Page 25 of Split Decision

A pause. "Better right now."

I pull back enough to see her face. She looks like herself—steady, clear-eyed—but there’s something living just under the surface. The same thing I’ve seen since the boardroom. Not grief. More like a sustained alertness. The look of someone already braced for what comes next.

"Come on," I say. "I'm taking you somewhere that has nothing to do with any of this."

"Where?"

"Dinner. Somewhere loud, where no one knows us, and we can order too much food and not talk about anything important."

She almost smiles. "That sounds like the best thing I've heard in weeks."

"Right? That’s because it’s my idea." I feel her chuckle against my chest before she releases her hold on me.

She locks the car. I open the truck door. She climbs in and steals my jacket from the back seat before I've even started the engine, which she does every single time and will never stop doing.

"Luke?"

"Yeah?"

"Thank you for coming."

I look at her across the center console. She's already got my jacket pulled around her shoulders, her hair slightly wind-tangled, the center behind us, and she looks—for the first time in too many days—like she's off duty.

"I'll always come for you," I say.

She nods once. Doesn't make it bigger than it is.

That's Andi. She knows which things to keep small so they can stay true.

The restaurant is a Thai place in a strip mall in Decatur that we've been to exactly once before, about eight months ago, when we were still figuring out what we were to each other and neither of us would have admitted it. The kind of place with too many tables packed too close together and a television over the bar showing a game nobody's watching and a menu that's three pages longer than it needs to be.

I chose it specifically because it has nothing to do with who we are right now.

We get a table in the corner—her preference. She likes her back to the wall, which I’ve never asked about and don’t need to. When she opens the menu, her shoulders drop just a fraction, like she’s setting something down she’s been carrying all day.

"Get whatever you want," I say. "We're ordering too much."

"You said that already."

"I meant it both times."

She laughs. Small but real. The first one I've heard in too many days that wasn't for someone else's benefit.

We order a genuinely unreasonable amount of food. The server—a college-aged kid who clearly recognizes Andi and is expertly pretending not to—sets down a basket of spring rolls before I’ve finished my water, and Andi grabs one before I’ve even registered that they’ve arrived.

"That fast?" I ask, amused at her uncharacteristic display.

"I haven't eaten since eleven," she says, which is not a surprise and is a conversation we've had before and will have again.

"What happened to lunch?"

"Board call ran long, and then I lost track of time."

"You have to eat, Andi."

"I know." She finishes the spring roll. "I eat. Just not always at the times I'm supposed to."

"You can't run on?—"