Page 86 of Split Decision

"Yes."

I understand it immediately. Even hurt, she's protecting the integrity of the choice I have to make. Am I capable of being the man she needs? The one who doesn’t take away her right to decide what happens in her life. The one who involves her in decisions, no matter how hard the conversation is, and make sure she knows her voice matters.

By not telling me about the accident, she’s making sure that if we’re together, it's because I’ve decided to be the man she needs, not because an emergency has decided for me. It's the most Andi thing she could have done, and it also means she's already decided, and she's sealing it off from interference.

"How bad, Mack?"

A longer pause. "The news is accurate."

I look out the window. The Las Vegas morning is assembling itself outside.

"Okay," I say.

"Luke—"

"I said okay."

I hang up.

Minor injuries. Routine overnight monitoring. The news said it, and Mack confirmed it. She's okay. She's with Travis. She instructed everyone not to call me.

I try to figure out which of those three facts is doing the most damage, and I think it's the last one.

The next threeweeks pass in a way that doesn't feel like time so much as distance.

The camp winds down. Joe runs lighter sessions—maintenance work, keeping the body from stiffening while the fight bruises heal. Mack is quieter than usual, which is saying something. Shane drives back to Atlanta, Katie in the passenger seat, the two of them working through whatever they had spent the camp avoiding.

I stay.

Not because I have a reason to. Joe's done with me. The fight happened. Post-fight training is really just allowing the body to heal while keeping it nimble. The record is updated. The Athletic Commission file is closed, the sixty-day arrangement is over, and every institutional problem that prompted six months of my life in Las Vegas has been resolved one way or another.

I stay because I don't know what I'm going back to.

The house in Atlanta is ours. Has been for over a year. Her coffee mug on the drying rack, her handwriting on the kitchen whiteboard. The indentation on her side of the mattress. Her perfume lingers in the air. Going back to all of that, while the question between us remains unanswered, feels like walking into a space that belongs to a version of us that might no longer exist.

The promoters moved me to a suite after the fight—a gesture, standard treatment for a ranked win. Two bedrooms, a living area, a view of the Strip that goes on forever. I've been here the last three weeks, and I've barely been in the living room. I sit at the window and look at the desert in the same way I looked at the ceiling of the hotel room for six months before this, and I think about the same things.

She got on the tour bus. I checked—not by calling her, just by looking at the schedule. The Fireflies posted from Los Angeles two days after Phoenix. Which means she finished the tour. Which means she recovered enough to perform, or the PR framing was accurate, and it really was minor.

Mack said it was accurate. I try to believe that.

What I actually believe is that Andi Morgan would finish a tour on two broken legs if she'd made a commitment to do it, and that the absence of information from everyone wholoves us both means everyone is honoring her instruction, and that I should do the same.

I go to the gym. I run the Strip at five in the morning when no one's out. I call Brandon twice about the center—the board pressure has eased, which was the point of all of this, which should feel like a win.

It doesn't feel like anything.

I called Andi once more, ten days after the fight. Not to make her answer. Just to put my voice somewhere she might find it.

Hey. I know you don't want me to call, and I know why. This is the last one. I just need you to know that whatever you decide, I'll be here when you're ready to tell me. I'm not going anywhere. That's it. That's all.

She hasn’t answered.

She hasn’t sent a text back.

Nearly a month after the fight, I start packing.

It takes longer than it should. Six months of living accumulate in ways you don't notice until you're trying to reverse them. Joe stops by when I'm halfway done and stands in the doorway of the suite, looking at the boxes and bags, and then at me.