Page 41 of Split Decision

We're between rounds, me on the stool, him crouched in front of me with a water bottle and the expression he wears when he's decided that diplomacy is done.

"You're in your head," he says.

"I'm fine."

"You were fine in November." He hands me the water. "What you are right now is distracted and distracted gets you hurt."

"I said I'm fine, Mack."

"And I said you're not." He takes the water back. "I don't coach fine. Fine doesn't need a coach. Fine is something you tell your mother when you don't want her to worry." He stands. "You've got something sitting on you, and it's showing up in here. Now. You either talk about it or youuse it. But you don't ignore it, because it won't ignore you."

He walks to the corner and waits.

I sit on the stool and think about the Commission escalation, which Brandon officially told me about ten days ago and which I still haven't told Andi—not because I'm keeping it from her, I tell myself, but because I'm waiting for a moment that's long enough and quiet enough to have the conversation properly. We keep missing each other. She's performing late into the night, and I'm up before five in the morning. When we do connect, it's usually a twenty-minute window, and I don't want to drop bad news into a moving window and then lose the signal.

That's what I've been telling myself.

The honest version is that I don't know how to tell her something is escalating when I'm a thousand miles away and can't do anything about it.

I get up off the stool.

"Let's go," I tell Mack.

The next round is different. Not because the problem is gone. Because I stopped pretending it wasn't there and started putting it somewhere it could do something. I'msharper. Reading earlier. My feet find the rhythm they've been missing.

Mack doesn't say anything when the round ends. He doesn't have to.

The afternoon sessionruns until five. By the time I've showered, eaten, and sat with the quiet of the hotel room for an hour, it's seven-thirty Vegas time, and I've been thinking about the same thing since the gym.

Tonight.

I'm going to call her tonight.

Not because I've found the right window—I don't think the right time exists. Not because I have more information than I had yesterday. Just because I've been holding this for ten days, and Mack is right about the things that show up in the ring, and the things that show up in the ring are always the things you're carrying instead of setting down.

I pick up my phone twice, then set it down. No hesitation—more like preparation. Like a fighter checking his stance before the bell.

The thing I keep returning to is the specific reason I've been waiting. I told myself it was the window. The timing. I didn't want to break twenty minutes of connection witha Commission update that would just spin in her head with nowhere to go.

But Andi doesn't spin. That's not how she processes. She receives information, files it in the architecture she's been building, and adds it to the picture. She doesn't need me to protect her from the picture. She's been assembling the picture longer than I have, from angles I can't see from here.

The waiting wasn't for her.

It was for me. Because saying it out loud makes it more real. And making it more real means confronting the fact that something is moving against us while I am in Las Vegas in a hotel room and she is on a tour bus, and neither of us can do much about it right now except know about it together.

That's the thing I've been trying to avoid feeling.

Syndi finds me in the hotel lobby at eight o’clock, which means she was waiting.

"You have theTop Contenderpiece tomorrow," she says, falling into step beside me without preamble. She's in her heels even at this hour, which I've stopped finding remarkable. "I sent you the prep document this afternoon. Did you read it?"

"I read it."

She gives me the look that means she doesn't believe me, but has decided not to press it. "The angle they're running is the fighter-with-a-story. Hometown kid, street background, legitimate career path. They want it personal." She pauses at the elevator. "That means they'll ask about Andi."

"I know."

"You're comfortable with that?"