Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
ANDI
The document is on my desk at MaxMorgan Music when I arrive Tuesday morning.
Not in my inbox. Not in a folder. On the desk itself, centered with a precision that isn’t accidental—the way you place something when you want it to be found, when finding it is the point.
My executive office at MaxMorgan has its own alarm system, separate from the building’s. I disarmed it with my code forty seconds ago. The door lock showed no tampering. The security desk in the lobby has been staffed since six o’clock this morning.
I stand in the doorway for a moment before I cross to it.
It’s a photograph. Black and white, printed on standard paper—something pulled from a file rather than taken with a camera, scanned from something older, something physical.
It’s a picture of the youth center, taken from outside the fence line.
The framing is familiar. The corner of the building, the parking lot, the streetlight that has since been replaced with a newer model.
The mural isn’t on the wall yet. The signage above the entrance is temporary—the kind you put up during construction before the permanent lettering goes in.
I know this photograph. Not this print—but this moment. I have the original somewhere, taken by the contractor’s site supervisor during the build. Standard documentation. I’ve seen it once, maybe twice, in the years since the center was originally built.
I turn it over.
On the back, in handwriting I don’t recognize, is a date. Written in pen, careful and unhurried.
The date the center broke ground.
I set it down exactly where I found it. I don’t touch anything else on the desk. I take a photograph with my phone—the document, the positioning, the desk surface around it—and then I go to the door and look at the lock again.
No scratches. No sign of forced entry. The alarm was armed when I arrived; I disarmed it with my code, as I do every time.
Someone has a key. Or someone has the code. Or someone has both. I sit down across the room, not at my desk, and I think about what I’m looking at. This is not a break-in. Break-ins take things. This visit left something for me to find.
Which means the purpose was never concealment. It was a demonstration. Someone stood in this office—in my space, at my desk, in the building my father built—and placed this where I would find it. Not to threaten what comes next. To show me what has already been.
I have been inside your life since before you knew I existed. Not since Jackson. Not since the board pressure, or the Commission filing, or the audit. Since before the foundation was poured. Since before anyone was watching you watch them.
The center broke ground six years ago.
I don’t move for a long moment. There’s a fear that doesn’t arrive as panic—it arrives as clarity. The sudden, cold understanding that the perimeter you thought you were defending was never where the threat was standing. It was already inside.
Then I call Luke.
He picks up on the second ring. Training has started for the day. I can hear the gym in the background, the familiar sounds of sustained effort and metallic equipment, someone counting reps in the distance, and someone punching mitts.
“Everything okay?” he says. He always answers that way now. Not hello. Not hey, baby. The question first, reading the tone before the content.
“I need you to know something,” I say. “I’m all right. Nothing happened to me. But I need to tell you what I found this morning.”
I tell him every step, every moment, and every move I made. He listens without interrupting—the version of him that came out of the last year, that learned the difference between processing and reacting. When I finish, he’s quiet for a moment.
“The date on the back,” he says. “Six years ago.”
“Yes.”
“She’s been watching the center since before it opened.”
“Or someone has. The photograph predates Evelyn’s current positions—she wasn’t on the philanthropy review board six years ago. Which means either she’s been running surveillance on me longer than her institutional access would explain, or she acquired the file from someone else.”
“Jackson?” he asks.
“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.
I focus on my work—everything corporate, everything executive—so I don’t have to think about the hornet’s nest I’ve just kicked.
The photograph sits on the corner of my desk where Bill left it—bagged now, as evidence—and I don’t look at it more than necessary.
There are people in and out of this office all afternoon who don’t know it’s there.
Who don’t know what this morning was. I answer questions about release schedules, licensing agreements, and a distribution dispute that needs my sign-off, and I do so with the practiced focus of someone who has learned to hold two things at once—the ordinary and the unbearable—without letting one collapse into the other.
At four-fifteen, Bill calls.
“I need to tell you something,” he says. “Are you somewhere private?”
I close my office door.
“The Athletic Commission contact,” he says. “The one Katelyn used to place the damaging material against Luke’s license while you were on tour with Sound Bar. I’ve been trying to reach him for three days. He was on the list of people I wanted to interview for the evidentiary chain.”
I already know where this is going. Something in the weight of his voice has told me.
“He’s dead,” I say.
I hear him settle before he begins. “Car accident on I-285. Two nights ago. Police are calling it distracted driving.” He waits a beat. “He lived alone. No witnesses to the accident itself. The vehicle left the roadway at a section with no traffic cameras.”
I sit very still.
“He was on our list,” I say.
“He was on our list,” Bill confirms. “I don’t have proof it’s connected. A car accident on I-285 is not inherently suspicious—people die on that highway with statistical regularity. But the timing…”
“The timing is both very suspicious and convenient,” I say.
“Yes. Exactly what you’re thinking.”
I look out the window at the MaxMorgan parking lot. The afternoon has the ordinary cadence of any other work day in Atlanta—cars, pedestrians, the city proceeding without awareness of what’s been assembled in this office today.
“She’s eliminating the witness chain,” I say. “Before we can reach them.”
“That’s my concern.”
“Which means she knows we’re building one.”
“She heard enough in that living room to know you have her name and you’re looking for documentation.
She doesn’t know you have Daniel’s file—but she knows you’re pulling threads.
” Bill’s voice is measured, the way it gets when he’s delivering something that requires stillness to hear.
“Andi. If she’s moving on witnesses, she’s moving on a timeline.
Which means we have less time than we thought.
When you start eliminating the pawns, you clear the lane for a decisive move. ”
The office continues to hum around me. A release approval awaits in my inbox, and I have an artist call in forty minutes. The usual operations at MaxMorgan go on as always—unaffected by what I’m holding and simply needing what they need.
“How much less?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” he says. “But I think we need to assume she will not wait for us to find what we’re looking for.”
I look at the photograph on my desk. The center before it existed. The date on the back.
Six years of being watched.
“All right,” I say. “Then neither are we.”