Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
LUKE
Brandon calls on a Wednesday afternoon, which is unusual. He always calls on Tuesdays.
I'm between sessions—thirty minutes of recovery before Mack runs the afternoon combination work—when the phone buzzes on the bench beside my water bottle. I look at it for a second before I pick up.
"Got a minute?" Brandon says.
"I've got thirty. What's going on?"
I can hear him moving to a more private place. A door closing. The acoustic shift of a man who has decided the conversation requires a room.
"Marin has the preliminary outcome from the Commission's internal review," he says. "It came through this afternoon."
I set the water bottle down. "Tell me."
He does. He tells it carefully—the way he tells things he's already run through a filter, which I've been noticing more often lately.
The Commission has enough to escalate. Not revoke, not yet, but escalate—which means enough to leak, which means enough to become a story before the scheduled fight, which means the fight becomes the story rather than the record.
"What are the conditions for closing it?" I ask.
A pause. "Sustained public separation from anyone currently under active regulatory inquiry."
I look at the gym wall. "She means Andi."
"Yes."
The gym noise comes through the far doors—gloves on bags, someone counting reps, the rhythmic percussion of the place. I've been here long enough that the sounds have become a kind of quiet.
"For how long?" I ask.
"Sixty days. Through the title defense."
"And the arrangement—who knows about it?"
"You, me, Marin." Another pause. "Andi doesn't know yet."
That's the weight of it. The part he's waiting for me to reach on my own.
"Marin says the conditions have to be in place before they can close the file," Brandon continues.
"Andi would need to be kept from the public record of the case—no joint statements, no appearances, nothing that connects her name to the licensing review.
If it's already public, the Commission can't quietly file it. "
I stand up from the bench and walk toward the window. Outside, the Las Vegas afternoon is doing what it does—white sky, flat light, the distant shape of the Strip against the desert.
"She'd say no," I say.
"I know."
"She'd say it's the same playbook they've been using on her. She'd call it what it is."
"I know." Brandon's voice is level, but something moves underneath it.
"Luke. The board at the center has been using your license review to justify their pressure on her.
If the Commission file closes, they lose that leg.
It doesn't solve everything, but it removes a weapon they're currently holding.
" He pauses. "Marin thinks it helps Andi more than it costs her. "
"Marin thinks."
"Yes."
I stand at the window for a moment.
The thing is, I understand the argument.
That's the part that sits like a stone in my chest—that I can follow the logic all the way to the end, and the end looks like a safer Andi, the center with fewer attacks against it, my license intact.
All of it for sixty days of public distance that we're already partly maintaining because she's on a tour bus in the Midwest and I'm in a Vegas gym.
It's a clean trade.
It's the kind of thing you do for someone when they can't see the entire board.
"I need to think about it," I say.
"The window is short," Brandon says. "If the Commission escalates without the arrangement in place—"
"I said I need to think about it."
A pause. "Okay."
I hang up and stay at the window.
I think about Andi in the boardroom, two hands flat on the table, her voice even while the board voted on her future.
I think about the arrangement she’ll never get to refuse—the sixty-day moratorium I’m considering without asking her, the decision I’m making for her because I already know what she'll say.
I think about what she said once, after Jackson showed up at the gala.
They don't come for you with force. They come for you by making the people who love you afraid.
I think about sixty days.
I make the call before I go back to the afternoon session.
She finds out three days later.
Not from me. From Brandon, which is worse. I was still in a Vegas hotel room when he told me she'd called him, from one state away from me.
I call her that night.
She picks up on the second ring. No greeting.
"Tell me what you did," she says.
Her voice is controlled. That's the thing about Andi—the more controlled her voice, the more it costs her. She's somewhere on the bus, quiet around her. Late.
"I made an arrangement with the Commission," I say. "Sixty days of public separation. It closes my file before it escalates. It removes my case from your board's argument against you."
Silence.
"You decided that?" she says.
"Yes."
"Without telling me."
"You would've said no."
The line holds the silence for a moment.
"Exactly," she says. One word. Flat and final as a door.
"Andi—"
"You knew I would have said no," she says, "and you did it, anyway. And you're telling me this three days after the fact when it's already done."
"I thought if I handed you results instead of another fight—"
"I don't need you to hand me anything." Her voice doesn't rise. That's the thing that gets me. She's not screaming. She's precise. "I need you to stand next to me. That's it. That's all I've ever needed from you. Not someone to fix it. Someone to stand there without flinching."
I look at the hotel ceiling.
"Luke." A pause. "Walk me through how what you did is different from what they've been doing to me."
"Because I'm not trying to hurt you," I say. "I'm trying to protect you."
"So was every person who made a choice for me without my knowledge.
" She says it without accusation. Just weight.
"The board. The system that placed me in that house.
The people who decided what I could handle and acted on it without asking.
" A pause. "You know that history. You know exactly what it cost me. And you used the same logic."
My jaw tightens.
"That's not fair," I say.
"No," she agrees. "It isn't. Neither is what you did."
Outside my hotel window, the city glows against the desert dark. The Strip at midnight, indifferent and permanent.
"I can't undo it," I say.
"I know you can't."
"If I pull back now, the file reopens. Everything I was trying to—"
"I know." Her voice is quieter now. Still controlled, but something different underneath it. "I'm not asking you to undo it. I'm telling you what it cost."
I don't have an answer for that.
"I still think it keeps you safer," I say finally. It comes out quieter than I mean it to. It's not a defense. It's just the honest thing.
She's quiet for a moment.
"I know you do," she says. "That's the part that worries me most. I don’t need you to protect me from this.”
“That’s not what I’m doing.” The words spill out of my mouth before I can stop them.
“Then what are you doing?” I hear the distance in her tone. The uncertainty. The distrust is creeping in.
“Making sure I don’t take you down with me.”
“If we’re not in it together, we’re not in it at all, Luke.”
The call ends.
I sit on the edge of the hotel bed in the small room Andi paid for so we'd have privacy when we needed it, and I look at the phone in my hand.
I thought I was standing next to her.
But I wasn’t.
I was standing in front of her.
I can see the difference now. I couldn't see it before, or I could see it, and I chose the outcome anyway, and I don't know which of those is worse.
The fight is three weeks away.
I go back to the gym in the morning.
ANDI
The bus is somewhere in Oklahoma when Brandon delivers the news about the sixty-day arrangement.
Not Luke. Brandon.
I'm sitting in the galley with a cold cup of tea, enjoying the late-night calm of the bus after a show.
Cami is sleeping, and Travis is in the back, working on something—I can faintly hear a guitar through the door.
Outside, the highway stretches out in the flat, dark expanse typical of the Southwest, with no variation, just endless distance.
He picks up on the third ring.
"Andi." Brandon's voice has the texture it gets when he's delivering something he doesn't want to deliver. I've heard it before. I know what it precedes.
"Tell me," I say.
He does. He tells me about the Commission's preliminary findings, the conditions, and the sixty days. He tells me Luke made the call before he knew Brandon was going to tell me. He tells me it's already done.
I listen without interrupting, the way I do when I'm processing rather than reacting.
When he finishes, I ask, "When did he make the arrangement?"
"Three days ago."
Three days. I've talked to Luke twice in three days. Brief calls, moving windows, the usual. He knew both times and said nothing.
"Thank you for telling me," I say.
"Andi—"
"Thank you, Brandon." I keep my voice level. "I mean it."
I hang up and sit with the phone in my lap.
Through the door, I can still hear Travis's guitar. Three chords, repeated. Something he's working through.
I think about the statement in December—the one that didn't include my name. Luke pushed back on that. He insisted. He told Marin, “She is my team,” and he meant it.
And then, three months later, in a Vegas hotel room, alone with the logic of it and no one to balance the argument, he made the same choice Marin recommended in December. Just slower. Just with more reasoning behind it. Just with better intentions.
The intentions don’t change what it is.
I know this. I've lived inside systems built by people with good intentions. I know what it looks like when someone decides they understand the situation better than you do and acts on that understanding without asking.
What I didn't expect was this betrayal from Luke.
I let myself feel that for a moment. Not perform it, not manage it. Just feel it, here in the galley of a tour bus in the middle of Oklahoma, with Cami asleep and Travis playing three chords in the back.
Then I pick up the phone and call him.
He picks up on the second ring. I can hear the hotel room behind him—the quiet of that place I've never been to but know by its sounds.
"Tell me what you did," I say.
He doesn’t get to decide what I survive.