Chapter 18 Getting Ahead of It

Chapter 18 Getting Ahead of It
POV: Wren

Carol's text was still on my screen when I made the decision.
We were not waiting for Marcus to land and set the terms. Two days was enough time to move if we moved right now, tonight, before he got here and the whole board shifted under us. I turned the phone toward Callum and watched him read it and watched his jaw do the thing it did when he was deciding something he had already decided.
"Coach first," he said.
"Story first," I said. "You call the coach, I start drafting. We work at the same time."
He pulled out his phone. I opened my laptop.
The draft had been living in pieces across four documents for two weeks, fragments and notes and sourced details that I had been building without letting myself assemble them because assembling meant it was real and real meant it needed to be ready and ready meant I had to decide what I was willing to risk to run it. Two days ago the answer to that question had still felt complicated. Right now, with a flight confirmation sitting on Callum's phone and Jamie somewhere in the dark with emails we couldn't reach, the answer felt very simple.
Everything. The answer was everything.
I opened a new document and started writing.
Not the careful version, not the legally defensible version, just the true version first, all of it, every connection and name and date and pattern across three schools, written the way you wrote something when you were the only person in the room and nobody was watching yet. You got the true version down first. Then you figured out what you could prove.
Across the desk Callum was on the phone with the coach's office, leaving a message, voice even and professional, requesting a meeting tomorrow morning, citing team scheduling matters, nothing that would flag as urgent or investigation-adjacent.
He hung up. Looked at my screen. "How many versions?"
"Three." I kept typing. "One I can defend legally right now with what we have. One that's complete but needs Jamie's emails to be bulletproof. One that's the whole truth including your father's name and Thrace and the pattern across all three schools."
"Which one runs."
"All three are the same story." I stopped typing and looked at him. "That's the problem and also the point. I can't make it smaller without making it wrong."
He sat back. Said nothing for a moment.
I went back to the draft.
The writing was good. Better than good, and I knew it the way you knew things about your own work when you stopped performing modesty about it and just looked at what was on the page. It had the sourcing, it had the pattern, it had the human cost of it laid out in specific, undeniable detail. It was the best thing I had written in two years and it was sitting in a locked document on an offsite account and I could not publish it yet because yet was doing a lot of work right now.
That specific frustration had a texture to it. Heavy and sharp at the same time.
I saved the draft and opened the legal version in a second window and started mapping what I could currently prove against what I had written. The coach transfer, documented through school board minutes. The donation, traceable through the foundation's public filings. Chen, documented through the email chain with her address in the cc field. The gambling arrangement, documented through Callum's dated folder.
Thrace. The locker note. The red circle. His name connecting everything.
Not yet provable in print. But close.
I added a line to the draft and sourced it three ways and moved to the next one.
Callum was quiet across the desk, working through something on his own phone, and the office had the specific quality it got late at night when the building was empty and the only light was the desk lamp and the two laptop screens. We had been in rooms like this enough times now that the quiet didn't need filling.
I was mid-sentence on the most important paragraph in the legal version when his phone buzzed.
He looked at it. Typed a response. Put it down.
Thirty seconds later it buzzed again.
He picked it up and this time he read it twice and the way he put it back down was different from the first time, slower, with more deliberateness, the kind of deliberateness that meant he was deciding how to say something.
"Coach cancelled," he said.
I looked up from the screen.
"Family matter." He said the two words with a flatness that made clear what he thought of them. "Thirty minutes after I left the message."
Thirty minutes. Not tomorrow, not after sleeping on it. Thirty minutes, which was exactly long enough to receive a message from someone else and make a phone call and then cancel.
Marcus wasn't landing in two days.
Marcus was already working the board from wherever he was right now.
"He got to the coach," I said.
"Yes."
"Before we did."
"Yes." Callum picked up his phone again and I watched his face move through something controlled and then settle. "Which means the coach was already on the list of people my father would contact when he needed to move quickly."
I saved the draft. Both versions. Saved everything twice to two separate locations because the night felt like the kind of night where losing work was a real possibility.
My phone buzzed on the desk.
Dex.
I read the text over Callum's shoulder because he had already turned the screen toward me before I could ask.
Something's wrong. Just got called into the athletic director's office. Tonight. Like right now. Callum bro what is going on. Why does the AD want to see me at 9pm.
Callum was already typing back.
I looked at the draft still open on my laptop, the legal version, the sourced and documented and carefully constructed version of a story that was the most important thing I had built in two years.
Dex getting called into the athletic director's office at nine at night, thirty minutes after the coach cancelled, two days before Marcus landed.
This wasn't preparation anymore.
This was already happening.