Rowan looked at her for a long moment. "I appreciate the honesty," she said, and meant it, which made what she had to say next sit no easier. "No."
The word landed in the little office and stayed there.
"No," Rowan said again, more carefully, because a refusal, like a submission, should be clean and complete and not leave the other party guessing where the pressure is. "I am a physical therapist's assistant. I am a brown belt who teaches the Tuesday fundamentals class to beginners who are frightened of falling down. I am not a main event. What happened last week happened because a demonstration started where my one good position starts and a proud man reached like a man doing a favor, and I have been honest about that sequence to everyone who has asked me, including, I notice, the parts of it that do not flatter me. If I walk into that arena, I am agreeing to be the thing the clip says I am. I am agreeing to let two thousand people and a donation link decide whether Rowan Ellis is real. And if I lose, and I may well lose, Kieran Holt is very good, he is a champion for comprehensible reasons, then Harold Benson's clinic got its evening and its money on the back of me being folded, to borrow Mrs. Abernathy's phrase, like a deck chair, in public. And if I win, it is worse, in a way. Then it starts again, larger. Then there is another podcast, another road, another main event. I know how this machine goes. I have watched it go. The only way to not be in the machine is to not step into it, and last Tuesday I did not step into it. It stepped into my Tuesday class."
"There it is," Tess said quietly. "That is the actual speech. She has been rehearsing it on the parallel bars all week, Harold told me."
"Harold tells you clinic gossip?" Rowan said.
"Harold tells everyone clinic gossip. Harold is a broadcaster."
Nadia Frost, to her credit, did not argue. She sat back, and she nodded slowly, and she wrote something on the inside cover of the folder in pencil, in handwriting too small to read upside down. "Friday," she said. "The offer stands until Friday, unchanged, and if Friday is a no, it is a no without penalty and without a second visit from me. I will find the showcase another main event. There is a judo exhibition from Bangor that will do very well and raise a respectable sum and teach considerably fewer people to walk, and I will book it with a whole heart." She stood, and shook Rowan's hand, and her grip was dry and firm and brief. "For what it is worth, from a woman who moves boats with clipboards: I do not think you are protecting a clip. I think you are protecting a life you built on purpose. Those are different things, and the second one deserves better arguments than the young man's."
At the door she stopped. "The clinic poster," she said. "The gait system. Who chose the photograph on it?"
"Eleven years is a long time to look at strangers walking," Nadia said, and went out.
Walt walked her to the street door. Tess stayed, swinging her feet from the edge of the desk, and watched Rowan with the particular patience of a friend who has decided that silence, applied correctly, is also a technique.
"You can say it," Rowan said at last.
"I am not going to say anything. You gave the speech. It was a good speech. It was true in at least four places." Tess swung her feet. "I will only observe, as your corner, your best friend, and the only person in this gym who has never once beaten you at anything including chess, which someone on the internet believes you play professionally..."
"I do not play chess."
"...that you keep saying last Tuesday stepped into your life. And you keep not saying the other thing."
"What other thing?"
"That you liked it." Tess said it gently, which was worse than saying it any other way. "Not the attention. The roll. One minute and fifty-one seconds of being exactly as good as you actually are, in front of witnesses, with no way to be modest about it. I have watched you be good quietly for six years, Ro. You fold it up and put it away like a clean towel. Last week it stayed unfolded for two minutes and the whole room saw the size of it. I am not saying do the match. I am saying do not decide it with a speech that leaves that part out. Ilya would not let you leave a grip out of a technique. Do not leave it out of the decision."