Chapter 11
CHAPTER ELEVEN
LUKE
Vegas smells like recycled air and ambition.
I've been here eleven days, and I've left the training facility four times—twice for food, once when Mack dragged me to a steakhouse because he said I was getting protein-deficient and difficult to be around, and once just to stand outside in the dark and remember what unfiltered air felt like.
Joe Caruso's facility sits on the edge of the city, far enough from the Strip that the noise is just a glow on the horizon at night.
It's a serious place. No music playing over the gym speakers.
No casual conversation. Just work, and the silence of men who understand that everything they want is on the other side of a very specific kind of suffering.
I like it here more than I expected to.
I also miss Andi in a way that has a specific physical texture.
Not dramatic. Just constant. Like a low-grade frequency underneath everything else—the drive to the grocery store, the last thirty seconds before sleep, the space between combinations in the ring.
She's there the way she always is, which is to say everywhere.
We FaceTime when our schedules line up, which isn't always the case.
She's on Eastern Time and performs most nights. It’s late for her by the time everyone boards the buses.
I'm in a facility that runs on Joe's clock, which starts at five-fifteen and ends when Joe says it ends.
Most nights, I'm horizontal and nearly clinically dead by nine.
Last night she called at ten-forty from a parking lot somewhere in Baltimore, still wearing her stage makeup, half her hair coming loose from whatever it was pinned into, and she talked to me for nineteen minutes about a kid in the front row who'd been crying during her last song and how she'd made eye contact with him and kept singing and how afterward he'd found her at the merch table and told her his mom had just died.
She held it together until he walked away. Then she went behind the merchandise tent and cried for five minutes. She told me this without drama. Just in the careful, factual way she tells things that matter.
"I wish I'd been there," I said.
"I know." She propped the phone against something so I could see her face. "But you're doing what you should be doing. I'm doing what I should be doing."
"That doesn't mean I don't wish I were there."
"No," she agreed. "It doesn't mean that."
That's Andi. She doesn't make parallel truths compete with each other. I'm still learning how to do that.
She's three weeks into the tour now and already the thing I feared most—the gradual narrowing of her world to a moving bus and a rotating set of venues and people who know her only as the woman onstage—hasn't happened.
She's building something out there. I can hear it in how she talks about Cami, about the crew, about the feeling of a crowd that's showing up specifically for her.
That's its own thing to hold. Pride and something more complicated are sitting right next to each other.
I'm doing pull-ups on the rig outside the main gym when Mack comes to find me, which means something has his attention.
"Your brother called the desk," he says. "Says he's been trying your cell."
I drop down and check my phone. Three missed calls from Brandon. The facility gets a bad signal in the far section where I was working. I call him back from the parking lot, standing in the February cold with my shirt damp and the desert sky enormous overhead.
"You see the Commission update?" he asks instead of hello.
"What update?"
"They escalated it. Still procedural, technically, but it moved to the next review tier."
I look at the glow of the city on the horizon. "How?"
"Marin says it looks like someone with commission access filed a supplemental complaint. Anonymous. References the unsanctioned fights from before you went professional."
The news article from the gym bench in week one. The one I read and set face-down and told myself was just noise.
It wasn't noise.
"When did she find out?"
"This morning. She flagged it for me right away." Brandon pauses. "She also said the supplemental language is specific. Someone who knows the timeline."
"Meaning someone who's been watching for a while… or has deep pockets to track all that information quickly."
"Yeah."
I let that sit for a moment.
"How's Andi?" I ask.
"She called me last week, actually." Something careful in his voice. "She's handling the donor situation with the center well. Better than I would. She doesn't rattle easily."
"I know."
"You should tell her about the escalation."
"Yeah, I know that too."
"Luke—"
"I'll tell her," I say. "I'm not keeping it from her."
"Okay."
I hang up and stand in the parking lot until the cold becomes purposeful. Then I go inside and find Mack in the equipment room, inventorying hand wraps with the particular focus he brings to things that don't require focus, which is how I know he already knows.
"Brandon tell you?" I ask.
"Marin did." He doesn't look up. "She's thorough."
"What do you think of her?"
He stacks a set of wraps and picks up another. "I think she's very good at her job."
"That's not what I asked."
He does look up then. "I think your instincts are usually right. And I think you've had an unsettled feeling about this for the last six weeks and haven't said it clearly to anyone." He goes back to the wraps. "That's what I think."
I don't have an answer for that. So I go back to the rig and add another set of pull-ups.
ANDI
The second hit to the youth center comes on a Thursday.
I'm in Charlotte when Mrs. Alvarez texts me—not calls—something that tells me she was afraid a call would go badly and that she needed to choose her words first.
The text reads: The board received an inquiry from the city's community development office. Asking about the center's licensure under the current operational review. Everyone is calm. Wanted you to know.
I read it twice in the venue's green room, still in my performance clothes, the crowd noise from Sound Bar's set bleeding through the walls.
Then I call her.
"Talk me through it," I say.
Mrs. Alvarez is steady. She's been at the center since before it had a proper front door—she was there when it was a rented room in a church basement, and I was twenty-three and operating entirely on determination and a spreadsheet.
She's watched every version of this organization become the next one, and she doesn't scare easily.
"They want documentation on our operational continuity plan," she says. "Specifically around leadership succession during a review period."
Leadership succession.
"They're asking if we have a plan to function without me," I say.
"In more diplomatic language, yes."
I press my thumb and forefinger to the bridge of my nose. "Send them the continuity documentation we filed in October. It's all there."
"I already did."
"Good." I pause. "How are the kids?"
"Wonderful," she says, and there's warmth under it that nothing procedural can touch. "Marcus finished his college application essay. He wants you to know."
Something loosens in my chest that I didn't realize had been clenched. "Tell him I'm proud of him."
"I will."
I hang up and sit with the phone in my lap for a moment.
Leadership succession. Community development inquiry. Coordinated with the audit. Coordinated with the Commission escalation Brandon told me about this morning, in the careful voice he uses when he doesn't want to alarm me.
Three separate institutions asking three separate questions in the same week.
That's not procedural.
That's orchestrated with a specific intention, purpose, and calculated end result.
I change into jeans and a sweater and find Travis in the hallway outside the main stage, waiting for his cue with one earbud in and one hanging loose, the way he always waits. He takes one look at my face and pulls the earbud out entirely.
"What happened?"
"Nothing I can prove yet," I say.
He nods slowly. He's learned, in the weeks since the tour started, that I don't exaggerate and I don't panic. When I say something's wrong, I have a reason.
"What can I do?" he asks.
"Nothing right now." I lean back against the wall. "I just needed a minute to be around someone who wasn't going to ask me how I'm handling it."
"Okay." He leans against the wall beside me, both of us facing the hallway, the roar of the crowd coming through the door at the far end. "How was Charlotte today?"
"Good. We walked around the NoDa neighborhood. Cami found a record store."
"She finds a record store everywhere. She has a problem."
"It's an excellent problem." I exhale. "How are you before the show?"
"Good." He glances at me sideways. "Ready."
"You always are."
The stage manager appears at the far door and gives Travis the two-minute signal. He pushes off the wall and rolls his neck once, the pre-show adjustment I've watched him do from the wings six times now. Then he looks at me.
"Whatever they're trying to do," he says, "they picked the wrong person to do it to."
He says it like a fact, not a compliment.
That's why it matters.