Page 45 of Split Decision

"Get some sleep," she says finally. Her voice has shifted—softer, less controlled. Road-tired in the way that means she's been keeping herself upright for days and is finally allowing herself not to.

"You too."

"Luke?"

"Yeah?"

“I know why you waited,” she breathes. “I know you were trying to protect our time. But I need you to stop doing that. It hurts more than it helps.”

"I know," I say. "Same goes."

A pause.

"Same goes," she agrees.

The call ends, and I sit with the phone in my hand in the small room with temporary furniture and the desert-dark outside the window. I think about the distance between us not as miles but as a habit we've started to develop. The bad habit of protecting the quiet moment by not putting anything true into it.

That's the thing we have to watch.

Not the big ruptures.

The small ones. The ones that feel like kindness.

ANDI

After I hang up, I sit with the phone in my lap for a while.

Outside the bus window, the mid-Atlantic darkness is doing what it does—flat and fast and punctuated by the occasional overpass light. Somewhere ahead of us, Philadelphia is assembling itself out of the highway dark.

I told him.

Not all of it—not the full arc of what I think is happening, not the name I keep not saying out loud, not the specific calculation I've been running about who has access to what information and in what sequence.

But the part that mattered tonight was shared.I was about to call you. I've been sitting on it too. We have to stop.

There's a particular weight in confessing to someone you love that you've repeated the same mistake they have. It doesn't quite bring relief; instead, it feels like two people placing the same burden on a table simultaneously and sharing a look over it.

That's where we are.

Cami appears at the end of the galley and stops when she sees my face—not alarmed, just reading. She's learned my tells over two months of close quarters, and she knows the difference between the face I make when something has gone wrong and the face I make when something has gone right in a complicated way.

"Okay?" she says.

"Yeah," I say. And mean it in the way that accounts for the complexity.

She nods once and retreats. That's Cami. She never needs more than an honest word.

I make a fresh cup of tea—hot this time—and sit with it as Philadelphia brightens on the horizon. In a few hours, we'll load in. Soundcheck by two. Show at eight.

Luke will be up before five. He'll run his five miles in the Nevada dark before most of the facility is awake, and he'll carry the conversation the same way I'm carrying it—not resolved, not finished, but held differently than it was this morning.

That's enough.

Not everything has to be fixed tonight. Some things just have to be knowntogether.

I open my laptop, pull up the donor communication logs one more time, and look at the pattern with fresh eyes.

Someone retained for this—someone with real operational sophistication. Someone who’s been doing this long enough that the method leaves no fingerprints, who knows exactly which threads to pull and in what order to achieve maximum damage at the optimal moment.