Page 70 of Split Decision

Through the door, I can still hear Travis's guitar. Three chords, repeated. Something he's working through.

I think about the statement in December—the one that didn't include my name. Luke pushed back on that. He insisted. He told Marin, “She is my team,”and he meant it.

And then, three months later, in a Vegas hotel room, alone with the logic of it and no one to balance the argument, he made the same choice Marin recommended in December. Just slower. Just with more reasoning behind it. Just with better intentions.

The intentions don’t change what it is.

I know this. I've lived inside systems built by people with good intentions. I know what it looks like when someone decides they understand the situation better than you do and acts on that understanding without asking.

What I didn't expect was this betrayal from Luke.

I let myself feel that for a moment. Not perform it, not manage it. Just feel it, here in the galley of a tour bus in the middle of Oklahoma, with Cami asleep and Travis playing three chords in the back.

Then I pick up the phone and call him.

He picks up on the second ring. I can hear the hotel room behind him—the quiet of that place I've never been to but know by its sounds.

"Tell me what you did," I say.

He doesn’t get to decide what I survive.

CHAPTER TWENTY

ANDI

The tour bus crosses into New Mexico at three in the morning, and I am awake for all of it.

Not because I can't sleep. I've learned to sleep in the rattle and hum of a moving bus, in the thin dark of a curtained bunk, with the low conversation of the night crew bleeding through the walls. I can sleep through most things now.

I'm awake because there are things you can't sleep through. Not because they're loud. Because they're quiet in the specific way of something that has permanently changed shape.

The moment Brandon told me instead of Luke, and I heard it in the first half-second, the quality of his voice when he's delivering something he didn't want to carry. I knew before he said the first word. The drop happened then, not when Luke confirmed it. Not when I called him and made him say it out loud. Before all of that, in the silence between Brandon picking up and beginning to speak, I already knew. He thought that if he handed me the results instead of another fight, it would be enough.

I understand the logic. I understand where it comes from. I understand that the version of Luke who made that call is the same version of Luke who put the blanket over me on the couch and left the kitchen light on low so I wouldn't wake disoriented, who sat outside the youth center in his truck just to be close to me, who has never once asked me to be less complicated than I am, who vowed never walked away even when the easier option was to.

Understanding it doesn't make it sit differently.

What it does—what it actually does, under the anger I've processed and set aside—is scare me. Because the people who've hurt me most in my life have always believed they were protecting me. That's the mechanism. Not malice. Care, tilted slightly wrong, until it becomes its own kind of control.

Luke is not Jackson. I know that with the same certainty I know anything.

But the pattern remains the same, and after living with it long enough to recognize its form, you notice it everywhere, even in the actions of those who care about you. Especially there, sometimes.

I pull my knees to my chest in the bunk and stare at the ceiling. Outside, New Mexico is dark, enormous, and indifferent.

My phone has seventeen messages I haven't answered. Most of them are Luke—not panicked, not pleading, just present. Checking in. Giving me room. Doing the right things in the right order, which is both exactly who he is and exactly what makes this harder.

The last message, sent an hour ago, says:

I'm not asking you to be okay with it. I just want you to know I'm here.

I read it three times.

Then I put the phone face down, close my eyes, and don't sleep for another hour.

I lie in the dark of the bus bunk for a long time after that.

Not running numbers. Not strategizing. Just letting myselflook directly at the thing I've been approaching from angles for three weeks.