Chapter 24
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
LUKE
Idon't sleep the night after the fight.
That's not unusual. Your body is full of something for hours afterward—not adrenaline, exactly, more like the residue of sustained focus, the system winding down from a state it doesn't visit often. I've learned not to fight it. I lie in the dark and let it move through me.
Tonight I'm also thinking about Andi.
I've sent her three texts since she left. Two she's seen. One she hasn't answered. I put the phone face down on the nightstand and look at the ceiling.
What I keep coming back to is her face in that backstage corridor.
Not the moment with Syndi—I know what that looked like, and I know what it was, and I know Andi knows the difference.
What I keep coming back to is after. The moment when she said I needed to see you win, and the way something in her voice almost came undone before it held.
I needed to see you win. Past tense. Completed need. The way you say something when you came for a reason, and the reason is now finished.
She left before I could get past the careful words to whatever was underneath them.
And Travis was with her, which is its own thing to think about.
Not in the way it would have been three months ago—I've listened to enough phone calls to understand what he is to her.
But I also saw his face when Syndi had her hands on my shoulders.
The way he watched me from behind Andi with the distinctive expression of a man taking inventory.
Travis is in love with her.
I don't think he's acted on it. I don't think Andi knows the full depth of it, or if she does, she's carrying it the way she carries uncomfortable truths—carefully, at a distance, without letting it change what she's decided.
But the expression was there. And Andi has been on a bus with him for five months while I was in this city working.
I'm not thinking clearly. I know that. Six rounds plus no sleep plus unanswered texts—this is not the state from which to make permanent assessments.
But here's what I can't stop running: she came to the fight to see me.
She saw the Syndi moment, and something closed in her face.
She has Travis beside her, who has been present and constant in all the ways I couldn't be.
And she left without saying the things she came to say because she'd already decided before she arrived, and all she needed was one more look at my actual life to confirm it.
I call her at one in the morning.
Voicemail.
I wait and call again.
Voicemail.
I text her.
Call me when you're up. Doesn't matter what time.
Then I put the phone face down and lie in the dark and think about the fact that I've been in this city for five months working toward something that happened tonight, and the one person I wanted in that building came and left and is now not answering, and maybe she's right about all of it.
I fall asleep somewhere around three and wake at six with the television on. A local news brief. The bottom of the hour. I'm half-asleep when I hear the word tour, and I sit up.
A motorcycle accident on the desert highway outside Phoenix. Two individuals, one connected to Travis Malone's touring party. Minor injuries. Both treated and released. The reporter moves on before I've had a chance to process it.
I reach for my phone and call Andi.
Voicemail.
I call Travis. Four rings. Voicemail.
I call Mack.
"She's okay," he says immediately. Which is the first thing you say when you need the person to hear that before anything else.
"Mack. What happened? Where is she?"
"She's okay, son." He repeats it, which he never does.
"That's not what I asked."
A pause. "She asked me not to call you."
I sit very still.
"She said that?"
"Yes."
I understand it immediately. Even hurt, she's protecting the integrity of the choice I have to make. Am I capable of being the man she needs? The one who doesn’t take away her right to decide what happens in her life.
The one who involves her in decisions, no matter how hard the conversation is, and make sure she knows her voice matters.
By not telling me about the accident, she’s making sure that if we’re together, it's because I’ve decided to be the man she needs, not because an emergency has decided for me.
It's the most Andi thing she could have done, and it also means she's already decided, and she's sealing it off from interference.
"How bad, Mack?"
A longer pause. "The news is accurate."
I look out the window. The Las Vegas morning is assembling itself outside.
"Okay," I say.
"Luke—"
"I said okay."
I hang up.
Minor injuries. Routine overnight monitoring. The news said it, and Mack confirmed it. She's okay. She's with Travis. She instructed everyone not to call me.
I try to figure out which of those three facts is doing the most damage, and I think it's the last one.
The next three weeks pass in a way that doesn't feel like time so much as distance.
The camp winds down. Joe runs lighter sessions—maintenance work, keeping the body from stiffening while the fight bruises heal.
Mack is quieter than usual, which is saying something.
Shane drives back to Atlanta, Katie in the passenger seat, the two of them working through whatever they had spent the camp avoiding.
I stay.
Not because I have a reason to. Joe's done with me.
The fight happened. Post-fight training is really just allowing the body to heal while keeping it nimble.
The record is updated. The Athletic Commission file is closed, the sixty-day arrangement is over, and every institutional problem that prompted six months of my life in Las Vegas has been resolved one way or another.
I stay because I don't know what I'm going back to.
The house in Atlanta is ours. Has been for over a year.
Her coffee mug on the drying rack, her handwriting on the kitchen whiteboard.
The indentation on her side of the mattress.
Her perfume lingers in the air. Going back to all of that, while the question between us remains unanswered, feels like walking into a space that belongs to a version of us that might no longer exist.
The promoters moved me to a suite after the fight—a gesture, standard treatment for a ranked win.
Two bedrooms, a living area, a view of the Strip that goes on forever.
I've been here the last three weeks, and I've barely been in the living room.
I sit at the window and look at the desert in the same way I looked at the ceiling of the hotel room for six months before this, and I think about the same things.
She got on the tour bus. I checked—not by calling her, just by looking at the schedule. The Fireflies posted from Los Angeles two days after Phoenix. Which means she finished the tour. Which means she recovered enough to perform, or the PR framing was accurate, and it really was minor.
Mack said it was accurate. I try to believe that.
What I actually believe is that Andi Morgan would finish a tour on two broken legs if she'd made a commitment to do it, and that the absence of information from everyone who loves us both means everyone is honoring her instruction, and that I should do the same.
I go to the gym. I run the Strip at five in the morning when no one's out. I call Brandon twice about the center—the board pressure has eased, which was the point of all of this, which should feel like a win.
It doesn't feel like anything.
I called Andi once more, ten days after the fight. Not to make her answer. Just to put my voice somewhere she might find it.
Hey. I know you don't want me to call, and I know why. This is the last one. I just need you to know that whatever you decide, I'll be here when you're ready to tell me. I'm not going anywhere. That's it. That's all.
She hasn’t answered.
She hasn’t sent a text back.
Nearly a month after the fight, I start packing.
It takes longer than it should. Six months of living accumulate in ways you don't notice until you're trying to reverse them. Joe stops by when I'm halfway done and stands in the doorway of the suite, looking at the boxes and bags, and then at me.
"You did good work this year," he says.
"Thank you, Joe."
"Come back."
"I will."
He nods once and leaves. That's Joe. Everything that needs to be said in the minimum number of words.
I sit on the couch in the suite's living area and look at the view.
I won the fight. I kept my license. The two-month arrangement to be estranged from Andi is done. The pressure from the youth center's board has eased. Every tactical aim of the last six months has been achieved.
And I'm sitting in a suite in Las Vegas on the twenty-first day of a silence that might be an answer, and I don't know how to accept it.
The fighter in me doesn't give up. That's always been true—not when someone says no, not when the odds stack up wrong, not when everything looks bleak.
I keep fighting. That's how I've gotten to where I am, even when my own family doubted it.
The one person who has believed in me from the start now won't answer the phone.
The distance I created between us turned out to be more than miles.
The arrangement wasn't just sixty days of public separation—it was me deciding what was best for her without asking her.
It was me putting her away to protect myself and calling it love.
I understand now, sitting in this suite with my bags half-packed and the desert visible through the window, that I became exactly the thing she's spent her whole life fighting.
Not a villain. Not cruel. Just a person who decided they knew better and acted accordingly.
There's no one to blame for that but me.
I should go. I should drive back to Atlanta, be in the house, and wait for whatever comes next. That's the right move. That's what a man who respects her decision does.
I'm still sitting there an hour later when the knock comes at the door.
I don't know who I'm expecting.