commercial stretch that leads to the youth center’s block.

"Front entrance," she says when we get close. "Mrs. Alvarez will be in."

"I'll park and come in with you."

"Don't." She looks at me. "Go around the block. If someone's watching, I walk in normally, and you're not visible."

I don't love this plan. I also can't argue with the logic of it.

I arrive at the front entrance. She steps out with her crutches—slowly and carefully, handling it without complaint or drama. I watch her walk across to the door. Mrs. Alvarez is visible through the glass, already approaching the entrance.

I pull around the block.

I circle once. Park on the side street with a sight line to the back entrance. I sit there and watch the building for ten minutes, and nothing moves except a city maintenance truck that passes twice and a woman walking a dog.