12. Chapter 12 — Ava
The system is holding.
That's what I keep telling myself on the charter to Philadelphia. Separate rows. Professional nods. Eyes forward.
Ty Knox is four rows ahead of me, headphones on, tablet in hand. He looks focused. He looks like a man watching film and thinking about nothing else.
He's not watching film. I can tell. He does a specific thing with his shoulders when he's actually locked in versus performing it. Right now, they're slightly too still.
I open my laptop. Pull up the financial model. Start running numbers I've already run four times this week.
The system holds on the charter. It holds through check-in. It holds through position meetings and team dinner and the nine o'clock film session.
I don't look at him once.
The hallway outside my room goes from muffled footsteps to quiet. I check the time. Nine-forty-three.
Nine-forty-five. A knock.
I already know before I open the door.
Ty. Sweats. Bare feet. The look of a man who lost an argument with himself somewhere between the elevator and room 608. He knows it. He came anyway.
"The circled schedule," he says. "I need to tell you something."
I step back. He comes in.
He doesn't sit. He stands near the desk, pulls out his phone, scrolls to something, turns it toward me.
A photo. Dark, grainy, taken from a distance. A sedan parked at an angle near the staff entrance of the Empires facility.
"I ran the plates," he says. "They come back to an LLC. That LLC connects to a consulting firm. The firm builds files on people in professional sports." A pause. "I've seen this before. Earlier this season, from the inside. I know what they do."
I look at the photo. Look at him.
"They're watching me."
"I think so."
"Because of what I found."
"Probably."
I close the laptop. Set it on the desk.
"How long have you known?"
"I suspected for a week. I confirmed it today."
"And you came here to tell me." I read his face. Looking for whether this is protective instinct or something else.
"You deserved to know."
That's all. No angle. No setup. Just that.
I pull out the desk chair and sit. My options right now are sit or do something with my hands I'll regret.
"I need to go to Shore."
He's already shaking his head. "You can't trust Shore."
"He's the GM. If there's a consulting firm surveilling franchise staff—"
"Ava." He says my name like it's a full sentence. "The anomaly you found. The insurance rider. Who do you think Shore reports to?"
I know the answer. I've known it for a week. The name at the bottom of the original rider document is not Shore's. Shore inherited the arrangement. Shore chose to keep it active.
"My father should know," I say.
"Not yet."
"He runs this team. If someone is—"
"If you bring Ruiz in right now, he moves before you understand what you're dealing with." Ty sits on the edge of the bed. Forearms on his knees. "You've built something here. Don't blow it up before you know the full shape of it."
He's not wrong. That's the infuriating part.
"The circled schedule in my apartment," I say. "Whoever did that was inside my home, Ty."
"I know."
"That's not a warning. That's an escalation."
"I know." His voice stays even. "Which is why I came here. Which is why I need you to stop treating this like a research project."
"I'm not—"
"You are." Not unkind. Just direct. "You're good at gathering information and moving carefully and not showing your hand. Those are the right skills. But you've been doing this alone. They know you're onto them. That changes things."
I don't say anything. He's right. I don't have a clean counter to it.
"Shore is compromised," I say. "My father moves too fast. So what's the play?"
"I don't know yet." He looks up. "But it's not you alone in your office at ten at night on a laptop someone's already been inside."
The room goes quiet.
Team hotels after film sessions have a specific kind of quiet. Fifty-three men behind closed doors. Nobody in this corridor. Nobody who knows this conversation is happening.
That's what I keep telling myself.
"You don't trust Shore," I say.
"No."
"You think my father moves too fast."
"He moves correctly. That's different. He makes the right call with incomplete information. Right now the information isn't complete."
I look at the window. Philadelphia outside, gray and wet, nothing past the glass but city lights.
"So we wait," I say.
"We find the rest of it first."
"And in the meantime I keep walking into that building every day knowing someone is watching?"
"You've been doing that for a week already."
He's not wrong about that either. I hate this. Not the situation — I can handle the situation. I hate that he keeps being right about the parts I don't want to look at.
"You should have told me sooner," I say.
"I know." No defense. "I wanted to confirm it first. I didn't want to hand you a theory."
The lamp on the nightstand throws the room in low light. He's sitting on the edge of my hotel bed in bare feet and sweats, watching me like I'm the only thing worth reading. I am so tired of how much I notice that.
We go back and forth for another twenty minutes. He thinks we find the source of the leak first. I think we need an outside contact — someone at the union, someone who knows franchise law. He thinks that exposes us before we're ready. I think staying quiet is exactly what they're counting on.
Both of us right about different parts.
Both of us wrong about different parts.
Neither willing to say that out loud.
At midnight I lean back in the chair.
"You should go."
He stands. Moves to the door. Stops with his hand not quite on the handle.
"Ava."
"Don't."
"I'm not going to say anything you don't want to hear." He turns. "I just want to know you're going to lock this door."
I stand. Cross to the door. Open it.
He walks out. I close it behind him.
The deadbolt turns. The chain goes across.
I stand with my back against the door. My hand is still on the chain. The metal is cold. He was two feet away thirty seconds ago and I am acutely, specifically aware of that fact in a way I have no productive use for.
I drop my hand.
I pick up my phone. Open the encrypted folder.
Three files. The insurance rider. The pattern analysis. The document I've been building since day one.
I tap the folder.
There are four files.
I stop.
I tap the new one.
A name. An email chain. A date.
I read it twice. A third time.
The email chain is between Shore and someone at the consulting firm. Sent during last season. Three days before the first anomaly I flagged.
Someone left this here for me to find.
Someone with access to a folder I created on a device I never connected to the franchise network. A folder I have not shared with anyone.
I read through it slowly. Shore's name. The firm's name. Dates. Numbers. Language that is careful and deliberate and tells a story I've been trying to build for three weeks.
Someone is navigating me directly to Shore.
Or they're building a case around me.
I look at the door. The chain across the deadbolt.
I don't know which one it is. That's the problem.
I read the email chain one more time. Open a new document. Start writing.
I work until two in the morning. The city goes quiet. The document gets longer.
I don't text Ty.
Not yet.