Page 5 of Main Event

“Jackson’s surveillance of me predates everything that happened last year. We established that.” I look at the photograph on my desk from across the room. “This could have come from his files. Or it could have come from someone who was running operations before Jackson was useful to anyone.”

Luke is quiet again. The gym sounds continue behind him—the ordinary machinery of preparation, entirely unaware of what we’re saying.

“Don’t touch anything else,” he says. “Call Bill before you call anyone else.”

“Already planning to. I wanted to talk to you first, though.”

“And Andi?” Bill pauses, which is how he tells me the next part matters. “Don’t be alone in that office today.”

“I’m not planning to be alone anywhere today,” I say. Which is true, and which is also not quite what he’s asking, and we both know it.

“I mean it,” he says.

“I know you do.” I keep my voice level. “I’ll call Bill now. I’ll call you after.”

There’s a moment of silence, but I can hear the gears in his mind working. He lets it go, showing me the version of him who trusts me to know my own situation and who has learned the difference between protecting and overriding. It cost both of us something to get here. Neither of us wastes it.

“Call me after,” he says.

Bill arrives within the hour.

He looks at the photograph. He looks at the positioning. He photographs it himself from multiple angles before picking it up with a pen through the corner to examine the back.

“The handwriting,” he says.

“I don’t recognize it.”

“We can have it analyzed. It won’t tell us much—printed capitals, deliberate, a professional, practiced hand that’s been trained to be unidentifiable.” He sets it back down. “This isn’t from an amateur.”

“No. None of this is. Someone got into this office. The center is one thing, but getting in this office is next level.”

“The date is specific. Not approximate—exact. Whoever wrote this knew it.”

“Or has access to records that include it.” I cross my arms. “Building permits. Contractor documentation. Insurance filings. The center’s founding paperwork is public record. Anyone with the right access to municipal archives⁠—”

“Could find the groundbreaking date,” Bill says. “Yes.” He looks at me. “But they’d have to know to look for it. Which means they’d have to know the center existed, and that it matters to you before they started looking.”

The implication lies between us.

“How long?” I ask. Not a question exactly.

“That’s what I want to find out.” He takes one more photograph and then straightens. “I want to pull everything I can find on Evelyn’s network going back further than the 2011 memo. Not just her current positions, but her full history. Who she worked with before Jackson. What she was running before he was viable.”

“You think this predates Jackson? That’s the conclusion I’ve come to.”

“I think,” Bill says carefully, “that a woman who has been running operations for thirty years didn’t start with Jackson Rhoades. He was a vehicle. He was a tool in her arsenal. But the operation existed before him.” He looks at me steadily. “Which means it existed before you were fifteen.”

The silence in the room is deafening.

I look at the photograph on my desk. The center, before it had a name. Before it had kids in it. Before it was anything except a building going up on a piece of Atlanta that I bought with the first real money I ever had, because I knew what I was going to build there before the foundation was poured.

Someone was watching before the foundation was poured.

“Pull everything,” I say.

Bill leaves at noon.

I spend the afternoon in back-to-back meetings—a quarterly review with the label’s head of artist development, a contract negotiation call that runs forty minutes over because it always does, a brief with the marketing team about a fall release that has been pushed twice already and cannot be pushed again. MaxMorgan runs the way it always has, unconcerned with my private life, for the time being. My assistant brings coffee at two without being asked. The building fills and empties to the rhythm of a company that has been operating for decades and will continue to operate regardless of what I’m carrying.