Page 7 of Split Decision

“I’ll think about it,” I say.

Marin gives a small nod. She’s already won half the argument.

ANDI

"Optically, separation helps," Marin says.

I don't respond. I don't ask who it helps.

I don’t speak. Letting them wonder costs me less than correcting them would. My silence in the conversation is strategic, not because I’m defeated. I understand what's happening in this room. I understood it before Marin finished her first sentence—before she opened her laptop, before she produced the graph, before she said the word " containment "as if it were a form of care. I've beenwatching this system my entire life. Not from a distance. From the inside. I was fifteen the first time someone decided that managing the narrative around me was more important than telling the truth about what was being done to me. I learned then what careful, professional language sounds like when it's building a cage.

I recognize this tactic immediately. My body knows before my mind does.

I just didn't expect to see it assembled in my own kitchen, by someone my fiancé trusts, with Brandon nodding silently as if it's reasonable.

It's been eight weeks since Jackson and Delia disappeared at sea.

At first, Luke and I were intimately closer. We'd more than survived—we were conquerors. He stood with me at the MaxMorgan Music gala, even though his dad was still trying to use leverage against me. He promised repeatedly that he wasn't going anywhere and that he wouldn't leave me alone to deal with this nightmare.

For a while, we were unshakable.

I didn't question that.

I do now.

Not because I doubt him. But because I can feel him thinking, and what he's thinking is the problem. He's runningthe logic. I know how Luke's mind works—he sees a threat to something he loves, and he calculates how to remove it. He's done it for me, with me, and because of me, more times than I can count. That instinct is one of the reasons I love him.

It's also the thing that's going to get us in trouble right now.

Because Marin is presenting this as protection. And Luke, who protects, is going to hear it that way.

I look at Marin.

She's watching him, not me. She has already read the room and identified where the decision will come from. She thinks she knows which of us has to be convinced of her solution to influence the other party to agree.

Which means she's underestimating me.

That's useful. I'll let her.

But I will not be completely silent, because silence in this context reads as consent, and I will not have my consent assumed in a conversation about my own life.

"Marin." My voice is even. She turns to face me, her expression giving nothing away about her thoughts.

I don't raise anything I can't control. I don't give her any footage. I give her one sentence, delivered at the sametemperature she's been using for the past forty minutes. If I learned anything from living in Jackson and Delia’s house, it was how to match energy in a fight when it's essential to winning the war.

"Before any decisions are made about strategy—I want to be clear that whatever happens next, my name doesn't get managed. Not minimized, not omitted, not framed. If we're in this together, we're in it together publicly." I hold her gaze. "That's not negotiable for me."

Marin looks at me for a moment.

"Understood," she says. Neutral. Already filing it somewhere.

She turns back to Luke.

I watch him absorb what I just said. He knows what I meant underneath it—I am watching what you do with this.I know he knows, because I see the slight adjustment in his posture, the way he shoulders the weight of it differently now.

Good.

He should carry it.