Chapter 31 #2
On the ride home, I think about fifteen-year-old Andi, who was too loud in a system built for silence, and about a woman named Evelyn Carrington who wrote a memo about how to keep her that way, and about Marin at twenty-two, ambitious and eager and desperate to be taken seriously, sitting in a room with a powerful woman who told her she was the only one who understood how the world actually worked.
I can almost trace the outline of what it must have felt like from the inside—to be young and ambitious and handed a framework that made the world legible. Truth doesn't win. Narratives do.
I understand how that happens.
I've experienced the other side—seeing it from the viewpoint of someone being managed. It's the feeling of someone deciding what you can handle, what you need to know, and which version of the truth is suitable for you. It might seem like care at first, but you realize it isn't once you understand.
Marin was twenty-two.
I was fifteen.
Evelyn used both of us, in different ways, for different purposes, with the same methodology.
That's the thing I keep returning to. Not the malice of it—I've made peace with malice.
What I can't quite make peace with is the efficiency.
The way a person becomes a resource without ever being told that's what they are.
I'm not forgiving her.
I'm not forgiving Marin either—not yet maybe not ever, because understanding why someone did something is not the same as accepting what it cost. What it cost me. What it cost the kids at the center who lost programming because their director was too busy defending her existence to serve them.
But I understand it. And understanding it is how I'm going to end it.
“I need to know where you are in this.” I can’t keep the unease out of my voice.
He’s silent for a heartbeat. “Baby, right where I’ve always been. I’m with you.”
LUKE
We're quiet in the car the rest of the way home.
Not the silence of people who have nothing to say. The silence of two people processing the same information in the same room, not yet ready to collapse it into words.
Four years on the Athletic Commission's oversight committee.
The license review that manufactured the pressure.
The sixty-day arrangement I made without asking her.
The six months I spent in Vegas, while Marin had unobstructed access, along with all the attempts to destroy our relationship with fake pictures and rampant rumors.
Every piece of it traced back to a woman who has been embedded in Atlanta's governance structures since before I knew Andi's name.
I think about that. I let myself think about it completely, without managing the edges of it, the way Mack taught me to sit with a loss before you start pulling it apart for information.
She moved me.
Not Jackson. Not Marin. Evelyn Carrington, from whatever room she operates in, activated a relationship she'd been building for years—a seat on the Commission's governance committee she'd been cultivating since before I was in the picture.
She didn't put me in Vegas. But she used the license review to make the stakes real enough that staying felt impossible.
The camp was mine. The choice was mine. She just made sure the pressure was high enough that walking away from it wasn't something I could do to Andi.
The arrangement I made. The sixty days I negotiated without telling Andi.
I made that decision because I believed the threat was institutional, and I thought I could manage it by removing myself as a liability. Every calculation I made was based on the situation as presented to me.
The situation as presented to me was built by Evelyn Carrington.
Andi reaches over and puts her hand on mine, where it rests on the gear shift. She doesn't say anything. She just holds on.
I turn my hand over and hold back.
We drive home through the Atlanta morning—ordinary traffic, ordinary streets, ordinary city, entirely unaware that the woman who has been running an operation against the people in this car has been sitting in its governance structures for the better part of a decade.
"She moved me," I say. Not to Andi. Just to say it out loud.
"Yes, she did," Andi says.
"The license review. The board pushing you away from the youth center. The fake pictures of Travis and you. Trying to destroy our relationship. All of it."
"Yes. I know."
I'm quiet for a moment.
"She made a mistake," I say.
Andi looks at me.
“She didn't put me in Vegas," I say. "But she used it.
Six months of me being gone was supposed to leave you isolated, give Marin unobstructed access, let the pressure build without me in the room to push back.
" I look at the road. "Instead, it put me in a training camp with nothing to do but think.
I had six months of Mack, frustration, and not being able to help you—and I used it.
I started tracking patterns. Pulling threads.
Asking questions I couldn't answer yet." I pause.
"She exploited my absence. I used it back. "
Andi is very still for a moment.
Then she says, "She underestimated what you'd do with the distance."
"She underestimated both of us," I say. "She's been running this methodology for thirty years, and it's always worked because the targets don't have each other." I glance at her. "We have each other."
She looks at me for a long moment.
"We have each other," she agrees.
We pull onto our street. The house receives us the way it always does—ordinary, familiar, ours.
Somewhere in this city, Evelyn Carrington is making calculations based on incomplete information.
She thinks she's still running the playbook.
She doesn't know we're already inside it.
"We have to find Daniel," I say. “There’s no way out of this without him. Not that I can see.”
"You’re right,” she says, nodding slowly while staring at her plate, lost deep in thought. “What if he refuses to get involved? He walked away from Jackson for a reason.”
"He reached out to Brandon once," I say. "That's how Brandon got the name—someone called him, after Jackson died, identifying themselves as Daniel Rhoades. Brandon thought it was just a matter of closing out his brother's business. He didn't understand what was being offered."
Andi is very still. "You didn't tell me that."
"I didn't understand what it meant until just now." I look at her. "He reached out once. He might reach out again. But we can't wait for that."
"No." She's quiet for a moment. "Bill said at some point, you need a person. Someone who was inside." She looks at the table. "Daniel was inside. He had access to Jackson's records. If anyone built a file—original documents, original communications—it's him."
"He's been watching," I say. "The sedan that was idling outside the house before I left for camp.
The pattern in how each escalation was timed, the specific targets chosen—someone who knew the operation intimately has been watching it run from the outside for a long time.
" I pause. "If it is Daniel, he knows we're close. He might already be deciding."
"Or he already decided, and we just haven't received it yet."
We don't say much else, because there isn't much else to say until there's something to act on.
But for the first time since December, I feel like we're not behind anymore.