Page 26 of Split Decision

"Luke." She looks at me. "I love you. But I did not come to dinner to be managed."

"Right." I take a spring roll. "Sorry."

"You're forgiven." She picks up her menu again, even though she's already decided. It's a thing she does—holds the menu like a prop while she thinks about something else entirely. "How's the training?"

"Good. Better than good." I lean back. "Mack added a new combination last week that I've been working into the rotation. It's awkward right now, but I can feel where it's going to land when I've got it."

"How long until the fight?"

"Five months, roughly. Joe wants the last eight weeks exclusively on fight prep. Right now, it's still conditioning and fundamentals."

She nods. She knows this world—she grew up in it—but she asks anyway, which I've always liked about her. She doesn't assume she already has the information.

"Tell me something about the tour," I say. "Something you're actually excited about."

She sets the menu down.

"There's a venue in Nashville," she says. "Small—three hundred capacity, maybe. Travis played it years ago when he was nobody, and he still talks about it the way people talk about a place that got something right. He put it on the schedule himself, against Katelyn's advice, because it doesn't make economic sense when you could fill a ten-thousand-seat arena instead." She looks at me. "I want to sing there. I've wanted it since he described it."

"What's it like?"

"Old. Converted from something—I think a church, maybe. Bad acoustics technically, but the bad acoustics are the point. The sound bounces off the walls in a way that makes it feel like the room is singing with you." She pauses. "He said it changes how you hear yourself."

I look at her across the table.

"That's going to be a good night," I say.

"Yeah." She picks up her water. "I think so."

The food arrives in stages—too much of it, exactly as ordered—and we eat and talk about nothing important the way we used to before the Commission and the board and the coordinated pressure made every conversation a potential crisis briefing. The restaurant fills up around us. The game on the television evolves into something louder. The server brings a dessert we didn't order, sets it down with a slightly star-struck expression, and retreats before either of us can say anything.

"He recognized you," I say.

"He recognized both of us," she says, looking at the dessert. "That's new."

"Is it weird?"

She honestly thinks about it, which is what she does. "It's strange," she says. "Not bad strange. Just—I spent so longbeing known for the wrong thing. Being known for something I built feels different."

"You should be known for everything you've built."

She looks at me for a moment. The restaurant is loud around us, the table between us has enough food on it to last another two hours, and she looks—still—like someone who is off duty. Who got to put the vigilance down for one evening.

"This was a good idea," she says.

"I know," I say. “It was mine.”

"Don't be smug about it."

"I'm not smug. I'm right. There's a difference."

She throws a napkin at me. I catch it. The server sees this and looks deeply uncertain about whether to intervene.

We get home at nine-thirty. She falls asleep on the couch before ten, which tells me how tired she's actually been underneath all the composure. I sit in the armchair and watch her for a while. I take in the specific peacefulness of her face when it stops working, the way the sustained alertness of the last several weeks releases all at once the moment she doesn't have to hold it anymore, the way her breathing evens out when the trials aren’t at the forefront of her mind.

I turn the TV off. Put a blanket over her. Leave the kitchen light on low so she won't be disoriented if she wakes.

Then I sit back down and stay with her.