Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
LUKE
Bill calls with the Commission’s official position on Thursday morning.
I’m in the gym, but I’m not training. My next scheduled fight is the big one, and it’ll be announced soon, assuming the Commission doesn’t expel me completely.
In the lead-up to this one, there are different rules.
There’s no room for error. No room for guessing.
No room for hesitation. For a title eliminator bout, Mack brings in a specialist. Diego Reyes, a former World Boxing Council contender with twelve years of professional boxing, has been on the wrong end of a championship fight and learned exactly what that costs.
He is here to teach me what Mack can’t: how to think like someone who has actually stood where I’m trying to go.
Reyes has me on active rest after the gas station incident, which means movement work and nothing that requires the hands. He doesn’t say it’s because of the footage. He doesn’t have to.
“They’re not suspending you,” Bill says.
“Not yet. The self-defense argument is holding because the police report supports it, and Andi’s statement is on record.
But they’ve opened a conduct file.” He gives me a moment to get there myself.
“Which means anything else that happens between now and the title fight goes into that file.”
“Understood.”
“Luke.” He waits a beat. “The man died.”
“I know.”
“You’re not legally liable—the death occurred under medical care, which is a separate act that results in a broken chain of causation.
No prosecutor touches that.” Paper moves on his end.
“But the conduct file doesn’t reflect the full picture yet, and if the connection between the gas station and the hospital surfaces in the press before it surfaces in the official record—”
“It changes the story,” I say.
“It changes every story simultaneously. The footage. The conduct file. The Commission’s position. All of it gets reframed around a dead man whose identity no one can verify.” He pauses. “Which is either very bad for you or the thing that proves what actually happened. I don’t know which yet.”
“Neither do I,” I say.
We leave it there.
Reyes finds me on the floor after the call. He doesn’t ask about the Commission or the footage—he reads me the way Mack reads everything, which is to say he reads what matters and doesn’t editorialize about the rest.
“You’re not here today,” he says.
“I’m here.”
“Your body is here.” He crosses his arms. “Where’s the rest of you?”
I look at the far wall. “Working through some things.”
“Work faster. We have a fight to announce.” He uncrosses his arms. “Tuesday. Press conference at the arena. You’re headlining a title eliminator in eleven weeks, which means starting Wednesday, I own your mornings, your afternoons, and your evenings.
Whatever is happening outside this gym happens somewhere I’m not responsible for.
” He looks at me steadily. “Can you do that?”
“Yes,” I say, meeting his gaze straight on.
“Then be here tomorrow. All of you.” He walks away.
I stand in the center of the gym floor and think about eleven weeks.
About what eleven weeks means—for the fight, for the Commission file, for Andi’s knee, for the investigation, for every thread that’s currently in motion.
Eleven weeks is either enough time, or it isn’t. Either way, it’s what we have.
I go back to the movement work.
The press conference is Tuesday.
I stand at the podium in the arena with Reyes to my left and my opponent’s camp to the right, and I say the things you say at a press conference.
I’ve prepared. I respect my opponent. I’m focused.
I’m ready. The reporters ask the questions they ask.
Three of them ask about the gas station footage.
I give them the same answer I gave the Commission.
“My fiancée was being attacked. I intervened. I stand by what I did.”
One reporter asks if the Athletic Commission’s conduct file concerns me.
“My record in the ring concerns me,” I say. “Everything else is noise.”
Reyes, beside me, permits himself a small expression of approval.
It makes the evening news. The footage of the press conference runs alongside footage from the gas station because that’s how news cycles work.
Everything becomes a context for everything else.
The Commission’s conduct file is mentioned in four of the seven stories I see before Andi takes the remote away from me.
“Stop watching it,” she says. She’s on the couch with her leg elevated, wearing a knee brace in place of the original full leg brace, a minor escalation that the orthopedist says isn’t as bad as it could have been. “You know what it’s going to say. Watching it again doesn’t change it.”
“I know.”
“Then come and sit down.”
I sit beside her. She puts her hand on my arm without looking away from the window.
“Eleven weeks,” she says.
“Eleven weeks.”
“Then this is what the next eleven weeks look like,” she says.
“You train. I manage the rest. We move on Evelyn when Bill has what he needs and not before.” She looks at me.
“You were exactly correct when you said everything else is noise during the press conference. That’s what you’re going to live out for the next eleven weeks. ”
I look at her, a slight smirk on my face in response to her words.
“You’re quoting me at me,” I say.
“Only when you’re right.” She squeezes my arm once and lets go.
“Andi, you are everything to me. If you think I can let you handle Evelyn alone while I focus on my career, your concussion is obviously worse than we initially thought.”
“Luke, you are everything to me. If you think I can let you step into that ring in eleven weeks with a man who can kill you without being fully prepared—mentally and physically—you’ve obviously been hit in the head one too many times.” She smiles sweetly at me, as if that ends the conversation.
Apparently, it does, because she immediately moves on to the next topic.
“Reyes wants dinner.”
“What?”
“He called while you were in the shower this morning. He wants to take us to dinner on Thursday. Some place on the west side he likes.” The corner of her mouth. “I think he wants to assess my knee and determine whether I’m a liability to your camp schedule.”
“He would absolutely do that.”
“I told him Thursday works.” She picks up her book. “He’s not as frightening as he thinks he is.”
I think about Reyes’s expression in the gym. “He’s exactly as frightening as he thinks he is.”
“Then it’ll be an interesting dinner,” she says.
Thursday dinner is, in fact, interesting.
Reyes is different at a restaurant table than he is in the gym.
He’s quieter, more observational, the version of him that watches rather than directs.
He asks Andi three questions over the course of the meal that are ostensibly about her advocacy work but are covertly about her pain tolerance, her decision-making under pressure, and her capacity to let me do what I need to do without pulling my focus.
She answers all three correctly without knowing she’s being tested.
At the end of the meal, walking out, Reyes falls into step beside me while Andi speaks to someone she recognizes near the exit.
“She’s good,” he says quietly.
“You have no idea, man.”
“She’s not going to pull you. Not even if it gets harder.” He glances at her. “That’s the right woman for what you’re doing. Keep her close.”
I watch her across the restaurant—the way she stands, the careful distribution of her weight because of the knee, the way she’s laughing at something the other person said, like the last two weeks didn’t happen.
“I intend to,” I say.
She tells me about the invitation to the governance council over dinner the following evening.
We’re at the kitchen table—just us, chicken and pasta, the ordinary comfort of a weeknight at home. She’s been thinking about it since the invitation arrived. I can tell by the way she brings it up—directly, no preamble, the way she handles things she’s already decided.
“I’m going to accept it,” she says. “The governance council meeting. Evelyn’s territory.”
I set my fork down.
“She’ll be there,” I say.
“That’s why I’m going.”
I look at her, waiting for the rest of the story.
“She’s had a week of footage, Commission filings, and a dead man in a hospital,” Andi says.
“She’s watching the news cycle the same way everyone else is.
If I don’t show up in her space—if I change my behavior, reduce my exposure, pull back from anything that touches her network—she knows she’s getting to us.
” Andi holds my eyes. “I’m not giving her that. She gets zero satisfaction from me.”
“She’ll read you,” I say.
“I know.”
“She’s been doing this for thirty years. She’ll look for anything that tells her you know more than you should.”
“I know that too.” She’s steady. Completely steady.
“I know what her playbook looks like from the inside. I’ve been living inside versions of it since I was fifteen.
She doesn’t know I have the file. She doesn’t know what we know.
That’s the one thing she doesn’t have.” She pauses, steady as anything. “I can hold on to that.”
I want to say, “Let me come.” I want to say, “You’re not going—not alone.” I want to say all the things I would have said a year ago without thinking about whether they were mine to say.
I don’t say them.
“I’ll go with you,” I say instead. “To the building. I’ll wait outside.”
Something moves across her face—not quite a smile, but it’s just under the surface. “She’ll have someone watching the entrance. If you’re outside, she’ll know you came. Again. To protect me. Again.”
“Then I’ll wait two blocks away.”
“Luke.”
“I’m not sitting at home,” I say. “That’s not negotiable.”
She looks at me for a moment. Then she relents in her way. “Two blocks. In the truck. Phone on.”
“Phone on,” I agree.
She picks up her fork.