Page 32 of Split Decision

I'm almost at my office when I see it.

The center's main calendar—the large whiteboard mounted on the wall beside the administrative corridor, the one that shows the full program schedule for the coming months—has been changed.

Not erased. Changed.

Someone has carefully altered the notation for the center's upcoming federal funding review. The date has been moved three weeks earlier than it actually is, written in a hand that's close enough to Mrs. Alvarez's that you'd have to know her handwriting well to catch the difference.

Someone has carefully altered the notation for the center's upcoming federal funding review. The correct date has been replaced with a different one, written in a hand that's close enough to Mrs. Alvarez's that you'd have to know her handwriting well to catch the difference.

The date written there is 9/4/11.

September fourth. Fifteen years ago.

I stand in the corridor and look at it.

I know our funding review date. Moving it on the calendar means anyone who relies on that board—program staff, board members, the communications team—would show up unprepared. Would miss the actual deadline. Would give the board reviewing our funding structure a clean, documented reason to question our organizational competence.

It's not dramatic. It's not a threat anyone could point to in court.

It's the machine, leaving its fingerprints onmy calendar.

I take a photograph. I call Mrs. Alvarez, who confirms she didn't touch the calendar this week. I correct the date. I call Bill, who tells me to document everything and reminds me that this is what the early phase looks like—small, precise, deniable.

"The point isn't the calendar," he says. "The point is that they were inside your building, and you didn't know until you walked in."

After I hang up, I stand in the activity room for a moment. The mural. The homework tables. The door that faces the street. Five months is a long time to be away from this. I check the rest of the building twice. Nothing else has been touched. I reset the alarm with a new code. I call the building's security company and schedule an immediate camera upgrade.

Then I drive home, and I finish packing for the tour.

Luke texted while I was at the center.

Everything okay?

He knows my schedule. He knows I was going to stop by before leaving. He reads my absence in the timing of my silence the way he reads everything—before I have to explain it.

Yes. Tell you tonight. Go train.

Andi.

I mean it. Go. I'm fine.

A pause. I can picture him standing in the gym, phone in hand, making the calculation.

Tonight.

Tonight. I love you.

I love you, baby. Be safe on the road.

I put the phone in my pocket, and I finish packing.

The tour is waiting. The machine is waiting. Both of them will still be there when I get back.

Procrastination will bethe death of me one of these days... if I don't put it off.

Hauling my suitcases out of storage, I unzip them and spread them out across my bed. Our show dates are so close together that it would be hard to make a stop to shop for clothes along the way. I’m finding it impossible to plan for everything I may need—casual clothes, dressy clothes, pajamas, and toiletries.

Over the last several weeks of rehearsals, the women in Fireflies have become the unexpected bright spot in an otherwise complicated December. Cami Hale, their lead singer, attached herself to me somewhere around the third joint rehearsal with the easy confidence of someone who has decided you're going to be friends and sees no reason to waste time getting there. She's been in this industry long enough to have lost the parts that weren't real and kept the parts that were, and what's left is someone who says exactly what she means and means exactly what she says.