Chapter 2 #2
It’s not an accusation. It’s positioning—reframing the situation to limit exposure and give no one new material to weaponize.
Understand the logic of it. My brain tracks the strategy easily; this is her job, her expertise, and she’s been nothing but professional since she walked through the door.
She isn’t wrong. That’s the worst part. Everything in her plan makes sense—and every step costs me something I didn’t agree to give. I
Even so, something in my chest tightens. Because even if it’s efficient, even if it’s correct, this statement doesn’t feel like protection. It feels like being moved without my consent. It feels unmistakably like betrayal.
Brandon speaks up, reading my mind through interpreting my facial expressions. He’s my brother and knows me far too well. “It’s only temporary, man. You post this, let things cool down, then you rebuild when circumstances are more favorable for you both.”
Cool down. Like we’re a fever… or radioactive and on the verge of a nuclear meltdown.
I read the statement again, as if extra words will suddenly appear to explain every lie that’s been told about us. But it denies nothing. It defends nothing. It doesn’t protect her.
It protects me.
I feel Andi’s eyes on me now. Not her angry eyes.
I’ve seen those enough to recognize them instantly.
She’s waiting to see what I’ll do, to hear my decision before she weighs in with her thoughts.
If I had to guess, I’d say she’s weighing the odds of me abandoning her, leaving her to face the repercussions alone.
Marin closes the laptop halfway.
“If you expand this to include her,” she says calmly, “the Youth Outreach inquiry becomes linked to your license review in public perception. Right now, they are parallel lines. You don’t want to connect them.”
She’s implying we have to fracture ourselves on purpose—contain the damage so it doesn’t spread and expand.
I can protect my boxing career by staying silent about Andi, by letting her absorb the strain of the youth center inquiry alone while I remain insulated from it.
When she speaks, she can’t say my name. She can’t acknowledge my career, my investigation, or the accusations circling me, because linkage is liability now.
The strategy is clean. Effective. It keeps my file contained and my future intact.
And it leaves her standing by herself.
That’s the trade. Two distinct narratives deliberately held apart, because separation is the only option anyone believes will keep us upright.
I nod slowly, understanding the logic even as my throat clenches involuntarily.
Strategically, she’s right. Emotionally, it feels like I’m agreeing to survive by letting the person I love take the hit instead—and I’m not sure which part of me that costs.
“I’ll think about it,” I say.
Marin gives a small nod. She’s already won half the argument.
ANDI
"Optically, separation helps," Marin says.
I don't respond. I don't ask who it helps.
I don’t speak. Letting them wonder costs me less than correcting them would.
My silence in the conversation is strategic, not because I’m defeated.
I understand what's happening in this room.
I understood it before Marin finished her first sentence—before she opened her laptop, before she produced the graph, before she said the word " containment " as if it were a form of care.
I've been watching this system my entire life.
Not from a distance. From the inside. I was fifteen the first time someone decided that managing the narrative around me was more important than telling the truth about what was being done to me.
I learned then what careful, professional language sounds like when it's building a cage.
I recognize this tactic immediately. My body knows before my mind does.
I just didn't expect to see it assembled in my own kitchen, by someone my fiancé trusts, with Brandon nodding silently as if it's reasonable.
It's been eight weeks since Jackson and Delia disappeared at sea.
At first, Luke and I were intimately closer.
We'd more than survived—we were conquerors.
He stood with me at the MaxMorgan Music gala, even though his dad was still trying to use leverage against me.
He promised repeatedly that he wasn't going anywhere and that he wouldn't leave me alone to deal with this nightmare.
For a while, we were unshakable.
I didn't question that.
I do now.
Not because I doubt him. But because I can feel him thinking, and what he's thinking is the problem.
He's running the logic. I know how Luke's mind works—he sees a threat to something he loves, and he calculates how to remove it.
He's done it for me, with me, and because of me, more times than I can count.
That instinct is one of the reasons I love him.
It's also the thing that's going to get us in trouble right now.
Because Marin is presenting this as protection. And Luke, who protects, is going to hear it that way.
I look at Marin.
She's watching him, not me. She has already read the room and identified where the decision will come from. She thinks she knows which of us has to be convinced of her solution to influence the other party to agree.
Which means she's underestimating me.
That's useful. I'll let her.
But I will not be completely silent, because silence in this context reads as consent, and I will not have my consent assumed in a conversation about my own life.
"Marin." My voice is even. She turns to face me, her expression giving nothing away about her thoughts.
I don't raise anything I can't control. I don't give her any footage.
I give her one sentence, delivered at the same temperature she's been using for the past forty minutes. If I learned anything from living in Jackson and Delia’s house, it was how to match energy in a fight when it's essential to winning the war.
"Before any decisions are made about strategy—I want to be clear that whatever happens next, my name doesn't get managed. Not minimized, not omitted, not framed. If we're in this together, we're in it together publicly." I hold her gaze. "That's not negotiable for me."
Marin looks at me for a moment.
"Understood," she says. Neutral. Already filing it somewhere.
She turns back to Luke.
I watch him absorb what I just said. He knows what I meant underneath it—I am watching what you do with this. I know he knows, because I see the slight adjustment in his posture, the way he shoulders the weight of it differently now.
Good.
He should carry it.
The conversation continues. Brandon says something encouraging concerning timelines.
Marin closes her laptop with the same measured quiet with which she does everything.
I stay present in my body and in the room, and I don't give anyone a reason to describe me later as volatile, reactive, or difficult.
I am none of those things.
I am a woman who has survived worse than this, in this same kitchen, with less help than I have now.
Luke shifts beside me. I can feel him thinking—and that's the problem.
He has to think about whether we stand together.
He shouldn't have to.