Page 85 of Split Decision

That's not unusual. Your body is full of something for hours afterward—not adrenaline, exactly, more like the residue of sustained focus, the system winding down from a state it doesn't visit often. I've learned not to fight it. I lie in the dark and let it move through me.

Tonight I'm also thinking about Andi.

I've sent her three texts since she left. Two she's seen. One she hasn't answered. I put the phone face down on the nightstand and look at the ceiling.

What I keep coming back to is her face in that backstage corridor. Not the moment with Syndi—I know what that looked like, and I know what it was, and I know Andi knows the difference. What I keep coming back to is after. The moment when she saidI needed to see you win,and the way something in her voice almost came undone before it held.

I needed to see you win.Past tense. Completed need. The way you say something when you came for a reason, and the reason is now finished.

She left before I could get past the careful words to whatever was underneath them. And Travis was with her, which is its own thing to think about. Not in the way it would have been three months ago—I've listened to enough phone calls to understand what he is to her. But I also saw his face when Syndi had her hands on my shoulders. The way he watched me from behind Andi with the distinctive expression of a man taking inventory.

Travis is in love with her.

I don't think he's acted on it. I don't think Andi knows the full depth of it, or if she does, she's carrying it the way she carries uncomfortable truths—carefully, at a distance, without letting it change what she's decided. But the expression was there. And Andi has been on a bus with him for five months while I was in this cityworking.

I'm not thinking clearly. I know that. Six rounds plus no sleep plus unanswered texts—this is not the state from which to make permanent assessments.

But here's what I can't stop running: she came to the fight to see me. She saw the Syndi moment, and something closed in her face. She has Travis beside her, who has been present and constant in all the ways I couldn't be. And she left without saying the things she came to say because she'd already decided before she arrived, and all she needed was one more look at my actual life to confirm it.

I call her at one in the morning.

Voicemail.

I wait and call again.

Voicemail.

I text her.

Call me when you're up. Doesn't matter what time.

Then I put the phone face down and lie in the dark and think about the fact that I've been in this city for five months working toward something that happened tonight, and the one person I wanted in that building came and left and is now not answering, and maybe she's right about all of it.

I fall asleep somewherearound three and wake at six with the television on. A local news brief. The bottom of the hour. I'm half-asleep when I hear the wordtour,and I sit up.

A motorcycle accident on the desert highway outside Phoenix. Two individuals, one connected to Travis Malone's touring party. Minor injuries. Both treated and released. The reporter moves on before I've had a chance to process it.

I reach for my phone and call Andi.

Voicemail.

I call Travis. Four rings. Voicemail.

I call Mack.

"She's okay," he says immediately. Which is the first thing you say when you need the person to hear that before anything else.

"Mack. What happened? Where is she?"

"She's okay, son." He repeats it, which he never does.

"That's not what I asked."

A pause. "She asked me not to call you."

I sit very still.

"She said that?"