Chapter 8
CHAPTER EIGHT
ANDI
Bill calls at two in the afternoon.
Luke left for the gym at seven, and since then, the house has been silent—an unremarkable quality of a space that simply contains what you bring into it without judgment.
I have been sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop, investigation files, and a cup of coffee that has gone cold an hour ago, examining the financial links between Evelyn’s advisory roles and the institutions that opposed the center.
The typical process of building a case demands the same qualities as good music: patience, accuracy, and the readiness to stay with something unfinished until it reaches clarity.
“Daniel Rhoades came to see me this morning,” Bill says.
I set down my pen.
“In person,” he says. “He called yesterday evening, and I met him at my office at eight. He brought documentation.” Bill pauses, and his voice changes on the other side of it. “Andi. I need you to be somewhere you can sit down.”
“I’m already sitting down.”
“Then I need you to stay there.”
Bill tells it the way he tells everything—methodically, in sequence, without editorializing until he’s given me the facts and given me time to absorb them.
He tells me why Daniel came to him specifically.
It was because my dad, Max Morgan, had trusted him.
He saw how Bill had helped me without being obligated to.
Daniel had been watching for someone who had proven trustworthy through everything I’d survived, and Bill was that person.
He tells me what Daniel brought.
A second file. Held back from the package he sent me months ago—deeper documentation he wasn’t ready to surface until he trusted the channel.
“The documentation comes from two places,” Bill says.
“Some of it Jackson sent him the week before he disappeared. Jackson kept operational records as insurance against Evelyn—the same way anyone inside that operation would have protected themselves. He knew what was coming and moved what he could to the one person Evelyn couldn’t easily reach through the network.
Daniel had never been inside it. That made him safe to receive it. ”
“And the rest?”
“Daniel built it himself. Over the last two years. Public records, financial filings, connections he already understood from watching his brother’s world from the outside.
” He gives me a moment with it. “He told me he needed to understand it fully before he could hand it to anyone. He’s been building the second file since the night he understood Jackson wasn’t coming back. ”
I look at the kitchen wall. The coffee is going cold beside my laptop.
“He spent two years on this,” I say.
“Yes,” Bill says. “He did.”
Inside the second file: the yacht’s final days, reconstructed from records Daniel had spent two years assembling. A timeline. A set of communications. The name and position of every person who knew where Jackson Rhoades was in the seventy-two hours before he disappeared.
“Jackson is dead,” Bill says.
The kitchen is eerily silent.
“He’s been dead since the night the federal investigation closed in,” Bill says.
“The disappearance was staged to look like he ran—a man under federal investigation choosing to run rather than face what was coming. Plausible enough that it held. Plausible enough that the investigation shifted from locating him to building the case without him.”
He pauses.
“But Daniel has the timeline. He has communications that establish where Jackson was and who knew it. He has—” Bill stops.
Takes a breath. “He has enough to establish that the disappearance was arranged. That someone with significant institutional reach decided Jackson had become a liability that couldn’t be managed any other way. ”
“Evelyn,” I say.
“Evelyn,” Bill confirms. “She didn’t do it herself. She never does anything herself. But the documentation establishes her involvement in the arrangement clearly enough that Daniel is prepared to testify to it.”
I look at the kitchen wall. The morning light is coming through the window. The coffee is going cold on the table beside my laptop.
“Delia knew,” I say.
“Yes. She’d watched Jackson’s operation for decades. She understood what the federal investigation meant—either he’d be implicated, which would expose her, or he’d be silenced, which would expose her differently. She got off the yacht two days before he disappeared because she saw it coming.”
“She went to someone she trusted.”
“A woman she’d known for fifteen years. A former colleague with no visible connection to Evelyn’s network.” Bill’s voice is careful. “That connection existed. It just wasn’t visible. The colleague contacted Evelyn within hours. Within a week, Delia was admitted to a psychiatric facility.”
I think about the paperwork. Voluntary admission.
Acute distress following her husband’s disappearance.
The circumstances that rendered “voluntary” meaningless.
The method of it—genuine distress weaponized, institutional language applied, an oversight board advised by the woman who arranged the confinement.
The same play.
The same play she ran in 2011.
The same play she ran on a fifteen-year-old girl who saw something she shouldn’t have seen and reported it and was told she was unstable.
“The minute Daniel left my office,” Bill says, “I started pulling every name in his documentation. The facility is out of state—private, quiet, the kind of place that doesn’t appear in searches unless you know what you’re looking for.
Daniel’s file had the name of the evaluating physician.
A man named Gerald Marsh.” The line goes hollow.
“I found him. I was building the thread—his professional relationship to Evelyn’s network, the financial connections, and the oversight board he reported to.
Two days of work, maybe three, and I would’ve had enough to depose him. ”
“Would have had,” I say.
“Yesterday morning, Marsh submitted his resignation from the facility. No notice. No stated reason. By afternoon, his license was under review—a complaint filed by a patient advocacy organization. I pulled the organization’s board.” He pauses, and I know before he says it. “Evelyn advises it.”
The kitchen is very still.
“She got there first,” I say.
“Yes. And then—” Bill stops. Takes a breath.
“I was pulling the facility’s staff structure this morning, looking for anyone else who might have documented the circumstances of Delia’s admission.
There was a former colleague of Marsh’s—someone who’d worked next to the oversight structure, left the facility eight months ago.
I was going to call him this afternoon.”
I already sense what’s about to happen. The weight of his pause reveals it. With my head in my hands, I wait for him to deliver the unavoidable news.
“He’s dead,” I say.
“It appeared in the local news this morning. Out of state, small paper, the kind of story that wouldn’t have surfaced if I hadn’t been looking at his name.
” Bill’s voice is careful and level. “Found at the bottom of a stairwell in his apartment building. He lived alone. No cameras in the stairwell. Ruled an accident.”
I do my best to absorb all this information at once.
“That’s what the Marsh resignation suggests.
Either she knew specifically, or she ran a general containment sweep and the Delia thread was in it.
” He pauses. “Daniel’s second file changes the picture significantly.
But it also changes the risk. He surfaced.
He came to me. Which means anyone watching him knows he’s moved. ”
“Is he safe?”
“He has arrangements,” Bill says. “He’s been living carefully for two years. He anticipated this.” Bill pauses, careful now. “He asked me to tell you something.”
“Tell me.”
“He said, ‘I should have been louder in 2011. I want you to know that I know that.’”
The kitchen is quiet for a long time.
“Thank you, Bill,” I say.
“Andi—”
“I need a little while,” I say. “I’ll call you this evening.”
I hang up, and I set the phone on the table. My entire body feels numb, yet my nerves are frayed like live wires thrashing wildly. I sit in the kitchen of the home that Luke and I have been building for going on two years, and I let the truth hit me full force.
Jackson Rhoades is dead.
I’ve known this in some part of myself since the yacht, since the investigation, since the shape of an absence that doesn’t feel like flight. I’ve known it the way you know things you can’t afford to examine directly until you have enough ground to stand on.
Now I have ground.
He’s dead, and Delia has been in a facility for eighteen months under paperwork that claimed voluntary admission, and Evelyn arranged it the same way she arranged everything—through institutional access, through people in the right positions, through the patient method of someone who has spent thirty years learning how to use the system against the people the system is supposed to protect.
I think about Delia getting off that yacht. The two days she had between understanding what was coming and losing the person she went to for help. The week between that betrayal and the facility.
I think about being fifteen. The report I filed. The adults who told me I was confused, unstable, unreliable. The record that became a weapon.
The same play.
She’s been running the same play for thirty years, and I have been inside versions of it since—
I stop.
I sit motionless at the kitchen table. Not because I choose to.
Because something in me has gone quiet, the way a room does when a sound you didn’t realize was constant suddenly cuts out.
Something is pressing at the edge of my thoughts.
I can feel it—not distant, not theoretical, but close enough that it’s interfering with everything else.
This isn’t a pattern you stand back from and admire.
This is one you live inside. One that only becomes visible when it no longer has you in it.