Page 94 of Split Decision

LUKE

The house doesn't feel wrong.

That's the thing I wasn't expecting. I thought coming back would feel like stepping into something that had shifted while I was gone—furniture in the same places but the air carrying the months of absence like a low-frequency hum. I thought it would take time to feel like mine again.

Instead, I walk through the door at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday night with two duffel bags and a body that's been in Las Vegas for six months, and the house just receives me. The distinctive smell of it. The way the kitchen lightsits. The creak on the third stair that I've been meaning to fix since I moved in.

Andi is asleep.

She came home four days before I got back—earlier than the doctors wanted, exactly as long as she was willing to wait. She used the MaxMorgan company jet to be comfortable and avoid public airports. She's on the couch when I come in, one leg elevated on the cushions, the cast a blunt white interruption in the low light. She fell asleep with the TV on and a book face down on her chest. The book she's been trying to read for three weeks, according to the texts she sends me when she can't sleep.

I set the bags down quietly and stand there for a moment.

She looks smaller than I remember. Not because she's lost weight or because she's injured—just because she's asleep, which is the only time Andi lets her body fully stop performing competence. When she's awake, she takes up exactly the space she's entitled to. When she's asleep, she looks like what she actually is: someone who has been carrying too much for too long.

I cross the room and ease myself into the armchair across from her.

I don't wake her.

I just sit there for a while, watching her breathe, letting the house settle around us both. Outside, the neighborhood is quiet in the familiar way Atlanta is quiet at eleven on a Tuesday—not silent, just unconcerned. Someone's sprinkler system trips on two houses down. A dog barks once and stops.

I've been gone six months.

I've come back to a woman who drove to Vegas from Phoenix on a motorcycle to see my fight without telling me, who broke three ribs and her left leg and had internal bleeding on a desert highway, and didn't call me from the hospital because she didn't want the circumstances to decide for me.

That's Andi.

That's who I almost let a machine take apart, piece by piece, while I was a thousand miles away in a training camp, thinking I was protecting her.

She stirs—not quite waking, just the slight adjustment of someone who senses a change in the room. Her eyes open partway and find me without surprise, like some part of her was tracking my arrival even in sleep.

"Hey," she says. Her voice is rough and warm.

"Hey."

She looks at me for a moment, taking stock. Then she reaches out her hand.

I move from the chair to the couch, careful not to bump her cast, and settle in next to her. She leans into me just like she always does. It took us a couple of weeks to figure out how to fit together like this, and I didn’t realize how much I missed it until now.

"You smell like the plane," she says into my shoulder.

"I'll go shower. I’ll just be a minute."

"Don't go." She tightens slightly. "In a minute."

I put my arm around her, and we sit together in the dark. The TV is still on, but muted, and the light from the screen moves across the ceiling.

"How's the leg?" I ask.

"It's a leg," she says. "It'll be fine."

"The incision?"

"Also fine." A pause. "The doctor said I healed faster than expected."

"Of course you did."

She makes a sound that might be a laugh.