"Nothing like that." He came and stood beside her, not too close, and looked up at the wall with her. Twenty-some faces, most of them local, a few of them genuinely good. "You've dusted these frames three years and never said a word about any of them. Never said, that one's overrated, that one could fight. Nothing."
"I am paid to dust them," she said. "Not to review them."
"Most people can't help reviewing them."
"I am not most people." Said without pride, the way someone might say they were left-handed. She moved the wand along the next frame. "You did not come to watch me dust, Frank."
"No." He put his hands in his pockets. His voice, when he finally got to it, came out quieter than he intended. "In the summer of ninety-eight I went to Gothenburg on a coaching exchange. Six weeks. I saw a lot of good fighters. I saw one great one. A girl — a young woman — out of a little gym by the harbour. She fought a Finn who hit like a truck, and she never once went where the punches were. Shoulder like a door closing. I have thought about that shoulder maybe once a year for twenty-seven years, and I never expected to see it again." He paused. "Then this week I watched a man shove a woman with a mop, slowed down to a tenth of its speed, and I saw it in a corridor in Port Ellery."
The wand kept moving. If anything, it slowed a fraction. "The internet," Greta said at last, "has too much time."
"Greta."
"Twenty-one and nothing," she said. "That is all that is true, and it is all I will confirm. Twenty-one wins, no losses. The rest is other people's decoration." She lowered the wand and looked at him properly for the first time, and her face was calm and completely closed, like a house with the lights on in only one room. "And I am asking you, as a kindness, to keep it quiet. Whatever you think you remember. I am Mrs. Lindqvist who cleans. That is not a disguise, Frank. That is the life I chose, and I chose it carefully."
He wanted to argue. He had a coach's whole vocabulary of argument ready — about honour, about the wall, about a record like that belonging to history and not to a mop cupboard. But she had said *as a kindness*, and the phrase did something to him. Coaches are paid to push people past the point where they say stop. Old coaches, if they are any good, learn the other skill too.
"All right," he said. "Quiet. From me, quiet."
"Thank you."
"Can I ask one thing? Not for telling. For me." She waited, which he had learned was her way of granting permission and withholding it at the same time. "Twenty-one and nothing, at thirty-one, with a title. Nobody walks away from that at the top unless—" He stopped himself. "Forget it. That's not one thing, that's prying."
She was silent a moment. Something crossed her face, not grief exactly — grief is weather; this was more like a door in a familiar house that stays shut. "There was a defence," she said. "The biggest one. Posters, television, all of it. One week before, my brother Stefan died. He was my trainer. He was my corner since I was fourteen years old. An aneurysm — there is no story to it, he made tea in the morning and by the evening he was gone." She said it evenly, a fact laid down like a tool set gently on a bench. "I tried to train for that fight. I went to the gym nine days like a ghost going through a house it used to live in. On the tenth day I sat outside the arena office with the contract in my bag and I understood I could not walk to a ring that he was not standing beside. So I signed the other paper instead. I vacated the title. I gave it back empty, without a fight. People wrote that I was afraid, some of them. Let them. I have been called worse by better."
Barlow stood with his hands in his pockets and looked at the floor she had already cleaned, polished concrete, cannery bones under everything. "I'm sorry," he said, and meant the inadequacy of it too.