Chapter 4 #2
She holds my gaze without flinching. "I want to.
And I know that's complicated right now—with everything happening with the center, with us, with—" She stops.
Tries again. "The board asked me to step back.
You know what that means for the next several months.
If I'm in Atlanta, I'm watching from the outside of the only thing I've built here that feels like mine right now. If I'm on the road..." She trails off.
"You're doing the work you're allowed to do," I finish.
"Yes," he says in a quiet voice. Not relieved that I understand. Just honest about what it is.
I think about the MaxMorgan angle before she has to explain it.
Andi, as executive chair on a national tour, isn't a departure from her role—it's an extension of it.
Her being visible in forty cities in five months, attached to a major-label act, builds the kind of artist-development profile that no boardroom meeting can produce.
Graham would see that immediately. She knows he would.
What she doesn't say and doesn't need to: if the board wants her distanced from the center, the tour gives that distance a purpose.
She's not being pushed out. She's building something, and she’s not stepping out of the light. In fact, she’ll be under the brightest lights, center stage, on tour with one of the biggest names in music today.
The framing matters, and Andi has always understood framing better than she lets on.
"Does it work with MaxMorgan?" I ask. "Technically."
"Graham already said yes. My presence on the road is good for the brand—new artist's debut, executive chair visible in the market.
He framed it as strategic positioning." A faint wry edge.
"Which it is. It's also me not sitting in Atlanta watching Marin's recommendations take effect on everything I care about. "
"You didn't say that last part to Graham."
"No." The edge sharpens slightly, then softens. "I didn't."
"The songs you've been working on," I say. "Are they yours? For the tour?"
She considers this for a moment—not the question itself, but something underneath it.
"Some of them might be," she says. "I haven't thought that far ahead yet."
But the way she says it tells me she has. But she hasn’t made up her mind yet.
We sit with our shared but separate changes for a moment, both of us coming to terms with the fact that we’ve each been drifting in our own direction—and somehow ended up moving toward the same distance.
"We'd be apart the whole time," I say.
"We'd be apart the whole time," she agrees.
"Phones. FaceTime. Whatever it takes."
"Whatever it takes."
Neither of us is pretending this is simple. It's just that the alternative—one of us staying, one of us resenting it, both of us diminished—is worse.
"Then I think you should say yes to Travis," I say.
She looks at me for a moment. There's something in her expression I can't quite name—not relief, not happiness exactly. Something steadier than either of those. Like she was waiting to see what kind of man I was going to be about this, and the answer came back the way she hoped but wasn't sure of.
"I think you should say yes to Joe," she says.
We don't resolve everything in that conversation. There’s still an outstanding question in my mind, and I need an answer.
We’re in the shower when I bring it up.
It isn’t planned. It isn’t romantic. It’s barely even a decision—it’s more like my body makes one before my brain catches up.
The water drums against the tile and steam crowds the air, and I’m standing behind her with this tight, unfamiliar pressure in my chest, like something is trying to climb out of my ribs.
She’s got shampoo worked through her hair, eyes closed, mouth tipped up slightly as she rinses, and I’m watching her like I’m trying to memorize her—like six months of distance is already reaching for her.
I should wait. I should do it right. I should have a valid argument, a plan, a speech that doesn’t sound like a man begging the universe to leave him something permanent.
But the wanting is louder than my pride.
Louder than timing. Louder than the part of me that keeps insisting we can outthink everything that’s coming for us.
My throat works around nothing, my hands hover—useless—before they land on her waist just to anchor me, and the words slip out on the same breath as the fear.
“Marry me.”
She goes still. Not alarmed—just processing. Her eyes are closed against the shampoo.
"I am marrying you," she says carefully. "That's the plan."
"I mean before January. Before Vegas. Before the tour. Before we both leave.” I reach over and tilt her head back under the water, rinsing the shampoo out because my hands need something to do. "I want you to have my name before we're on opposite sides of the country for six months."
She opens her eyes. Looks at me through the water.
"Luke."
"I know it's fast. I know your answer is going to be no."
"Then why are you asking?"
"Because I wanted to say it out loud." I meet her eyes. "Because I mean it."
She's quiet for a moment. The water runs between us.
"Your mother would never forgive us," she says finally.
"My mother will survive."
"She would not survive." The corner of her mouth pulls up. "She has a Pinterest board, Luke. There are subcategories."
I laugh despite myself. She does too, water running down her face, one hand braced on my arm.
"I love you," she says when she stops laughing, and the way she says it—steady, like it's the simplest fact in the world—hits me somewhere I wasn't defending. "We're getting married. That's real. It doesn't start on a specific date. It's already happening."
I look at her.
"But I want—"
"I know what you want." She puts her hand flat on my chest. "You want to know I'm yours while you're gone. You want every other person in both our orbits to know it too." She holds my eyes. "You already know that I am. You have always known that."
She's right. I know she's right.
It still sits in my chest a little—the wanting of it, the not-having-it-yet. She sees that too, because she's Andi, and she reaches up and kisses me once, slow and deliberate, the kind that means I see you rather than I'm sorry.
"After," she says against my mouth.
"After," I agree.
We stay under the water until it runs cold.
But the hurt is clean. It's just love and timing not quite lining up.
The dark thought—the one I push back before it forms fully—is that every plan we make right now has an asterisk attached.
The Commission review is sitting in its procedural holding pattern.
The youth center board's quiet capitulation to Marin's recommended separation.
The coordinated pressure we've both felt building, week by week, since those first headlines broke.
We've agreed to spend six months apart on opposite sides of the country. Whoever is running this operation against us will soon know that. And they will use it to their advantage with every opportunity available.
I don't say this out loud. I add it to the list of things I'm carrying rather than putting it down.
ANDI
December has its own rhythm—shorter days, colder mornings, the city tilting toward the kind of warmth that only comes from manufactured light and forced occasion.
I’ve started waking up early to have breakfast with Luke before the gym. The mornings belong to us then. The house is quiet enough that every sound feels deliberate—the spoon against his bowl, the coffee maker clicking off, the chair legs shifting on the floor.
We treat it like something intentional now.
His oatmeal and fruit, my coffee, the same spot at the table.
Some days we talk. Some days we just sit there, close enough to feel the presence of the other, not performing, not preparing, just existing before the rest of the day reaches in and takes its share.
This morning, he asks how the rehearsals are going.
"Better every day," I tell him. "My voice is building endurance it's never had.
Danielle—the vocal coach—says I have unusual natural control for someone who learned by ear rather than training.
" I wrap my hands around my mug. "Travis thinks we should record the duets before the tour starts.
Get them released in advance so the audiences already know them. "
"Good idea," Luke says. He means it. There's no edge in it, no inventory of what it means that I'm spending hours a day in close professional collaboration with Travis Malone. We've had the conversation. He trusts me. That trust is one thing I'm taking with me on the road.
"Your name is starting to circulate," I tell him. "Mack said the Commission review becoming public actually worked in your favor—your name got attached to a controversy, which means it got attached to the news cycle. People are looking you up."
He makes a face. "Not the way I'd choose to build a following."
"No. But it is what it is." I look at him across the table. "Once you get to Vegas and the fight prep picks up, they're going to want access. Interviews. Features. Syndi is going to earn her keep."
"She already does," he admits. "She's better at this than I give her credit for."
I think about a conversation I overheard once near the gym entrance—Syndi on the phone, her voice carrying the meticulous tone of someone navigating two obligations at once. I filed it away. There's nothing to do with it yet.
"Be careful with her," I say.
Luke looks up. "Syndi?"
"Not like that." I wave it off. "Just—she's managing your image, which means she's deciding what story gets told about you. Pay attention to the story she's building."
He holds my eyes for a moment. "I will."
He kisses me at the door when he leaves. Long, deliberate, the kind that means something rather than just goodbye. I watch his truck back out of the driveway and stand in the doorway a moment after he's gone.
January second is three weeks away.