Thank you. Yes, I think merging would be the correct thing to do.
You’re right- I turned on ‘non-production’ mode on our Staging site (once I learned that existed!). The thing is though, I did disconnect the staging site first. When I did that, it disconnected Production as well! I reconnected Production and turned on non-production mode on the staging site. I thought I was all-set until we noticed the subscribers were missing.