Page 28 of Main Event

“Take the bedroom,” he says. “I’ll be downstairs.”

I look at him for a moment, love swelling in my chest along with gratitude. The man who parks two blocks away because he knows the entrance is watched. The man who puts his hand on the back of my neck without my asking for the strength and support he provides naturally. The man who stays downstairs so I can have the quiet I need without asking anything in return.

“Thank you,” I say.

“Always,” he says.

I go upstairs.

Outside, the city runs its evening. Somewhere in it, Evelyn Carrington is doing whatever she does after a governance council meeting—returning calls, reviewing files, and managing the machinery of a thirty-year operation with the unhurried confidence of someone who has never been stopped.

Not yet.

CHAPTER EIGHT

ANDI

Bill calls at two in the afternoon.

Luke left for the gym at seven, and since then, the house has been silent—an unremarkable quality of a space that simply contains what you bring into it without judgment. I have been sitting at the kitchen table with my laptop, investigation files, and a cup of coffee that has gone cold an hour ago, examining the financial links between Evelyn’s advisory roles and the institutions that opposed the center. The typical process of building a case demands the same qualities as good music: patience, accuracy, and the readiness to stay with something unfinished until it reaches clarity.

“Daniel Rhoades came to see me this morning,” Bill says.

I set down my pen.

“In person,” he says. “He called yesterday evening, and I met him at my office at eight. He brought documentation.” Bill pauses, and his voice changes on the other side of it. “Andi. I need you to be somewhere you can sit down.”

“I’m already sitting down.”

“Then I need you to stay there.”

Bill tells it the way he tells everything—methodically, in sequence, without editorializing until he’s given me the facts and given me time to absorb them. He tells me why Daniel came to him specifically. It was because my dad, Max Morgan, had trusted him. He saw how Bill had helped me without being obligated to. Daniel had been watching for someone who had proven trustworthy through everything I’d survived, and Bill was that person.

He tells me what Daniel brought.

A second file. Held back from the package he sent me months ago—deeper documentation he wasn’t ready to surface until he trusted the channel.

“The documentation comes from two places,” Bill says. “Some of it Jackson sent him the week before he disappeared. Jackson kept operational records as insurance against Evelyn—the same way anyone inside that operation would have protected themselves. He knew what was coming and moved what he could to the one person Evelyn couldn’t easily reach through the network. Daniel had never been inside it. That made him safe to receive it.”

“And the rest?”

“Daniel built it himself. Over the last two years. Public records, financial filings, connections he already understood from watching his brother’s world from the outside.” He gives me a moment with it. “He told me he needed to understand it fully before he could hand it to anyone. He’s been building the second file since the night he understood Jackson wasn’t coming back.”

I look at the kitchen wall. The coffee is going cold beside my laptop.

“He spent two years on this,” I say.

“Yes,” Bill says. “He did.”

Inside the second file: the yacht’s final days, reconstructed from records Daniel had spent two years assembling. A timeline. A set of communications. The name and position of every person who knew where Jackson Rhoades was in the seventy-two hours before he disappeared.

“Jackson is dead,” Bill says.

The kitchen is eerily silent.

“He’s been dead since the night the federal investigation closed in,” Bill says. “The disappearance was staged to look like he ran—a man under federal investigation choosing to run rather than face what was coming. Plausible enough that it held. Plausible enough that the investigation shifted from locating him to building the case without him.”

He pauses.