Page 99 of Split Decision

"I'm going to talk to Bill," she says.

"Okay."

"Soon."

"Okay." I reach over and take her hand. She lets me. "What do you need from me right now?"

She thinks about it.

"Keep watching Brandon," she says. "Not for what she's doing. For what he's not seeing."

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

ANDI

The thing about healing is that it's louder than people tell you.

Not the physical part—the leg is healing on its own schedule, indifferent to what I think about it. Three more weeks in the cast, then physical therapy, then a slow return to weight-bearing in a brace. The body knows what to do. It just requires patience, which has never been my strongest quality.

The loud part is everything else.

Luke came home from camp six days ago. The camp that was supposed to end in triumph—hisfight won, his license cleared, his career on the trajectory he'd worked toward for years—and instead ended with me airlifted to a Phoenix hospital. He doesn't talk directly about those days. He mentions them sideways sometimes, the way you reference something that changed the shape of things without wanting to examine it too closely yet.

We're home. That's the fact I keep returning to. We're home, and we're in the same house at the same time, which has been true for exactly six days after months of not being true, and I'm still adjusting to the weight of it. The solidity of him in the kitchen at seven in the morning. The sound of the shower. His jacket is on the hook by the door.

Small things.

Enormous things.

We had the hard talk in his hotel room once I’d healed enough to leave the hospital. We said everything we needed to say about the agreement, our time apart, and the factors that led to our near demise. What we've done since then is we decided to keep going, to keep moving forward together. My fears that we no longer need each other have subsided. I know that’s not true at all. We’ve found peace in realizing we need each other more than ever.

I'm on the couch with my leg elevated and my laptop open, and the morning is quiet around me when Luke comes in from his run. He's been running every morning at six—not training camp runs, not the brutal interval work Joe prescribed, just running. Moving through the neighborhood in the early dark because his body doesn't know how to be still anymore.

He comes in the back door, and I hear him in the kitchen—water filling a glass, the sound he makes when catching his breath, the refrigerator—and then he appears in the living room doorway with two glasses of water, damp from the run, and looks at me the way he does sometimes now. Like he's checking to make sure I'm still here. Like the sight of me on the couch in the morning is something he's going to take stock of for a while before he stops being relieved by it.

"Anything interesting?" he asks, nodding at the laptop.

"Board minutes from last month. Catching up." I close it. "How was the run?"

"Good." He sits on the coffee table across from me, which is something he does now—positioning himself where he can see my face. "Mrs. Alvarez's car is already in the youth center lot."

"She gets there at six-fifteen. Has for elevenyears."

"I know." He hands me the water. "She called yesterday while you were sleeping. Just to check in."

I look at him.

"I told her you were fine," he says. "I didn't tell her the whole thing because it wasn't mine to tell. But I think she knew."

"She always knows." I set the water down. "What did she say?"

"She said the center is steady. And she said—" He pauses. "She said to tell you that the girl has been coming back every day. She said you’d know who she meant. Want to tell me about her?"

My chest does the thing it does when something unexpected happens, and I know it contains a mixture of good and bad. I press my palm flat against my sternum for a moment, the way you do when you need to hold something in place.

“Good,” I say.

And then, because it’s more than that, I keep going.