Page 38 of Split Decision

I like it here more than I expected to.

I also miss Andi in a way that has a specific physical texture. Not dramatic. Just constant. Like a low-grade frequency underneath everything else—the drive to the grocery store, the last thirty seconds before sleep, the space between combinations in the ring. She's there the way she always is, which is to say everywhere.

We FaceTime when our schedules line up, which isn't always the case. She's on Eastern Time and performs most nights. It’s late for her by the time everyone boards the buses. I'm in a facility that runs on Joe's clock, which starts at five-fifteen and ends when Joe says it ends. Most nights, I'm horizontal and nearly clinically dead by nine.

Last night she called at ten-forty from a parking lot somewhere in Baltimore, still wearing her stage makeup, half her hair coming loose from whatever it was pinned into, and she talked to me for nineteen minutes about a kid in the front row who'd been crying during her last song and how she'd made eye contact with him and kept singing and how afterward he'd found her at the merch table and told her his mom had just died.

She held it together until he walked away. Then she went behind the merchandise tent and cried forfive minutes. She told me this without drama. Just in the careful, factual way she tells things that matter.

"I wish I'd been there," I said.

"I know." She propped the phone against something so I could see her face. "But you're doing what you should be doing. I'm doing what I should be doing."

"That doesn't mean I don't wish I were there."

"No," she agreed. "It doesn't mean that."

That's Andi. She doesn't make parallel truths compete with each other. I'm still learning how to do that.

She's three weeks into the tour now and already the thing I feared most—the gradual narrowing of her world to a moving bus and a rotating set of venues and people who know her only as the woman onstage—hasn't happened. She's building something out there. I can hear it in how she talks about Cami, about the crew, about the feeling of a crowd that's showing up specifically for her.

That's its own thing to hold. Pride and something more complicated are sitting right next to each other.

I'm doing pull-ups on the rig outside the main gym when Mack comes to find me, which means something has hisattention.

"Your brother called the desk," he says. "Says he's been trying your cell."

I drop down and check my phone. Three missed calls from Brandon. The facility gets a bad signal in the far section where I was working. I call him back from the parking lot, standing in the February cold with my shirt damp and the desert sky enormous overhead.

"You see the Commission update?" he asks instead of hello.

"What update?"

"They escalated it. Still procedural, technically, but it moved to the next review tier."

I look at the glow of the city on the horizon. "How?"

"Marin says it looks like someone with commission access filed a supplemental complaint. Anonymous. References the unsanctioned fights from before you went professional."

The news article from the gym bench in week one. The one I read and set face-down and told myself was just noise.

It wasn't noise.

"When did she find out?"

"This morning. She flagged it for me rightaway." Brandon pauses. "She also said the supplemental language is specific. Someone who knows the timeline."

"Meaning someone who's been watching for a while… or has deep pockets to track all that information quickly."

"Yeah."

I let that sit for a moment.

"How's Andi?" I ask.

"She called me last week, actually." Something careful in his voice. "She's handling the donor situation with the center well. Better than I would. She doesn't rattle easily."

"I know."