Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
brANDON
The governance advisory council meets in a building on West Peachtree that announces itself through understatement—no signage visible from the street, a quiet, well-appointed lobby that is neither showy nor ostentatious, the kind of space that communicates resources without requiring you to count them.
I’ve been in rooms like this my entire career. I know what they mean.
Eight people around a conference table. Introductions brief and professional.
A former federal appointee whose name I recognize from a decade of policy work.
Two philanthropic directors I know by reputation.
A woman from a family foundation with interests in education and housing. The others, I don’t know yet.
And Evelyn Carrington.
She’s introduced simply—governance consultant, longtime council advisor—and she arrives at the table the way certain people arrive in rooms: without announcement, already present.
Late fifties, I’d say, though it’s genuinely difficult to place.
Composed in the way that money and practice produce—not the performed composure of someone managing nerves, but the settled composure of someone who stopped needing to manage them a long time ago.
She listens more than she speaks. When she does speak, what she says is measured and exactly right for the moment—the precision that comes from having sat in enough of these rooms to know which words matter and which ones only think they do.
I watch people like this for a living. I know how to read a room.
She’s good. She’s very good.
Toward the end of the meeting, as the conversation moves to potential initiatives that overlap with the youth center’s work, she turns to me directly for the first time.
“Your brother is Luke Woods,” she says. Not a question. “I’ve followed his career for some time. Remarkable trajectory.”
“He’s worked for it,” I say.
“Of course.” A pause, a beat of warmth that arrives without being performed. “And his fiancée—I understand she’s doing important advocacy work. The legislative testimony this week was substantive.”
“Andi does important work, yes.”
She nods. “The institutional structures around foster care reform really need to be examined. We must find ways to support that effort.” She addresses the room, not just me—using a general tone that makes her personal observation feel more widespread.
The meeting ends forty minutes later.
I drive home thinking she seemed impressive.
Marin is at my apartment when I get back.
She has a key. I gave it to her four months ago, during the stretch of time when her presence stopped feeling incidental and began to feel like something solid—something my life had begun to organize itself around.
She uses it the way she uses most things: with precision and no waste.
She was here when I needed her to be and absent when I didn’t, and the combination made me feel, for a while, like I’d finally found someone who understood exactly how I function.
She’s at the kitchen counter with a glass of wine and a file she’s reading. She looks up when I come in.
“How was it?” she asks.
“Productive.” I pour myself a glass. “Interesting group. There was a woman there, a governance consultant, Evelyn Carrington. Have you heard of her?”
Marin’s expression doesn’t change.
That’s the thing I notice, standing in my kitchen with a glass of wine I haven’t tasted yet. Not what her expression does. What it doesn’t do.
When I tell Marin something she finds interesting—professionally, intellectually—her attention sharpens in a way I can measure.
When I tell her something new, there’s a beat of genuine processing.
I’ve come to know these tells over months.
I rely on them the way I rely on any good data—as a baseline against which anomalies register.
No sharpening. No processing beat.
“The name sounds familiar,” she says. “Governance circles are small.”
“She asked about Luke. About Andi specifically.” I watch her. “Said the testimony was substantive.”
“It was,” Marin says. She picks up her file again. “She’s right about that.”
I stand in the kitchen for a moment longer than the conversation requires. Then I let it go—because I’m good at letting things go when I don’t have enough to justify not letting them go. I take off my jacket before we have dinner. She stays, and the evening proceeds as evenings do.
But I don’t let it go entirely.
I just file it away for future reference.
The files are on my passenger seat when I get to my car the next morning.
I see them before I open the door—a stack, centered on the seat, with an intentional centering that is too precise to be accidental.
My first thought is that Marin put them there, as part of some document exchange I overlooked.
But the top folder is the Dalton Group analysis.
The one I built from scratch over three weeks, stored on my personal laptop, and never shared with anyone.
I stand on the parking garage level and look at them through the window for a long moment before I open the door.
I pick up the top folder. My formatting, my notations, my shorthand in the margins. Not a copy of a document I shared. A copy of my work that never left my possession.
I check the other folders. Methodically, the way I do everything. Four folders. All material from my personal research on the governance network and its financial connections. Material I’ve never sent anywhere, never printed, and never brought out of my home office.
I sit in the driver’s seat with the folders in my lap, and I think long and hard about what this documentation means. Not just to me, but to all of us.
Someone accessed my personal laptop. Or my home network. Or both. Copied four folders of research material—not randomly or selectively, but the files most directly relevant to the investigation—and left them here where I would find them immediately, where the finding would be impossible to dismiss.
Not to steal. They’re still on my laptop, I presume. To show me they can get whatever they want, whenever they want, wherever they want.
I know what you have. I know where you keep it. You didn’t stop me by having it. You should think carefully about what you’re doing with it.
I sit in the parking garage for eight minutes. I know because I watch the time in the corner of my phone screen while I’m deciding what to do.
Then I call Luke.
He answers on the second ring. Gym noises echo in the background—the distinct sounds of a place designed for exertion.
“Someone was in my car,” I say. “My research files were copied and left on the passenger seat.”
His silence that follows is not the silence of someone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about.
“It happens,” he says. “This is not the first time.”
I look at the folders in my lap.
“How long has this been going on?” I ask.
“A while.”
“Luke.” I keep my voice level. “Tell me what’s happening. All of it.”
Another silence—shorter this time, the silence of someone deciding what to share and what to conceal. I know my brother better than he thinks I do.
“Not on the phone,” he says. “Come to the gym.”
He’s waiting for me by the time I arrive.
Out of the training session, towel around his neck, the focused stillness of someone who has been thinking about what to say and hasn’t finished thinking yet.
We go to the small office off the main floor—Mack’s territory, which Mack has vacated without being asked.
He looks at the folders I’ve set on the desk between us.
“When did you find them?” he asks.
“This morning. In the front seat of my car. That was parked in the secure parking garage.”
He nods. The nod of someone confirming something he already suspected, not learning something new.
“How long has this been happening?” I ask again.
She waits a beat too long. “A while.” Another vague answer.
“Luke.”
“I know.” He looks at the folders. “I’m not going to tell you everything right now.”
I hold his eyes. “Why not?”
It’s not quite an accusation. It’s a question I already know part of the answer to, which is why I’m asking it—to see if he knows the same part I do.
He looks at me for a long moment. There’s something in his face I recognize as the weight of a decision he hasn’t finished making.
“Because there are people in your life who I’m not sure about yet,” he says. Carefully. “And until I am, I need to be careful about what goes where.”
People. Plural, but we both know it’s singular.
I look at the desk. At the folders. At the work I’ve been doing for months, someone copied and left it in my car to tell me they’d already seen it.
“She was at the meeting yesterday,” I say. “Evelyn Carrington.”
He doesn’t react. Which is its own reaction.
“She asked about Andi,” I say. “By name. Called the testimony substantive.” I pause. “Marin didn’t mention she’d be there. When I brought up the name at home, she said it sounded familiar. Governance circles are small.”
Luke is very still.
“That’s all she said?” he asks.
“That’s all she said.” I look at him. “Her expression didn’t change, Luke. I know what her expression looks like when something is new information. That wasn’t it.”
The office is quiet. Somewhere on the main floor, gloves connect with a bag in a steady rhythm. The ordinary sounds of preparation.
“I’ve been watching her,” I say. “Quietly. For a few weeks. Nothing I can point to. Just pattern recognition.”
“What kind of pattern?”
“The way she frames things. The exact words she uses when she’s steering a conversation somewhere.” I pause. “I thought it was just how she works. I’m starting to think it’s something else.”
Luke looks at his hands.
There’s something he’s not telling me. I know him well enough to know that and well enough to know that pushing right now won’t get me there. He’s holding something back for a reason, and until I understand the reason, I can’t argue with it.
“What do you need from me?” I ask.
“Right now?” He looks up. “Keep your routine. Don’t change anything. Don’t give anyone a reason to think your posture has shifted.”
“Including Marin?”
He holds my gaze for a few seconds. “Including Marin.”
I nod. Stand. Pick up the folders.
“Brandon.” He waits until I look at him. “I will tell you everything. When I can do it without—” He stops. Tries again. “There are people I’m trying to protect. The order matters.”
I look at my brother. The man who showed up to my first major pitch meeting and sat in the parking lot the whole two hours because I mentioned I was nervous, which I only found out about six months later.
The man who came to the hospital after the accident without being asked.
He showed up before I’d even called anyone, which I filed at the time as Luke being Luke and have been quietly re-filing ever since.
“I know,” I say. “I trust you.”
I walk out of the gym, get in my car, and I drive.
Not home. Not to the office. Just drive—the default routine of a man who needs the time, distance, and privacy to keep assembling the puzzle pieces without interruption.
Evelyn Carrington asked about Andi by name.
Marin’s expression didn’t change.
Luke is holding something back, and whatever it is connects to a woman who sat across a conference table from me yesterday and asked about my future sister-in-law with warmth that arrived exactly on cue.
I’ve made myself a promise about Marin. Private, unspoken, the kind you make when you love someone, and you’re also smart enough to know what you’d do if the worst turned out to be true.
I made it after the accident—after she showed up at the hospital before I called her, which I told myself meant she cared, which I still believe, which doesn’t resolve the other thing.
I’m not ready to cross that line yet. I need more than pattern recognition and a name that didn’t produce the right reaction.
But I know what I’m looking for now.
Then I head to the office.
There’s work to do.