Page 74 of Split Decision

"Thank you."

After I hang up, I sit with the phone and think about what I've just done. I've planted a seed of doubt in the person who trusts her most, without enough evidence to justify it. If I'm wrong about Marin, I've damaged something real. If I'm right, I've given Brandon a chance to see it before it goes further.

That's the calculation.

I don't love it.

But I make it anyway.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

LUKE

Mack gives me one instruction in May, and one only.

"Stop fighting like you have something to prove," he says. "Start fighting like you already know."

We're watching tape on my upcoming opponent—a solid middleweight named Rafael Soto with a seventeen-and-two record and a right hand that has ended eight fights before the fourth round. He's disciplined. Patient. He waits for you to make the first mistake, and then he makes you pay for it, compounding.

I've been watching tape on him for three weeks. I know his patterns the way I know my own address.

What I haven't been able to do is get out of my head long enough to use what I know.

"You're overthinking it," Mack says.

"I know."

"You know what the problem is." He turns off the monitor. "You're trying to win the fight before it starts. You want to walk in there already decided." He crosses his arms. "That's not boxing. That's anxiety wearing boxing gloves."

I don't answer because he's right.

The arrangement with Marin technically worked. The Commission's file is closed. My license is safe. The fight is happening. I should be able to put it down now and be fully present in what I came here to do.

Instead, I'm carrying the weight of how it was resolved every time I step in the ring.

Not guilt, exactly. More like the lingering weight of a choice I made—one I’m still walking into, without being able to see where it ends.

Mack has noticed. He always notices.

"You talk to her?" he asks.

"Most nights."

"Is she all right?"

I think about how to answer that. Andi is functioning—performing on tour, navigating the audit, managing the board, and calling me with her voice steady. She's all right in the ways that are visible. Underneath that, something is different, and I can feel the shift of it even across a thousand miles. She's holding herself slightly apart from me. Not punishing me. Just maintaining a careful distance while she decides how much trust to extend and in what direction.

"She's handling things," I say.

Mack makes a sound that isn't quite agreement.

"She called me last week," he says.

I look at him. "About what?"

"About the PR firm Marin recommended for the center." He picks up the remote and turns the monitor back on, pulling up a different clip. "She wanted to know if I'd heard of them."

"Had you?"