Page 12 of Split Decision

He walks away. I stand there for another moment with the weight of it settling in—not doubt, not hesitation, just the specific gravity of a decision that's real now in a way it wasn't ten minutes ago.

The association has already assigned me a PR representative—a woman named Syndi Roberson who operates as if she were born with a clipboard in her hand and opinions about my media availability. Mack thinks she's useful. I think she's relentless. We're both probably right.

I already know what I'm going to say to Joe. I just need to figure out how to say it to Andi first.

She supports me, but she’d object to the timing of this.

That’s exactly why I’m not presenting it as a choice.

The mornings arethe only time we have each other right now, and even those are borrowed. I'm upbefore five. She gets home close to midnight most nights—MaxMorgan business that spills into evening hours, and lately a studio she's been booking on her own, working on material that doesn't have a destination yet. She's writing songs because she needs somewhere to put the emotions in her head and heart. By the time she climbs into bed, she's already mostly asleep, her body moving through the motions of the routine before her mind has fully caught up. I lie there in the dark for a few minutes after she settles, her breathing evening out against my shoulder, and I think about the fact that this is what our schedule looks like before I've even left Atlanta.

The studio time is hers. I don’t ask about it, and she doesn’t offer details, which is unusual for us. Music is her constant, the same way the gym is mine—something that doesn’t need justification because itiswho she is. The surrounding silence lately doesn’t feel like secrecy. It feels like something still forming, something she hasn’t put words to yet, and doesn’t want to speak aloud until it’s real.

I notice. But I don't push.

I leave her a note on the kitchen table on Thursday morning.

Home by 1. Stay if you can. We need to talk.

She texts back at nine-fifteen when shewakes up.

Ominous. Everything okay?

Everything's fine. Just have something to tell you.

A longer pause than I'd like.

Me too. I'll be here.

She'son the couch with her laptop when I come through the door, still in the oversized shirt she slept in, coffee going cold on the end table beside her. She looks up when she hears the garage, and the quality of her attention—careful, steady—tells me she's been thinking about her something to tell me the same way I've been thinking about mine.

I drop my bag by the stairs. She closes the laptop.

"You first," she says.

"No. You."

She almost smiles. "That's not how it works."

"I called it."

"You didn't call anything. You said we needed to talk."

"Which was implicit."

"Luke." Her voice is soft, but she is not backing down.

I sit in the armchair across from her. I've been rehearsing this the entire drive home, turning it over, looking for the version that softens the blow, and what I've come to is that there isn't one. There's just the truth, and how you say it.

"Mack wants me at Joe Caruso's training facility in Vegas," I say. "January second. Six months. Full immersion—no visitors built in, no scheduled downtime. Joe's rules." I hold her eyes. "It’s to prepare me for a ranked fight, Andi. I told Mack I wanted to do it before I talked to you. That was wrong. But I'm telling you now before I make it official, and I want to figure out what this means for us."

She's quiet. Her expression doesn't shift into anything I can read cleanly—not hurt, not anger, the same stillness she uses when she's processing faster than she wants to show.

"Six months," she says.

"Six months."

"January."