Page 4 of Main Event

For now, there is lunch. Luke is across the table. And the file is in Bill’s hands. We know her name. She doesn’t know we know.

For today, that advantage is enough.

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.