That night Tomas did not sleep in his fractured single-parent instalments. He did his accounts at the kitchen table and failed at them. He stood in Sofia's doorway and watched her sleep with her painting of the bus propped against the bookcase, one arm flung up beside her head in the attitude of a tiny, victorious swimmer. He called Hector, because there were some decisions a man did not make without first listening to the voice that had trained his hands, and Hector, at sixty-six, answered on the second ring as if he had been sitting beside the phone for three days, which, Tomas realised, he probably had been.
"So," Hector said. "The centre wants to put my letting-go lesson on a poster and charge admission for charity. Tell me what your face is doing."
"How do you know my face is doing anything?"
"Tomas. I have known your face since it had acne. Talk."
Tomas told him, all of it, the park and the paper and Grace's plain sentences about mercy, and the house went quiet around his voice, and Hector listened the way he had listened in corners between rounds, wholly, without once reaching for advice before it was asked for. When Tomas finished there was a silence with breathing in it, and then the old coach said, "Answer me one thing and do not be noble about it. Are you afraid you will hurt him, or are you afraid you will like it?"
The question landed where it was aimed, under the ribs. Tomas sat down slowly on the bottom step of the stairs, where he could see both the kitchen, with its unsigned paper, and the hallway to Sofia's room. "The second one," he said. "Not the winning. I don't miss winning. I miss, sometimes, being good at something all the way to the end of it. The depot, you fix the bus and it goes out and it breaks again in a month, that is the nature of the thing and I accept it. Sofia, you do everything right for a year and she still has a night where she cries for her mother in a voice that, that she doesn't use in the daytime. Nothing finishes. In there, things finished. Cleanly. I knew where the end was. I am afraid of how much I might want the end of a thing, just once, with people watching who finally understand the language."
"Good," Hector said, with enormous satisfaction. "That is an honest fear and an honest fear can be trained. Listen to me. You will set your conditions and you will set them in writing and one of them will be mine. The tap ends it. Not at the end of the round, not for the crowd, not for the cameras, not for the boy's education. The tap, his or yours, and your hands open like they opened in that park, in front of everyone, so that five thousand people who have only ever seen the first half of the sport learn what the second half looks like. If you can sign that, Tomas, then you are not going back. You are going forward carrying the thing you promised her. She did not ask you to be smaller. I knew that woman. She asked you not to be used. There is a difference and you have known it all week."
Rosa, in the morning, said the same thing in fewer words and with pancakes. She had read the paper twice, once with her glasses and once, Tomas suspected, by holding it at arm's length and judging its character. "Marisol would have hated the park," she said, sliding the plate across. "She would have hated that they made you use your hands in front of strangers. But this?" She tapped the second sheet with one floury finger, on the line about the lighting, on the words family fund. "This is a woman being answered. Sign it your way, with your conditions. Then stop asking ghosts for permission they have already given you. Ghosts are busy, Tomas. Eat."