Page 52 of Split Decision

I look up.

"For what it's worth," she says, "you're right to be thorough. You should always verify independently." She holds my eyes for a moment. "That's not a criticism. I mean it straightforwardly."

Then she leaves. With my office quiet and my conference calls completed for the day, I contemplate her words for a while.

Because it could be exactly what it sounds like—a professional acknowledging appropriate rigor. And it could be something else. A signal. A small, careful acknowledgment that she knows what I'm doing, and she's not going to stop me. Which might mean she wants me to look and, finding nothing incriminating, arrive at the conclusion that she's clean.

Or it might mean she's already ahead of whatever I find. I pick up my phone and almost call Luke. But then I set it back down.

Not yet. I don't have enough to say anything useful. What I have is a name in a disclosure addendum and a woman who accepted a professional setback without any of the reactions people usually have when they've been caught doing something.

I open the background file again.

Garrett Cole. Former Rhoades communications director. Current whereabouts and professional affiliation: unlisted.

I start pullingthreads.

ANDI

The tour is in its seventh week, and I've started to understand the rhythm of it the way you understand a foreign language after long enough immersion—not translated in your head anymore, just present.

I know which venues have poor sightlines from the stage and which let you see all the way to the back wall. I know Cami is different before a show than after—focused and quiet going in, expansive and electric coming out—and that the window between those two states is where her best ideas happen. I know Katelyn's brusqueness is most pronounced when she's managing something she didn't expect, and that if she's been short with three people before noon, it means something fell through, though she hasn't told anyone about it yet.

I've learned to read the environment the way I read a boardroom.

What I haven't been able to read—or rather, what I've been reading and not knowing what to do with—is the specific silence from Brandon over the last week.

He calls regularly. He updates me on the audit timeline, the board's current state, and donor relationships. He's thorough and consistent, and he never gives me reason to worry. But there's been something in the texture of the last three calls I can't quite name—a slight compression,as if someone were speaking carefully in a room where they're not sure who else can hear.

I've learned to trust that sensation.

Travis finds me on the bus between Raleigh and Charlotte, which is where he’s been finding me for three weeks—the galley table, late enough that everyone else has cleared out, when the specific loneliness of moving between cities at night has settled in, and I've stopped fighting it.

He sets down a cup of tea and doesn't sit.

"You're doing the thing," he says.

"What thing?"

"The thing where you're working through something, and you don't want to say it out loud yet because saying it out loud makes it more real." He leans against the counter. "You've been doing it since Raleigh."

"We just left Raleigh."

"Charlotte, then." He folds his arms. "What is it?"

I look at the tea. The highway darkness outside. The anonymous quality of the Carolina dark at one in the morning.

"I think Brandon found something," I say.

Travis waits.

"About Marin. Something in whatever he's been looking at for the audit." I wrap my hands around the mug. "He hasn't told me directly. But the last time he called, he spent the entire conversation being precise about things he's usually casual about. Details he doesn't normally verify with me are suddenly verified. Phrasing that's been slightly more formal than usual."

"Brandon's a careful person," Travis says.

"He's a careful person who was not being careful with me before last week." I look up. "Something changed."

Travis is quiet for a moment.