Chapter 26
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
LUKE
The house doesn't feel wrong.
That's the thing I wasn't expecting. I thought coming back would feel like stepping into something that had shifted while I was gone—furniture in the same places but the air carrying the months of absence like a low-frequency hum. I thought it would take time to feel like mine again.
Instead, I walk through the door at eleven o'clock on a Tuesday night with two duffel bags and a body that's been in Las Vegas for six months, and the house just receives me.
The distinctive smell of it. The way the kitchen light sits.
The creak on the third stair that I've been meaning to fix since I moved in.
Andi is asleep.
She came home four days before I got back—earlier than the doctors wanted, exactly as long as she was willing to wait.
She used the MaxMorgan company jet to be comfortable and avoid public airports.
She's on the couch when I come in, one leg elevated on the cushions, the cast a blunt white interruption in the low light.
She fell asleep with the TV on and a book face down on her chest. The book she's been trying to read for three weeks, according to the texts she sends me when she can't sleep.
I set the bags down quietly and stand there for a moment.
She looks smaller than I remember. Not because she's lost weight or because she's injured—just because she's asleep, which is the only time Andi lets her body fully stop performing competence.
When she's awake, she takes up exactly the space she's entitled to.
When she's asleep, she looks like what she actually is: someone who has been carrying too much for too long.
I cross the room and ease myself into the armchair across from her.
I don't wake her.
I just sit there for a while, watching her breathe, letting the house settle around us both. Outside, the neighborhood is quiet in the familiar way Atlanta is quiet at eleven on a Tuesday—not silent, just unconcerned. Someone's sprinkler system trips on two houses down. A dog barks once and stops.
I've been gone six months.
I've come back to a woman who drove to Vegas from Phoenix on a motorcycle to see my fight without telling me, who broke three ribs and her left leg and had internal bleeding on a desert highway, and didn't call me from the hospital because she didn't want the circumstances to decide for me.
That's Andi.
That's who I almost let a machine take apart, piece by piece, while I was a thousand miles away in a training camp, thinking I was protecting her.
She stirs—not quite waking, just the slight adjustment of someone who senses a change in the room. Her eyes open partway and find me without surprise, like some part of her was tracking my arrival even in sleep.
"Hey," she says. Her voice is rough and warm.
"Hey."
She looks at me for a moment, taking stock. Then she reaches out her hand.
I move from the chair to the couch, careful not to bump her cast, and settle in next to her. She leans into me just like she always does. It took us a couple of weeks to figure out how to fit together like this, and I didn’t realize how much I missed it until now.
"You smell like the plane," she says into my shoulder.
"I'll go shower. I’ll just be a minute."
"Don't go." She tightens slightly. "In a minute."
I put my arm around her, and we sit together in the dark. The TV is still on, but muted, and the light from the screen moves across the ceiling.
"How's the leg?" I ask.
"It's a leg," she says. "It'll be fine."
"The incision?"
"Also fine." A pause. "The doctor said I healed faster than expected."
"Of course you did."
She makes a sound that might be a laugh.
We stay like that for a long time. The house feels like it’s holding us. The sprinklers outside turn off. I can finally let go of the tension I’ve been carrying for six months—trying to act fine, keeping my worries out of my training. Now, it all starts to fade away in the quiet and the dark.
"Luke," she says.
"Yeah."
"I know we have things to talk about."
"We do."
"Not tonight."
"No," I agree. "Not tonight."
She turns her face into my shoulder and lets out a long breath, like she’s finally able to set something heavy down, even if just for a moment.
"I'm glad you're home," she says.
"I know." I press my mouth briefly to the top of her head. "I'm glad to be here."
ANDI
The first week is quiet in a way I didn't expect.
It’s not that nothing is happening—the audit is still going, the board is slowly letting me get involved again, and Marin’s advice keeps coming through Brandon like clockwork. But Luke is here now, in the house, and just having him around changes everything in ways I can’t really explain.
He runs in the mornings out of habit. He comes back and makes breakfast for both of us, which he does with the same methodical focus he brings to training—ingredients lined up, timing exact, nothing wasted.
He eats, sitting across from me at the kitchen table, and asks about the youth center with specific questions rather than general ones, which tells me he’s been paying attention to everything I’ve said over six months of phone calls and texts.
“Have you heard anything about Marcus?”
“Marcus got into Georgia State. Isn’t that amazing news?”
Luke puts down his fork.
"He did?" he asks, in the voice he uses when something lands harder than he expected.
"He did." I watch him. "I cried when Mrs. Alvarez told me."
"Yeah," he says. He picks his fork back up. "Yeah. Of course you did."
After a moment of letting the news sink in, he continues. "Is he going?"
"Full scholarship. He leaves in August."
Luke nods slowly. He's quiet for a minute in the way he gets quiet when something is genuinely moving him, and he doesn't quite know what to do with it. I've learned to let those silences sit until he’s ready.
"The center did that for him," he says finally.
"The center helped him believe he could achieve that. He put the work in." I agree.
He reaches across the table and puts his hand over mine. We finish breakfast in comfortable silence. It’s the best meal I’ve had in a long time.
The board meeting is on a Thursday.
I arrive fifteen minutes early, which I always do, and the building receives me the way it always has—the mural kids, the slightly crooked letters, the hum of afternoon programming coming through the walls.
Mrs. Alvarez is at her desk when I walk in and stands up immediately, which she never does, which means she's been waiting.
She crosses the room and hugs me.
She's not a hugger.
I hold on for a moment, then let her go.
"The kids have been asking," she says.
"Tell them I'm back."
"I already did." She eyes my crutches with what I can only describe as a personally offended assessment. "How long?"
"Three more weeks."
"Mm." She holds the boardroom door open. "There's coffee."
The boardroom has changed in a way I can't immediately name.
Not the furniture, not the lighting, not the photographs on the wall.
Something more subtle—the way the room holds itself.
The audit documentation is stacked neatly at the far end of the table, which no one put there for my benefit because no one knew I'd arrive early.
Someone put it there because it belongs at the center of the conversation.
I sit down and open the first folder.
The language is familiar.
That's what I notice first. Not the content—the content is procedural, standard, exactly what an audit report should look like. But certain phrases in the board communication summaries, the ones that were written during the weeks I was stepping back, have a specific cadence.
Temporary distance from any figure currently under regulatory review.
Protect the organization through strategic insulation.
Narrow exposure before the narrative forms.
I've heard all of those. Said in that same tone. I heard them in my own kitchen, from Marin, in early December.
I sit very still and read through the rest of the summary.
The recommendations in these board communications predated several of Marin's actual meetings with the board. That's what I'm seeing. The language arrived before the person it's associated with was formally involved in decision-making.
Someone was advising before they were officially advising.
I close the folder.
Luke is at the gym. He's started working with a local trainer in the gap before he decides what comes next—a title fight, a different camp, something. He's not directionless. He's deliberate. I know this about him.
I take a photo of the summary page on my phone.
I take photos of three more.
Then I close the folder, set it back exactly where I found it, and wait for the board to arrive.
Brandon brings Marin to dinner at Luke's parents' house on a Saturday. He doesn't announce it in advance. He texts Luke that afternoon.
Bringing someone.
Then Luke texts me, and I spend the drive over deciding that I'm going to sit with whatever I feel rather than performing either warmth or suspicion.
Luke's mother, Linda, is gracious in the way she's always been—present, attentive, a woman who reads a room without appearing to. She's shaking hands with Marin in the entryway when we arrive, and I watch the introduction from the doorway.
Marin in a social context is different from Marin in a professional one.
The blazer is gone—she's wearing something simple, dark, unpretentious.
Her posture is the same. The steadiness is the same.
But she's slightly reduced the frequency of her professional precision, in the way a very capable person does when they want to appear approachable. It's well done.
Too well done.
That's not a fair thought, I tell myself. People who are good at their jobs don't stop being good at them on weekends. Competence isn't evidence of anything.
"Andi." Brandon crosses the room and hugs me carefully around the crutches. "How are you feeling?"
"Better every day," I say.
He looks at me the way he does when he's checking whether I mean it. I mean it enough.