Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
LUKE
There are two kinds of off in the ring.
The first kind is physical—tired muscles, a sore shoulder, timing disrupted by something you can correct with rest and repetition. Mack can fix that kind in two sessions. One if he’s in a bad mood.
The second kind lives above the neck. It's the kind where your body does everything right, and your mind is half a beat somewhere else, and you're reacting instead of reading, and the guy across from you doesn't have to be better than you to land on you.
He just has to be present in a way you aren't.
I've been the second kind for two weeks.
Mack hasn't said it directly. He doesn't operate that way.
He says it sideways, in adjustments that are really diagnoses.
Get your weight back before you load that.
Which translates to: you're leaning in because you're trying to force an outcome rather than read one.
Stop chasing the finish. Which translates to: you're trying to end this faster than it wants to end, and that's desperation, not discipline.
Today, he says it directly.
We're between rounds, me on the stool, him crouched in front of me with a water bottle and the expression he wears when he's decided that diplomacy is done.
"You're in your head," he says.
"I'm fine."
"You were fine in November." He hands me the water. "What you are right now is distracted and distracted gets you hurt."
"I said I'm fine, Mack."
"And I said you're not." He takes the water back.
"I don't coach fine. Fine doesn't need a coach.
Fine is something you tell your mother when you don't want her to worry.
" He stands. "You've got something sitting on you, and it's showing up in here.
Now. You either talk about it or you use it.
But you don't ignore it, because it won't ignore you. "
He walks to the corner and waits.
I sit on the stool and think about the Commission escalation, which Brandon officially told me about ten days ago and which I still haven't told Andi—not because I'm keeping it from her, I tell myself, but because I'm waiting for a moment that's long enough and quiet enough to have the conversation properly.
We keep missing each other. She's performing late into the night, and I'm up before five in the morning.
When we do connect, it's usually a twenty-minute window, and I don't want to drop bad news into a moving window and then lose the signal.
That's what I've been telling myself.
The honest version is that I don't know how to tell her something is escalating when I'm a thousand miles away and can't do anything about it.
I get up off the stool.
"Let's go," I tell Mack.
The next round is different. Not because the problem is gone. Because I stopped pretending it wasn't there and started putting it somewhere it could do something. I'm sharper. Reading earlier. My feet find the rhythm they've been missing.
Mack doesn't say anything when the round ends. He doesn't have to.
The afternoon session runs until five. By the time I've showered, eaten, and sat with the quiet of the hotel room for an hour, it's seven-thirty Vegas time, and I've been thinking about the same thing since the gym.
Tonight.
I'm going to call her tonight.
Not because I've found the right window—I don't think the right time exists.
Not because I have more information than I had yesterday.
Just because I've been holding this for ten days, and Mack is right about the things that show up in the ring, and the things that show up in the ring are always the things you're carrying instead of setting down.
I pick up my phone twice, then set it down. No hesitation—more like preparation. Like a fighter checking his stance before the bell.
The thing I keep returning to is the specific reason I've been waiting. I told myself it was the window. The timing. I didn't want to break twenty minutes of connection with a Commission update that would just spin in her head with nowhere to go.
But Andi doesn't spin. That's not how she processes. She receives information, files it in the architecture she's been building, and adds it to the picture. She doesn't need me to protect her from the picture. She's been assembling the picture longer than I have, from angles I can't see from here.
The waiting wasn't for her.
It was for me. Because saying it out loud makes it more real. And making it more real means confronting the fact that something is moving against us while I am in Las Vegas in a hotel room and she is on a tour bus, and neither of us can do much about it right now except know about it together.
That's the thing I've been trying to avoid feeling.
Syndi finds me in the hotel lobby at eight o’clock, which means she was waiting.
"You have the Top Contender piece tomorrow," she says, falling into step beside me without preamble. She's in her heels even at this hour, which I've stopped finding remarkable. "I sent you the prep document this afternoon. Did you read it?"
"I read it."
She gives me the look that means she doesn't believe me, but has decided not to press it. "The angle they're running is the fighter-with-a-story. Hometown kid, street background, legitimate career path. They want it personal." She pauses at the elevator. "That means they'll ask about Andi."
"I know."
"You're comfortable with that?"
"She's my fiancée. Yes."
Syndi nods. Not warmly, but efficiently. "I'll give you the language I'd recommend for the separation period. You don't have to use it, but have it ready in case they push on the youth center angle."
She hands me a single printed page and walks away before I can respond, heels precise on the lobby tile, already on her phone.
I look at the page.
Recommended language: "Andi and I are both focused on our respective work right now. I'm proud of everything she's built, and I'll continue to say so."
Clean. Professional. True as far as it goes.
I fold the page, put it in my pocket, and think about the difference between language that's recommended and language that's yours.
I pick up the phone.
ANDI
The bus between Raleigh and Charlotte leaves at eleven.
I know this because Katelyn has the schedule posted in the galley, and because I've been watching the clock for the last hour, the way you do when you can't sleep and need something to track besides your own thoughts.
It's been four days since the Charlotte hits—the community development inquiry, coordinated with whatever is happening with Luke's Commission review—which I only know is escalating because I can feel it in how he doesn't mention it, both arriving at a time when something was planned rather than coincidental.
I've been sitting with the combined weight of it in the specific way I've learned to sit with things on the road: quietly, in whatever corner of the bus is empty, while the rest of the tour moves around me.
Cami knows something is wrong. She hasn't asked directly, which is one of the things I value about her—she creates space and waits for me to fill it or not, and she doesn't make the waiting uncomfortable. She left a cup of tea on the table next to me two hours ago and didn't linger.
The tea is cold now.
I open my laptop and pull up the center's donor communication logs.
Not for any specific purpose—just to look at the pattern again.
I've been doing this every few days, the way you return to a piece of evidence that's almost but not quite telling you something.
The timing of the calls. The specific donors who were contacted.
The language they reported back to me. It was all so consistent, it might as well have been scripted.
Someone gave them a script.
Someone with access to the donor list.
Someone who understood that you don't go after the institution directly.
You go after the relationships that sustain it.
You make the people who believe in the work calculate their own risk, and then you watch them make the conservative choice, and then the institution loses its foundation while everyone's hands stay clean.
I know this playbook.
I lived inside it at fifteen.
I close the laptop.
What I haven't told Luke—not because I'm keeping it from him, but because I haven't had the right moment and I don't know how to say it quickly—is that the pattern I'm seeing is too sophisticated for a disgruntled PAC or a holdover from Jackson's network acting on residual grievance.
What I'm seeing is operational. Coordinated. Meticulous.
The work of someone who does this professionally. Perfectly.
Someone was retained for exactly this purpose.
My phone shows no missed calls from Luke. Which means he is either still in the gym, asleep, or sitting with something the same way I'm sitting with this.
I think about calling him.
I think about what I'd say. This isn’t random, Luke.
It’s too deliberate. Someone’s doing this on purpose.
I think I know who—but I don’t have proof yet, and I can’t say a name right now.
Not on a bus in the middle of the night.
Because the second I do, you’ll carry it into every day of camp, trying to fight something you can’t even reach from Vegas—and I won’t do that to you.
I set the phone face down on the table.
That's not protecting him. That's making the same calculation he's probably making about me right now—that the timing isn't right, that our window to connect is too short for the deep conversation this requires, and that the true thing can wait for a better moment.
We’re both doing it.
That’s the part that unsettles me more than any single move being made against us. Not the attacks themselves—those I can meet head-on. I know how to take a hit. I know how to brace, deflect, and recover. I’ve spent a lifetime doing just that.