Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
ANDI
The tour bus crosses into New Mexico at three in the morning, and I am awake for all of it.
Not because I can't sleep. I've learned to sleep in the rattle and hum of a moving bus, in the thin dark of a curtained bunk, with the low conversation of the night crew bleeding through the walls. I can sleep through most things now.
I'm awake because there are things you can't sleep through. Not because they're loud. Because they're quiet in the specific way of something that has permanently changed shape.
The moment Brandon told me instead of Luke, and I heard it in the first half-second, the quality of his voice when he's delivering something he didn't want to carry.
I knew before he said the first word. The drop happened then, not when Luke confirmed it.
Not when I called him and made him say it out loud.
Before all of that, in the silence between Brandon picking up and beginning to speak, I already knew.
He thought that if he handed me the results instead of another fight, it would be enough.
I understand the logic. I understand where it comes from.
I understand that the version of Luke who made that call is the same version of Luke who put the blanket over me on the couch and left the kitchen light on low so I wouldn't wake disoriented, who sat outside the youth center in his truck just to be close to me, who has never once asked me to be less complicated than I am, who vowed never walked away even when the easier option was to.
Understanding it doesn't make it sit differently.
What it does—what it actually does, under the anger I've processed and set aside—is scare me. Because the people who've hurt me most in my life have always believed they were protecting me. That's the mechanism. Not malice. Care, tilted slightly wrong, until it becomes its own kind of control.
Luke is not Jackson. I know that with the same certainty I know anything.
But the pattern remains the same, and after living with it long enough to recognize its form, you notice it everywhere, even in the actions of those who care about you. Especially there, sometimes.
I pull my knees to my chest in the bunk and stare at the ceiling. Outside, New Mexico is dark, enormous, and indifferent.
My phone has seventeen messages I haven't answered. Most of them are Luke—not panicked, not pleading, just present. Checking in. Giving me room. Doing the right things in the right order, which is both exactly who he is and exactly what makes this harder.
The last message, sent an hour ago, says:
I'm not asking you to be okay with it. I just want you to know I'm here.
I read it three times.
Then I put the phone face down, close my eyes, and don't sleep for another hour.
I lie in the dark of the bus bunk for a long time after that.
Not running numbers. Not strategizing. Just letting myself look directly at the thing I've been approaching from angles for three weeks.
Is this over?
This isn't a rhetorical question but a real one.
There's a version of this story where Luke Woods is a man who loves me as deeply as anyone ever has, and also made a choice I cannot accept.
Both truths can coexist. They've been true before—in other relationships and different versions of my life—and I've learned the hard way that love alone isn't enough reason to remain in something that threatens to undo what I've spent my entire life rebuilding.
My autonomy. My right to know what's being decided in my name.
I think about the system. The board. Every person who looked at my situation calculated what I could handle and acted on that calculation without asking me.
I've spent my adult life building something to prove that the system's assessment was wrong—that I could handle more than they decided, that I was more than their conclusion about me.
Luke knows all of that. He knows it the way he knows very few things—completely, without flinching, because I told him and he stayed. He is the person who heard the worst of my history and looked at me the same way after.
And then he used the same logic.
The specific words he used in the conversation, the ones that keep surfacing, “You would have said no.” He knew. He knew I would have said no, and he did it anyway, and that means the choice he made wasn't uninformed. He had the information—he knew my answer—and he decided his answer was better.
I turn onto my back and look at the ceiling of the bunk.
Here's the thing I can't get past: I understand it.
Not the decision—I can't make peace with the decision. But the place it came from. The specific fear underneath it is that if he handed it to me, I’d say no, and the consequence would fall on both of us, and he'd have to watch it happen.
That fear is real, and it comes from love. I know that.
But good intentions and love have been the mechanism before. That's not an excuse. That's the very thing that makes it complicated.
I spent another hour pondering the question, much like how you truly sit with something when you're genuinely deciding rather than just pretending or avoiding making a choice.
At the end of it, I don't have an answer.
That's the first honest thing I've felt in three weeks.
I don't know if we're over.
I know I still love him. I know I haven't stopped, not for one day of this tour, not when I was furious, not when I was processing, and not when Travis was sitting across from me being steady and present in all the ways Luke couldn't be.
I know that love is not a sufficient reason to stay if the pattern repeats.
I realize I need to see him in person, in the same room, without a phone between us. The person I speak to over the phone is the one he wants to present, but I need to see his true self when he's right in front of me, with no time to think and respond.
I need to see his face when I say the true thing.
I close my eyes.
We’ll be in Phoenix in three weeks.
LUKE
The Commission file closes on a Thursday.
Marin sends Brandon a one-line email. Brandon forwards it to me with a note that says, “ It worked. How are you?”
I read it sitting on the floor of the gym after everyone else has left, my back against the wall, still in my training clothes. The facility is quiet at this hour—just the hum of the ventilation system and the emptiness of a room that's been full of effort all day.
It worked.
The review is closed. No public filing. No escalation. Sixty days of careful public distancing, and the thing that was supposed to destroy my career before it started is now just a document in a drawer somewhere, resolved quietly by machinery I don't fully understand.
I should feel relieved. But I feel like I paid for something with a currency I didn't know I was carrying.
I text Brandon back.
Thanks. I'll call later.
Then I call Andi.
She picks up on the fourth ring, which tells me she saw it coming and took a moment.
"Hey," she says.
"The review closed."
A pause. "I know. Brandon texted me."
Something about that bothers me—not that Brandon told her, but the order of it. That the outcome of a decision I made without her was delivered to her by the person who'd helped me make it.
"Andi—"
“Luke.” Her voice remains calm, not icy but cautious.
When Andi is angry, she’s like thunder—you sense it beforehand, and it echoes everywhere.
This time, it's calmer but more piercing. The calmness of someone who’s chosen to stay still.
“The review is over. That’s good. I’m happy your license remains secure. "
"Are you?"
"Yes." She means it. I can tell. "I don't want your career destroyed. I've never wanted that."
"I know."
"But I also want you to understand what it cost. Not the strategy. What it actually cost."
"I do understand."
"Do you?" Not a challenge. A question. "Because when I stepped back from the youth center, you saw it happening to me, and you were angry on my behalf. You told me it was wrong. And then you did the same thing."
The words are quiet. That's what makes them hit so hard.
"I know," I say. It comes out smaller than I mean it to.
"I'm not going to keep making this point.
I've made it. You heard it. Now we have to figure out what comes next.
" She pauses. "But Luke—the sixty days aren't over.
And while they're running, I need you to actually look at who's benefiting from them.
Not Brandon. Not me. Not you. Look at who positioned this and ask yourself why the solution always looks the same. "
I already know what she's saying. I've been thinking the same thing for two weeks.
"I'm looking," I say.
"Good."
Another pause. I used to know what her silences meant. I'm not sure I do anymore.
"How's training?" she asks.
"Mack's not happy with me."
"Is he ever?"
"Sometimes." I lean my head back against the wall. "How's the tour?"
"St. Louis crowd earned it." The slightest lift in her voice—the one she can't help when the work went right. "Travis was right. They're skeptical at the top."
"And you won them."
"We did."
We stay on the line longer than the conversation requires. Not because it's comfortable. Because neither of us knows how to be the one who ends it.
"Andi."
"Yeah."
"I'm going to fix this."
Silence. Not the silence of someone thinking. The silence of someone who has already thought and arrived somewhere he can't see yet.
"Okay," she says.
Simply that. Not, “I know you will.” Nor, “I believe you.” Just an okay, expressed in a tone of someone who has finished the conversation and wants to end it.
"Andi—"
"Goodnight, Luke."
The call ends.
I sit on the floor of the empty gym for a long time. Turning her voice over. The way she said “okay,” like it was the only word she trusted herself with. Like everything else she could have said was too much or too true or too final, and she chose the one that closed the door without slamming it.
By the time I get up, I've decided to call Brandon in the morning. Not to accuse anything. Just to look more carefully.
ANDI
Three days after the Athletic Commission file on Luke’s license closes, the external PR firm Marin recommended appears on the youth center's agenda as an action item.
Mrs. Alvarez texts me the meeting notes. The item is listed under Strategic Communications Review, which is a careful way of saying that someone has already decided this is happening and that the board is being asked to ratify it.
I call Brandon.
He picks up on the second ring. "Andi. I was going to call you today."
"The PR firm."
"Yes." No evasion. At least he doesn't try that. "Marin vetted them. I think it's the right move for the center during the audit. It gives the board cover on public communications, and takes the pressure off Mrs. Alvarez to navigate media questions."
"Who approached whom?" I ask.
"What?"
"Did you go to Marin asking for a communications solution, or did she bring this to you?"
A beat. "She brought it. After the community development inquiry."
"Okay."
"Andi, I know you're protective of the center. This isn't removing you from anything—"
"I know." I keep my voice even. "I'd like to see the firm's principals. Their previous clients. Anything in their background that connects them to D.C. political work in the last decade."
Silence.
"That's a specific request," Brandon says carefully.
"It is."
"You think there's something wrong with them."
"I think due diligence is reasonable." I pause. "Brandon. I know you trust Marin. I know she's been good for you to have around through this. I'm not asking you to stop trusting her. I'm asking you to look at the paper trail on this one recommendation and tell me what you see."
He's quiet for a moment. The quiet of someone actively recalibrating.
"I'll look at it," he says.
"Thank you."
After I hang up, I sit with the phone and think about what I've just done.
I've planted a seed of doubt in the person who trusts her most, without enough evidence to justify it.
If I'm wrong about Marin, I've damaged something real.
If I'm right, I've given Brandon a chance to see it before it goes further.
That's the calculation.
I don't love it.
But I make it anyway.