Page 44 of Split Decision

"Tell me things when they happen," she says. Not angry. Exact. "I'm not made of glass. The waiting doesn't protect me. It just means I'm working with incomplete information." A pause. "And apparently it means I'm doing the same thing to you."

"You were about to call."

"Four days late," she says.

"Ten days late," I say.

We both take a moment to consider our situation. Then she makes a sound that isn't quite a laugh but is adjacent to one—the exhale of two people who have just caught themselves in the same mistake from opposite sides.

"What else have you been sitting on?" she asks.

"Nothing. That was it." I lean back against the headboard. "You?"

A moment's pause.

"I think the coordination is more sophisticated than a PAC holdover," she says. "I think someone is retained for this. Specifically." She doesn't say the name. She doesn't need to. "I can't prove it yet. But the pattern is too clean for someone who's improvising."

"I know," I say softly. "I've been thinking the same thing."

"Brandon trusts her."

"I know."

"So we don't move yet. We watch." Her voice has the steady precision of someone who's thought this through. "But Luke, I need you in this with me. Not protecting me from it. In it."

"I'm in it, baby. If you’re in it, I’m in your corner with you."

"Then tell me things."

"I will."

Another pause—this one different from the others. Lighter. The specific texture of two people who have said the hard thing and come out the other side still standing.

"How's training?" she asks.

"Better tonight than it has been over the last couple of weeks."

"Mack get in your head?"

"Mack got out of my head. That's a distinction worth making."

She almost laughs. I can hear the shape of it even when it doesn't fully arrive.

"Tell me something that has nothing to do with any of this," she says.

I think for a moment.

"Shane got a care package from Katie today. He pretended he wasn't moved by it. But he was visibly moved by it. Joe made him run an extra mile."

She does laugh at that—the real one, unguarded. I haven't heard it in longer than I realized.

"Tell me about the tour," I say.

She tells me about a show in Richmond where the sound system cut out for forty-five seconds during her third song. She kept singing acoustically, and the entire room went quiet before erupting when the sound came back. She tells me about Cami finding a record store in every city, as if it were a personal mission. She tells me about a twelve-year-old in the front row in Richmond who knew every word of every song. When Andi pointed at her during the bridge of the third song, she didn't scream or cry—she just pointed back, completely steady, as if they'd made a specific agreement. Andi laughs as she tells it.She was so certain,she says.Like she'd been waiting for that exact moment and would not waste it by being overwhelmed.

I listen to all of it.

This is what I've been shielding our window from— not the bad news, but this. The things she carries that need a place to be. Someone outside the tour to share them with, because they’re new experiences for her. I've been soabsorbed in not exceeding twenty minutes that I forgot that twenty minutes of this is more valuable than twenty minutes of enforced silence.