Page 17 of Split Decision

The youth center is twelve minutes away. I have a key for the side entrance—less visible, less noise—and the code to disarm the interior sensors. I’ve come back after hours a hundred times for forgotten paperwork, last-minute grant edits, those midnight stretches when the building is quiet, and my thoughts don’t have to compete with daylight.

The parking lot is exactly what I expect: empty asphalt, a few tired streetlights, and the kind of neighborhood silence that isn’t silence so much as distance—one dog barking blocks away, a TV flickering behind someone’s curtains.

I let myself in.

The hallway is lit only by the EXIT sign’s sickly glow, but I know the building the way I know my own kitchen. Activity room on the left. Supply closet. Then the corridor opens toward the administration area. I don’t touch the overhead lights. Seventeen steps and a left. Muscle memory.

I’m on step twelve when the air changes.

Not a sound—worse than that. The faint aftertaste of movement. A pressure shift, like someone had been holding their breath in the dark and just exhaled. Every nerve in my body lifts its head at once.

I freeze.

Mack’s voice cuts through my pulse, a memory with weight:Don’t talk yourself out of what your body already knows. When it says something is wrong, it’s already right.

Something is wrong.

I slide one step backward toward the side exit, careful not to let my shoes squeak.

He comes out of the supply closet doorway like he’s been launched—fast, certain, already committed. An arm snakes across my chest from behind, pinning my arms to my ribs, and he drives me forward. My sternum meets the wall. My chin clips it hard enough to spark my vision white.

I don’t scream. Mack again:Screaming uses the air you need. Use the air.

So I use it.

He’s big. Heavy. The kind of grip that assumes compliance. His breath is stale with cigarettes, and he reeks faintly of chemicals—industrial cleaner, antiseptic, something meant to erase evidence.

Not a kid. Not a desperate thief. A grown man with a plan.

I stop fighting his arm—exactly what he expects—and go limp for a heartbeat. Then I drop. Dead weight. My bodyslams down, and his grip doesn’t release cleanly; my shoulder screams as it twists, but his balance pitches forward. Mack drilled this into me until it lived in my bones: take his center. Make him movewhere you want.

I plant my feet and drive backward.

He hits the wall in a rough, stumbling collision—no clean movie crash, just enough impact to steal his air and buy me seconds. I take them. I back up fast, hands up, spine to something solid, eyes straining for shape in the dark.

The darkness is no longer neutral—it’s a weapon. He can’t read my hands.

He hesitates. I can hear him deciding, recalculating the cost of finishing this. It has changed.

He bolts—not at me, past me—toward the emergency exit at the far end of the corridor. The push-bar snaps. The door bangs open. Cold night air rushes in, and his footsteps slap across the back lot, fast and fading, until there’s only the hum of the building and my own breathing.

I don’t move for a long moment.

My hands shake so hard my fingers look blurred. I let them. Mack taught me that too:let the body do what it needs to do afterward—just not during.

I flip on the corridorlight.

Blood beads along my chin where it struck the wall, warm and slow, as if my body is still catching up to what just happened. My shoulder throbs with a deep, deliberate ache—the kind that warns something was twisted the wrong way and won’t forgive me later. I take inventory by instinct: head clear, ribs intact, no dizziness. I’ve carried worse injuries home and taught myself how not to feel them.

I go straight to my office.

The desk drawer is open.

It shouldn’t be. I always close it. Always. That rule lives deeper than habit. Inside, the files have been handled—but not carelessly. Not torn through. This was methodical. Deliberate. Folders lifted and returned with a mimicry of caution, like someone studying my routines without ever quite understanding them.

I stare at the drawer the way you stare at a familiar room after something has shifted—nothing overtly changed, yet everything is suddenly wrong.

Nothing is missing. Program files. Vendor contracts. Grant documentation. Paper that means nothing to someone guessing—and everything to someone who knows exactly what to look for.