Page 43 of Split Decision

We’re both doing it.

That’s the part that unsettles me more than any single move being made against us. Not the attacks themselves—those I can meet head-on. I know how to take a hit. I know how to brace, deflect, and recover. I’ve spent a lifetime doing just that.

What I don’t know how to survive is the habit we’re building of holding back the real things. Waiting for a better moment. A quieter day. A call that lasts long enough. Because those moments don’t arrive. We just keep waiting, and the truth keeps stacking up, and eventually the weight of all the unsaid things does the damage the attacks never could.

That kind of pressure doesn’t explode. It accumulates. And by the time we feel it breaking us apart, it’s already been working for a while.

I pick up the phone to call him, and it lights up in my hand before I can dial.

Luke.

I answer on the second ring.

LUKE

She picks up on the second ring, which means she wasn't asleep.

"Hey," she says. Her voice has the quality of someone who's been awake in the dark, thinking.

"Hey, baby. Sorry. I know it's late."

"I wasn't sleeping."

I sit on the edge of my bed in the hotel room, the one Andi insisted on covering so we'd be close enough to walk to the gym, small and functional and entirely temporary. "The Commission escalated the review. Brandon told me almost two weeks ago, and I should've told you sooner."

A pause that has a specific texture—not surprise, not anger. Something that sounds like recognition.

"Okay," she says.

"I kept waiting for a better time to call."

"How did it escalate?"

I tell her what Brandon told me. She listens without interrupting, which Andi does when she's processing the facts rather than reacting out of emotion. I can hear the bus inthe background—the low hum of it moving, the acoustics of a space that's become familiar to me even though I've never been inside it.

"Anonymous supplemental complaint," she says when I finish.

"Yeah."

"That matches the donor calls. Same week as the community development inquiry to the center." Her voice is level. Not calm exactly—but definitely calibrated. "Someone is running this on a timed release."

"Yeah. That's what I think too."

"Luke." A pause. "I was about to call you."

"About what?"

"The same thing. The pattern." A brief silence. "I've been sitting with it for four days and not bringing it up. But only because our calls are so limited. I didn't want to ruin our time together with it. And then I realize?—"

"That's why I was waiting too," I say.

She goes quiet.

"We're both doing it," I say.

"Yes." One word, but the weight in it is considerable. "We have to stop."

"I know."