Page 25 of Main Event

“She’s been eliminating witnesses,” Bill says, “because she believes we’re close. We need her to believe we’re not. If she thinks we’re further behind than we are, she eases the pressure. She stops moving on people. She waits.” He looks at Andi. “And while she waits, we finish.”

Andi is quiet for a moment. Looking at the table. Then at Mack.

“The conversation has to be natural,” she says. “Not scripted. She’ll hear the difference.”

“Yes,” Mack says.

She looks at me. The directness of her, the thing she does when she’s already decided and just wants me to be in the same place she is.

“Tonight,” she says. “After Bill and Mack leave.”

We do it in the living room at ten o’clock.

We’ve thought about what to say—not scripted, the way Andi said, but shaped. Grounded in things that are true. Bill is still building the financial picture. The documentation is real but incomplete. The witness chain is harder to reach than expected. We have a name—Evelyn Carrington—but we’re still weeks from having the full scope of what she runs. These are all true. They’re just not the whole truth.

Andi brings it up the way she would bring up anything she’s been thinking about—directly, no preamble, the way she talks when she’s working through something out loud. She talks about the documentation. About where the gaps still are. About how Bill thinks it’ll be another month, maybe six weeks, before they have enough to bring to anyone with real authority. She says it the way she’d say it to me in any room in this house—the frustrated calm of someone who knows how to be patient and isn’t enjoying it.

I listen. I respond the way I would respond—asking the questions I’d actually ask, pushing back where I’d actually push back. Saying I think a month is too conservative, that we should be looking for a way to accelerate. Saying I don’t like the exposure while we wait. She tells me the exposure is managed. That Bill knows what he’s doing. That the worst thing we could do is move before we’re ready and give her a chance to reposition.

None of it is untrue.

All of it lands exactly where we need it to land.

We go upstairs at eleven. In the bedroom, door closed, Andi looks at me the way she does when something is done that can’t be undone.

“Now we wait,” she says.

“What are we waiting for?” I ask.

She looks at the door. At the room on the other side of it where the device sits behind the bookcase, still transmitting.

“For her to believe it,” she says. “And then make a move based on it.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

ANDI

The governance council meeting is on Thursday morning.

Since the invitation arrived, I’ve been contemplating it—not with dread or hesitation, but with the focused mindset of someone preparing for a performance where precision is crucial. One wrong move, and she’ll notice. Evelyn Carrington has been sitting across from people who don’t want her present for thirty years. She’s familiar with every form of controlled composure. What I need to show her isn’t just composure; it’s authenticity.

A woman who has had a difficult summer and is grateful for institutional support.

That’s the persona I’m walking in with, and that’s the figure I’m conveying. That’s what I have to be—not perform, be—for however long the meeting runs.

Luke parks two blocks away. Phone on.

I walk in alone.

The governance council meets in a conference room on the tenth floor of a building on Peachtree that announces itself through understatement—the lobby quiet and well-appointed, the elevator fast and silent, the kind of space that communicates resources without requiring you to count them. Eight people around an oval table. Introductions are brief and professional. I know three of them by name from their public work. The others I read quickly—philanthropic directors, a former federal appointee, and a woman from a family foundation.

And Evelyn Carrington.

She’s already seated when I arrive, which I notice immediately. She arrived before me. She wanted to be in position when I came through the door, which means she wanted to watch me enter the room before I could watch her. A small thing. The kind of thing that only matters if you’re reading it.

I’m reading it.

She looks exactly as she looked the day she walked into my center—late fifties, composed in the way that money and practice produce, the kind of woman whose warmth arrives precisely calibrated. She meets my eyes when I take my seat, and she smiles, and the smile is genuine, which is the most unsettling thing about her.