Page 16 of Split Decision

"Not like that." I wave it off. "Just—she's managing your image, which means she's deciding what story gets told about you. Pay attention to the story she's building."

He holds my eyes for a moment. "I will."

He kisses me at the door when he leaves. Long, deliberate, the kind that means something rather than just goodbye. I watch his truck back out of the driveway and stand in the doorway a moment after he's gone.

January second is three weeks away.

I have Christmas to get through first, which means I have shopping to do, a gym visit I've been promising myself, and a call with Travis this afternoon about the tour logistics. The world is still moving. We're moving with it.

I get dressed and go.

The mall is exactlywhat Atlanta in December demands—a punishment and a tradition simultaneously. I elbow my way through the crowd with the specific determination of a woman who has a list and a deadline, and I find what I'm looking for at the first jewelry store I try: a dog tag necklace with a heart cut from the center, a matching heart pendant for me, and enough time on the engraving to have it done before Christmas.

Your treasure is where your heart is.

Our heart.

I'm standing at the counter waiting for the receipt when a girl behind the register stares at me long enough that I notice.

"You're going on tour with Sound Bar," she says. Not a question.

"I am," I say.

She squeals, a sharp, delighted sound that cuts through the low murmur of the shop, and for a second every head turns toward us. Her hands flutter like she doesn’t know where to put them. I sign her receipt—my name suddenly feeling too big, too important for the thin slip ofpaper—my pen dragging just a little as if it wants to linger. She thanks me twice, breathless, eyes shining as though she’s just brushed against something electric. I smile the entire way to the car, my face aching from it, heart thudding with a mix of pride and disbelief. It’s strange how light and exposed I feel, like I’ve stepped half an inch out of my own life and into someone else’s story, famous enough to be noticed, not famous enough to feel real.

I have five minutes, and the gym is on the way to the studio, so I pull into the lot on impulse. I just want to see him. It's that simple.

He's in the ring when I walk in, shirt off, mid-combination with one of Mack's heavyweights, and I stop walking because the sight of him arrests everything else. He is in a different body than the one that walked into Mack's gym—not different in the way that means unrecognizable, but different in the way a thing becomes more itself when it finds what it was built for. Every session, every interval, every morning, he gets up before the sun has made him this.

I should be at the studio. I stay for four more minutes.

He sees me at the corner bell. His face does the thing—the split-second recalibration, surprise into delight, before Mack's voice cuts across the gym, and he pulls the mouthpiece back in.

He leans over the ropes and kisses me, anyway. Mouthpiece and all. The gym erupts.

Luke props his arms on the top rope, crossed at the wrists, and his eyes gleam with mischief as he rakes them over me, from top to bottom and back up again. It’s the kind of spark that tells me he has other things on his mind than sparring with a big, sweaty man now that I’m here.

Before he moves, I grab my phone from my pocket and snap a picture of him. He is the vision of perfection, and all I can think is I don’t want to miss this while I’m out on the road. The thought chokes me up with emotion, and I leave the gym before I change my mind about the tour and drag him home with me right now.

That night,Luke is asleep on the couch at nine-thirty—Mack scheduled a sparring session that apparently tried to kill him—and I sit at the kitchen table with the tour contract and the MaxMorgan approval Graham sent over.

Forty cities. Mid-January through mid-June.

I read through the language carefully—not because I'm looking for problems, but because I'm looking for the version of this that makes sense. The version where I'm not running away from everything being dismantled here, but running toward something I've earned, usingwhatever platform this tour builds to be louder rather than quieter. To be the version of Andi that Marin's strategy is designed to reduce.

If the board wants me temporarily distanced from the center, fine. But they don't get to decide what I do with that distance.

I sign the contract and close the laptop.

In the morning, I'll call Travis and tell him yes.

Once I’m in bed, the quiet finally settling over the house, the thought hits like a flash of headlights—my vendor check. Still sitting on my desk at the youth center.

I didn’t forget so much as… abandon it. I’d meant to drop it in the mail on my way home, but lately my brain has been a crowded room, and I walked out of my office without it. Now it’s ten o’clock. Luke is passed out on the couch—training exhaustion stamped into the way he sleeps—and I stare at the ceiling, thinking about the woman who runs that tiny catering business out of her own kitchen. Late payments don’t just inconvenience her. They cost her. I tell myself I’ll take care of it in the morning. Twenty minutes later, I’m already swinging my feet to the floor.

Luke doesn’t stir. He sleeps like he fights—total commitment, nowasted motion.

I leave a note on the coffee table anyway. It feels safer than just disappearing into the night.