Page 67 of Split Decision

The gym noise comes through the far doors—gloves on bags, someone counting reps, the rhythmic percussion of the place. I've been here long enough that the sounds have become a kind of quiet.

"For how long?" I ask.

"Sixty days. Through the title defense."

"And the arrangement—who knows about it?"

"You, me, Marin." Another pause. "Andi doesn't know yet."

That's the weight of it. The part he's waiting for me to reach on my own.

"Marin says the conditions have to be in place before they can close the file," Brandon continues. "Andi would need to be kept from the public record of the case—no joint statements, no appearances, nothing that connects her name to the licensing review. If it's already public, the Commission can't quietly file it."

I stand up from the bench and walk toward the window. Outside, the Las Vegas afternoon is doing what it does—white sky, flat light, the distant shape of the Strip against the desert.

"She'd say no," I say.

"I know."

"She'd say it's the same playbook they've been using on her. She'd call it what it is."

"I know." Brandon's voice is level, but something moves underneath it. "Luke. The board at the center has beenusing your license review to justify their pressure on her. If the Commission file closes, they lose that leg. It doesn't solve everything, but it removes a weapon they're currently holding." He pauses. "Marin thinks it helps Andi more than it costs her."

"Marin thinks."

"Yes."

I stand at the window for a moment.

The thing is, I understand the argument. That's the part that sits like a stone in my chest—that I can follow the logic all the way to the end, and the end looks like a safer Andi, the center with fewer attacks against it, my license intact. All of it for sixty days of public distance that we're already partly maintaining because she's on a tour bus in the Midwest and I'm in a Vegas gym.

It's a clean trade.

It's the kind of thing you do for someone when they can't see the entire board.

"I need to think about it," I say.

"The window is short," Brandon says. "If the Commission escalates without the arrangement in place?—"

"I said I need to think about it."

A pause. "Okay."

I hang up and stay at the window.

I think about Andi in the boardroom, two hands flat on the table, her voice even while the board voted on her future. I think about the arrangement she’ll never get to refuse—the sixty-day moratorium I’m considering without asking her, the decision I’m making for her because I already know what she'll say.

I think about what she said once, after Jackson showed up at the gala.

They don't come for you with force. They come for you by making the people who love you afraid.

I think about sixty days.

I make the call before I go back to the afternoon session.

She findsout three days later.

Not from me. From Brandon, which is worse. I was still in a Vegas hotel room when he told me she'd called him, from one state away from me.