Chapter 21
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
LUKE
Mack gives me one instruction in May, and one only.
"Stop fighting like you have something to prove," he says. "Start fighting like you already know."
We're watching tape on my upcoming opponent—a solid middleweight named Rafael Soto with a seventeen-and-two record and a right hand that has ended eight fights before the fourth round.
He's disciplined. Patient. He waits for you to make the first mistake, and then he makes you pay for it, compounding.
I've been watching tape on him for three weeks. I know his patterns the way I know my own address.
What I haven't been able to do is get out of my head long enough to use what I know.
"You're overthinking it," Mack says.
"I know."
"You know what the problem is." He turns off the monitor. "You're trying to win the fight before it starts. You want to walk in there already decided." He crosses his arms. "That's not boxing. That's anxiety wearing boxing gloves."
I don't answer because he's right.
The arrangement with Marin technically worked. The Commission's file is closed. My license is safe. The fight is happening. I should be able to put it down now and be fully present in what I came here to do.
Instead, I'm carrying the weight of how it was resolved every time I step in the ring.
Not guilt, exactly. More like the lingering weight of a choice I made—one I’m still walking into, without being able to see where it ends.
Mack has noticed. He always notices.
"You talk to her?" he asks.
"Most nights."
"Is she all right?"
I think about how to answer that. Andi is functioning—performing on tour, navigating the audit, managing the board, and calling me with her voice steady.
She's all right in the ways that are visible.
Underneath that, something is different, and I can feel the shift of it even across a thousand miles.
She's holding herself slightly apart from me.
Not punishing me. Just maintaining a careful distance while she decides how much trust to extend and in what direction.
"She's handling things," I say.
Mack makes a sound that isn't quite agreement.
"She called me last week," he says.
I look at him. "About what?"
"About the PR firm Marin recommended for the center." He picks up the remote and turns the monitor back on, pulling up a different clip. "She wanted to know if I'd heard of them."
"Had you?"
"No." He advances the footage. "But I know someone who has.
One of their principals worked on a D.C.
crisis management case in 2018 that involved the suppression of testimony.
Sealed records. Nothing public." He glances at me.
"Andi didn't ask me to look into it. I looked because she asked the question, and the question was the right one. "
I sit very still.
"Marin recommended a firm whose principal worked on testimony suppression?"
"Allegedly. Nothing's provable. It was sealed." Mack shrugs. "Could be a coincidence. Could be that a lot of D.C. crisis management people have adjacent histories that look bad out of context."
“Or it could be that someone is building infrastructure inside the center's communications.
" I look at him. “A PR firm controls what gets said publicly about the center.
Who speaks. What language gets used. What gets released and when.
If Marin recommended them and they're connected to suppression work, they're not just managing the story.
They're positioned to shape it. Or kill it.”
Mack doesn't respond directly to that. He just advances the footage to a Soto clip and says, "See how he drops his right elbow before the hook. Every time. You need to be ready for that."
I watch the clip.
But I'm thinking about something else.
brANDON
I pull the firm's background on a Sunday afternoon, when I’m alone in my office, because if I'm going to look at this, I want to look at it without Marin in the room.
The principals are clean on paper. No violations.
Solid client history. The kind of track record that looks exactly as it should look.
Then I go one layer deeper.
The firm’s lead principal—a man named Garrett Cole—has three prior crisis-management cases with political dimensions. Two are a matter of public record. The third is sealed, which Marin would have known, having filed adjacent documentation on that same case during her time in D.C.
She knows him. She worked with him. Yet she recommended him without disclosing that.
I sit with that information for a long time, turning it over and over in my head. Looking for the angles that yield deceit because there’s no way it was an oversight or incompetence. She’s already proven that with everything else she’s touched. She’s thorough and doesn’t miss anything.
It's not proof of anything. People work with people they know. Marin's world is a small world—D.C. crisis management runs through a tight professional network, and previous collaboration is the rule, not the exception.
But she didn't disclose it, even to me, and I can’t overlook that pertinent detail.
And Andi asked me to look for a reason.
I pour a glass of water, stand by my office window, and reflect on Marin, similar to how you observe two versions of something—one enjoyable and the other mismatched—and try to determine which one you're truly focusing on.
She's been right about almost everything.
That's the part I can't get past.
Every recommendation has been strategically sound.
Every analysis has been accurate. Every prediction about how things would move has come true.
She's been an extraordinary resource through a genuinely difficult period, and I've leaned on her more than I intended to when she first walked into our lives.
But I think about Andi's voice on the phone.
Ask yourself who benefits when the solution always looks the same.
I pick up my phone and call Marin.
"Brandon," she says. Calm. Even. The voice she always has.
"The PR firm," I say. "You and Garrett Cole. Tell me about it."
A pause. It lasts exactly as long as a pause would last if she were deciding how much to tell me and in what order.
"We worked adjacent cases in 2018," she says. "I should have disclosed that when I made the recommendation. You're right to ask."
"Why didn't you?"
Another pause.
"I thought the disclosure would complicate the recommendation unnecessarily," she says. "He's good at what he does. The previous work history is sealed. I didn't think the connection was material."
"Andi thinks everything is material."
"Yes," Marin says. "She does."
The way she says it isn't dismissive. It's almost admiring. Which is its own strange thing.
"I'm going to put the firm recommendation on hold," I say. "Until the audit closes."
She lets a moment of silence linger. "That's your decision to make."
"It is."
I hang up and stand at the window.
She didn't fight me on it. Didn't argue, didn't persuade, didn't deploy any of the careful language she uses when she wants to move a room in a particular direction.
She just accepted it.
Which means either she's genuinely deferring to my judgment, or she already knows the audit is close enough to closing that it doesn't matter.
I don't know which.
That's the thing about Marin Caldwell that keeps me up at night.
I can never quite tell.