Page 71 of Split Decision

Is this over?

This isn't a rhetorical question but a real one. There's a version of this story where Luke Woods is a man who loves me as deeply as anyone ever has, and also made a choice I cannot accept. Both truths can coexist. They've been true before—in other relationships and different versions of my life—and I've learned the hard way that love alone isn't enough reason to remain in something that threatens to undo what I've spent my entire life rebuilding.

My autonomy. My right to know what's being decided in my name.

I think about the system. The board. Every person who looked at my situation calculated what I could handle and acted on that calculation without asking me. I've spent my adult life building something to prove that the system's assessment was wrong—that I could handle more than they decided, that I was more than their conclusion about me.

Luke knows all of that. He knows it the way he knows very few things—completely, without flinching, because I told him and he stayed. He is the person who heard the worst of my history and looked at me the same way after.

And then he used the same logic.

The specific words he used in the conversation, the ones that keep surfacing, “You would have said no.”He knew. He knew I would have said no, and he did it anyway, and that means the choice he made wasn't uninformed. He had the information—he knew my answer—and he decided his answer was better.

I turn onto my back and look at the ceiling of the bunk.

Here's the thing I can't get past: I understand it. Not the decision—I can't make peace with the decision. But the place it came from. The specific fear underneath it is that if he handed it to me, I’d say no, and the consequence would fall on both of us, and he'd have to watch it happen. That fear is real, and it comes from love. I know that.

But good intentions and love have been the mechanism before. That's not an excuse. That's the very thing that makes it complicated.

I spent another hour pondering the question, much like how you truly sit with something when you're genuinely deciding rather than just pretending or avoiding making a choice.

At the end of it, I don't have an answer.

That's the first honest thing I've felt in three weeks.

I don't know if we're over.

I know I still love him. I know I haven't stopped, not for one day of this tour, not when I was furious, not when I was processing, and not when Travis was sitting across from me being steady and present in all the ways Luke couldn't be.

I know that love is not a sufficient reason to stay if the pattern repeats.

I realize I need to see him in person, in the same room, without a phone between us. The person I speak to over the phone is the one he wants to present, but I need to see his true self when he's right in front of me, with no time to think and respond.

I need to see his face when I say the true thing.

I close my eyes.

We’ll be in Phoenix in three weeks.

LUKE

The Commission file closes on a Thursday.

Marin sends Brandon a one-line email. Brandon forwards it to me with a note that says, “It worked. How are you?”

I read it sitting on the floor of the gym after everyone else has left, my back against the wall, still in my training clothes. The facility is quiet at this hour—just the hum of the ventilation system and the emptiness of a room that's been full of effort all day.

It worked.

The review is closed. No public filing. No escalation. Sixty days of careful public distancing, and the thing that was supposed to destroy my career before it started is now just a document in a drawer somewhere, resolved quietly by machinery I don't fully understand.

I should feel relieved. But I feel like I paid for something with a currency I didn't know I was carrying.

I text Brandon back.

Thanks. I'll call later.

Then I call Andi.