Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
LUKE
Five weeks out.
Reyes has a word for where I am right now. He uses it sparingly—he doesn’t believe in giving fighters language for their own progress because language makes you think about it instead of doing it. But last Thursday, after the session, while watching film, he said it once.
Sharp.
That’s the word. Five weeks out, I’m sharp in a way I haven’t been before.
Not faster—I’ve always been fast. Not stronger, because strength isn’t what wins at this level.
Sharper. The precision of someone who has stopped fighting the fight they prepared for and started fighting the one that’s actually in front of them.
Reyes put me back in with Castillo on Monday. Different result than two weeks ago. Castillo went home quieter than he arrived, which is the only review that matters.
Today is a full session—six rounds of sparring, footwork drills, film review, and then the thing Reyes has been building toward all camp. He stops me at the heavy bag after sparring, makes me stand still, and looks at me the way he looks at things he’s decided to say.
“You remember the first week?” he says.
“Yes.”
“What did I tell you?”
“That I was fighting like I was protecting something instead of taking something.”
“And now?”
I think about the last three rounds with Castillo. About the angles I cut instead of the space I gave. About my right hand landing exactly where it should, because I made him walk into it instead of chasing him with it.
“Now I’m taking something,” I say.
Reyes nods once. “Don’t lose that. Whatever is happening outside this gym—and I know things are happening, I’m not blind—don’t let it make you go back to protecting.
Protecting is reactive. Taking is a choice.
” He holds my eyes. “You fight from choice in five weeks, you win. You fight from fear, you don’t. It’s that simple.”
It’s not that simple. But the simplification is useful, which is why Reyes does it.
“Understood,” I say.
“Good.” He picks up his clipboard. “Film at four. Get some food.”
I eat alone in the gym’s back room with my phone on the table and the investigation running without me.
This is the discipline I’ve learned over the last few weeks—trusting other people to carry what I can’t carry and be present in the gym at the same time.
Bill is managing the documentation assembly.
Brandon is building the financial picture for Bill.
Andi is running the Evelyn relationship, keeping performance steady and feeding controlled information through the device.
Daniel’s attorney is working toward whatever comes next.
I am sparring with Castillo, watching film, and eating a chicken sandwich in a room that smells like liniment and sweat.
It’s the right division of labor. I know that.
On the days when I feel the investigation pulling at my focus—when my phone lights up with something significant, and I have to file it and go back to the mitts—those are the days Reyes watches me most closely.
He knows the difference between a fighter who’s distracted and one who’s compartmentalizing.
He’s been watching me do the latter and hasn’t said anything about it, which means he approves.
I trust Andi with the investigation in the same way she trusted me with the gallery at the legislative committee. Don’t watch me. Watch the room. Read it the way you read fighters.
She’s reading it.
I eat my sandwich, watch a film, and get ready to do it again tomorrow.
I come home at six-thirty to find Andi in the kitchen.
She’s making dinner—real dinner, not the functional meals we’ve been assembling lately from whatever’s in the refrigerator.
Something on the stove that needs attention.
Music on low. She’s in the gray dress she wears when she’s decided to be home instead of still working, a decision she makes with intention.
I stop in the doorway.
She looks up.
“I talked to Bill,” she says. “Everything is moving. There’s nothing either of us can do tonight that isn’t already being done.” She turns back to the stove. “So I made dinner.”
I set my bag down, wash my hands at the sink, stand behind her, and put my hands on her waist.
“What are we having?” I ask.
“Something your mother gave me the recipe for,” she says. “I’ve been meaning to make it for months.”
I put my chin on her shoulder and look at the pan.
“She’ll be pleased,” I say.
“She sent me three voice memos, walking me through it.” Andi stirs something. “She said you used to ask for it specifically on your birthday.”
“I did.”
“How old were you the last time she made it for you?”
I think about it. “Maybe twenty. Twenty-one.”
Andi is quiet for a moment. Stirring.
“She’s a good mother,” she says. Quietly. Not wistful—appreciative. The recognition of someone who knows what good mothers are worth because she understands what it means to not have one.
I tighten my hands on her waist.
“Yeah,” I say. “She is.”
We stay like that for a moment—me behind her, the stove going, the music low.
The stubborn ordinariness of a life that has been under sustained assault for months and is still here, still making dinner, still standing in a kitchen at six-thirty-two on a Thursday evening like two people who get to do this.
“Andi,” I say.
“Mm.”
“Thank you for tonight.”
She sets the spoon down, turns around in my hands, and looks at me. Her face in the kitchen light—the woman who reads rooms for a living, who has been reading the most dangerous one available for months, and who came home and made dinner.
“Thank you for trusting me with it,” she says. “The investigation. Knowing when to be in the gym and when not to be there.”
“You told me who to be in that gym.”
“You already were,” she says. “I just named it.”
We eat at the table with actual candles because Andi found them in a drawer and lit them without ceremony, the way she does things she decides are worth doing.
We talk about small things—a MaxMorgan artist she’s been working with who has a genuinely extraordinary voice, the back gate contractor who finally showed up and actually fixed it, and whether Mack would come to the fight with or without being asked.
“With,” I say.
“Definitely with,” she agrees.
After dinner, she washes while I dry, a routine we’ve fallen into without needing to discuss it. The music still plays. At some moment, she’s quietly humming along to something, not singing it for an audience—just being in the kitchen with me in the evening.
I dry a bowl and watch her and think, “This is the fight. This is what I’m taking something for. Not the title. This.”
Later, we sit on the back deck with the coffee that has become our version of Southern porch living at the end of the day.
The September night has gone fully cool—Atlanta finally letting go of summer, the air carrying the first real hint of what’s coming.
She’s in my jacket, her feet bare on the step below, and she’s leaning against my shoulder, her coffee held in both hands.
“Five weeks,” she says.
“Five weeks.”
“How do you feel?”
“Sharp,” I say. Reyes’s word. It’s the right one.
She’s quiet for a moment. “Reyes is good for you.”
“Yes, he is. Mack was right to bring him in.”
“He sees what you’re becoming.” She looks at the pool, the yard, and the twilight sky. At the back gate, finally fixed. “Sometimes it takes someone outside to see that.”
I think about what she said in the kitchen. You already were. I just named it.
“You’ve been seeing it,” I say.
“I’ve been watching,” she says. “There’s a difference.”
I look at her.
“I watch everything,” she says. “That’s not the same as seeing.” She turns toward me. “I see you, Luke. What you’re building in that gym. What you’ve built here.” She looks at our hands. “What we’ve built together.”
I put my coffee down on the step, and I take her face in my hands.
She looks at me—the beautiful directness of Andi when she’s decided to let herself be fully seen.
“I love you,” I say. “Not despite all of this. Not in spite of what we’re carrying. Because of who you are in the midst of it.”
She closes her eyes for a second. Then opens them.
“I love you,” she says. “And when this is over, I want a week where nothing explodes.”
I almost laugh. “I’ll see what I can arrange.”
“I’m serious.”
“I know you are.” I brush my thumb across her cheekbone, then across her lips. “A week. Just us. Wherever you want.”
“Somewhere with a beach. Sun, salt, sand, and unlimited umbrella drinks,” she says. “And no governance councils within a hundred miles.”
“Done.”
She leans into my hands.
We stay on the back deck until the coffee is gone, the neighborhood has gone quiet, and the cool air has shifted from pleasant to actually cold.
Then we go upstairs, close the door on everything waiting outside, and I have her all to myself for the rest of the night.
I brand every last inch of her with my lips, my tongue, and my love.
The investigation is moving. The documentation is being assembled. Five weeks from tonight, there will be a fight, a story breaking, and a machine being dismantled piece by piece.
But tonight… tonight there is just this. Just us.
I’m in the gym by seven the next morning.
Reyes is already there. He looks up when I come through the door, reads something in my face that satisfies him, and says nothing about it.
“Footwork today,” he says. “Then we talk about the jab.”
“Sounds good,” I say.
I tape my hands, and I get to work.
Four weeks and six days.