Page 76 of Split Decision

"I thought the disclosure would complicate the recommendation unnecessarily," she says. "He's good at what he does. The previous work history is sealed. I didn't think the connection was material."

"Andi thinks everything is material."

"Yes," Marin says. "She does."

The way she says it isn't dismissive. It's almost admiring. Which is its own strange thing.

"I'm going to put the firm recommendation on hold," I say. "Until the auditcloses."

She lets a moment of silence linger. "That's your decision to make."

"It is."

I hang up and stand at the window.

She didn't fight me on it. Didn't argue, didn't persuade, didn't deploy any of the careful language she uses when she wants to move a room in a particular direction.

She just accepted it.

Which means either she's genuinely deferring to my judgment, or she already knows the audit is close enough to closing that it doesn't matter.

I don't know which.

That's the thing about Marin Caldwell that keeps me up at night.

I can never quite tell.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

ANDI

Phoenix in May is a different color than anywhere we've been on this tour.

The desert light is sharper here. Less forgiving. Everything is very visible in a way that feels pointed—the mountains in the distance, the dry air, the clarity that comes from no humidity and nothing between you and the sky. After almost five months of the East Coast and the Midwest and the flat dark of the Southwest, the light here feels like an accusation. Like it's refusing to let anything be soft or ambiguous.

I step off the bus at seven in the morning and stand in the parking lot of the venue for a long time, just looking at it.

Luke's fight is tomorrow night.

I've known for three weeks that the tour has two dates near Vegas—Phoenix and Los Angeles. I've known for three weeks that if I wanted to, I could rearrange things. Get there. See him. Not announce it, just be in the building to watch him during one of the most important fights of his career. I've been planning it in the back of my mind, the way you plan things you're not sure you're going to do—running the logistics, identifying the obstacles, leaving the decision unmade.

I haven't told him.

That's been the recurring theme of the last month. We talk. Not every day—the windows are shorter now, or maybe we've just gotten more careful about what we put in them. We say the true things but in smaller doses, as if we're both rationing something we're not sure we have enough of. He asks about the tour. I ask about training. We talk around the thing that sits between us, and we're both aware we're talking around it, and neither of us has figured out how to stop.

The arrangement ended two weeks ago. His athletic commission file is closed. Officially, publicly, we are no longer separated. The youth center board pressure at the center has eased, which was the point—the thing I can't quite get past—not that it didn't work, but that it did. That his logic was correct. Those sixty days of manageddistance produced exactly the result he predicted, and I still can't make that feel like the right thing.

I set my coffee cup down on a concrete barrier and look at the mountains.

What I'm afraid of—the thing I've been circling for three weeks without saying directly, even to myself—is that I’ll go to Vegas and find out we're already different people than we were. That our five months of parallel crisis management, careful phone calls, and the specific loneliness of solving our own problems have quietly, without either of us choosing, built two separate versions of us that don't fit together the same way anymore.

That's the fear.

Not that he stopped loving me. I know he didn't. Not that he'd do it again—I think he understands now in a way he didn't before. The fear is subtler than that and harder to fix. The fear is that we got through it by ourselves, each of us, and that being through it means we needed each other less than we thought, and that needing each other less means something has changed shape permanently.

I've been carrying that thought for three weeks, and I haven't said it to anyone.

Travis finds me in the parking lot at seven-fifteen with two coffees, which means he's been up since beforeseven.