"You remembered the words." He rose then, in stages, refusing her offered hand with a look and accepting it, a moment later, with a nod, as if the two gestures were separate negotiations and both had been settled fairly. "Now the words must remember you. Go home. Sleep like a person who has already done the work, because you have. On Saturday, arrive early, tie your belt slowly, and let the young man bring his weather with him. Weather passes. Floors remain."
On Thursday the weather, in every sense, obliged. The regional preview programme ran a segment that used Kieran's interview and a clip of Rowan's quieter one, side by side, and a commentator used the phrase tortoise and hare on television, which Tess declared a sackable offence. Nadia Frost, meanwhile, moved through the final week like a harbourmaster in a rising wind. At forty four, Nadia had organised charity galas, a harbour regatta that had survived actual lightning, and one memorable fun run involving a mayoral candidate and a swan, and she treated the showcase as a logistics problem with a heart attached. She confirmed the ticket desk twice. She walked the hall with a clipboard and moved the charity total board three feet to the left so that it could be read from the door, because, she explained to Walt, people give more when they can see the number climb and know it is partly their climbing. She set the running order in large print and taped it inside both changing rooms. She assigned Owen Tate to the main event and told him so in person, because, she said, news like that should not arrive by text message like a parking fine.
Owen, at forty one, a referee with a voice built for being heard without shouting and a reputation, earned over fifteen seasons, for stopping things half a breath before they needed stopping, received the assignment with a nod and one question. "House rules, same as printed?" he asked. "Tap means stop, verbal means stop, my hand means stop, and nobody argues with any of the three."
"Same as printed," Nadia said. "And Owen. If it gets loud in there, I want it quiet before they start. A proper quiet."
"You will have it," he said, in the tone of a man promising weather he personally controlled.
Kieran Holt's Thursday began at five in the morning, as all his Thursdays did, with conditioning in the grey light and a playlist loud enough to argue with. By the third round of drills his shoulder had begun its familiar negotiation, not pain exactly, nothing he would have dignified with that word in front of witnesses, but a deep, warning tightness when he reached across his body at speed, as if something in the joint were a door on a stiff hinge that had learned to open only when it was warmed, oiled, and flattered. He finished the session. He hit every target time. He also, without deciding to, did the last set of entries entirely from the other side, and he came off the mat to find Marcus Doyle holding a towel and watching him with the stillness of a man who had stopped pretending not to count things.
"You switched sides," Marcus said.
"Variety," Kieran said. "Coaches love variety. You told a class that on Tuesday."
"I tell classes a lot of things. I told a class once that confidence cures nerves, and a boy threw up in his own kit bag. Walk with me."
They walked the perimeter of the mat, the way they had walked it after defeats and victories for nearly a decade, Marcus at forty nine having long ago learned that some conversations only happened in motion, shoulder to shoulder, with nobody's face required to do the talking. For a full circuit Kieran discussed the running order, the ticket numbers, and the commentator's tortoise remark with convincing lightness. On the second circuit, at the far end, where the banners muffled their voices, he said, without preamble, "If a man had, say, a shoulder that was mostly fine."
Marcus kept walking. "Mostly fine. Like a roof that mostly does not leak."
"Like a roof that does not leak at all, except in one particular rain, at one particular angle. Hypothetically, would that man be an idiot to headline on Saturday, or an idiot to mention it on Thursday? Those feel like the two offers on the table."