Page 42 of Split Decision

"She's my fiancée. Yes."

Syndi nods. Not warmly, but efficiently. "I'll give you the language I'd recommend for the separation period. You don't have to use it, but have it ready in case they push on the youth center angle."

She hands me a single printed page and walks away before I can respond, heels precise on the lobby tile, already on her phone.

I look at the page.

Recommended language: "Andi and I are both focused on our respective work right now. I'm proud of everything she's built, and I'll continue to say so."

Clean. Professional. True as far as it goes.

I fold the page, put it in my pocket, and think about thedifference between language that's recommended and language that's yours.

I pick up the phone.

ANDI

The bus between Raleigh and Charlotte leaves at eleven.

I know this because Katelyn has the schedule posted in the galley, and because I've been watching the clock for the last hour, the way you do when you can't sleep and need something to track besides your own thoughts.

It's been four days since the Charlotte hits—the community development inquiry, coordinated with whatever is happening with Luke's Commission review—which I only know is escalating because I can feel it in how he doesn't mention it, both arriving at a time when something was planned rather than coincidental. I've been sitting with the combined weight of it in the specific way I've learned to sit with things on the road: quietly, in whatever corner of the bus is empty, while the rest of the tour moves around me.

Cami knows something is wrong. She hasn't asked directly, which is one of the things I value about her—she creates space and waits for me to fill it or not,and she doesn't make the waiting uncomfortable. She left a cup of tea on the table next to me two hours ago and didn't linger.

The tea is cold now.

I open my laptop and pull up the center's donor communication logs. Not for any specific purpose—just to look at the pattern again. I've been doing this every few days, the way you return to a piece of evidence that's almost but not quite telling you something. The timing of the calls. The specific donors who were contacted. The language they reported back to me. It was all so consistent, it might as well have been scripted.

Someone gave them a script.

Someone with access to the donor list.

Someone who understood that you don't go after the institution directly. You go after the relationships that sustain it. You make the people who believe in the work calculate their own risk, and then you watch them make the conservative choice, and then the institution loses its foundation while everyone's hands stay clean.

I know this playbook.

I lived inside it at fifteen.

Iclose the laptop.

What I haven't told Luke—not because I'm keeping it from him, but because I haven't had the right moment and I don't know how to say it quickly—is that the pattern I'm seeing is too sophisticated for a disgruntled PAC or a holdover from Jackson's network acting on residual grievance.

What I'm seeing is operational. Coordinated. Meticulous.

The work of someone who does this professionally. Perfectly.

Someone was retained for exactly this purpose.

My phone shows no missed calls from Luke. Which means he is either still in the gym, asleep, or sitting with something the same way I'm sitting with this.

I think about calling him.

I think about what I'd say.This isn’t random, Luke. It’s too deliberate. Someone’s doing this on purpose. I think I know who—but I don’t have proof yet, and I can’t say a name right now. Not on a bus in the middle of the night. Because the second I do, you’ll carry it into every day of camp, trying to fight something you can’t even reach from Vegas—and I won’t do that to you.

I set the phone face down on the table.

That's not protecting him. That's making the same calculation he's probably making about me right now—thatthe timing isn't right, that our window to connect is too short for the deep conversation this requires, and that the true thing can wait for a better moment.