"And if she says yes?" Dane said, from the doorway, with something that wanted to be contempt and came out closer to unease.
"Then," Diane said, "you had better hope the mop is all she's been holding." She picked up the phone. "Craig? Sorry about that. Dead spot. Now — listen carefully, because you're going to like this better than you think."
Dane trained that afternoon the way he always trained, which was loudly and well, and if the heavy bag swung a fraction truer than usual under his hands nobody mentioned it. But the gym had changed around him in a way he kept catching out of the corner of his eye. People were being careful. Not hostile — careful, the way you are careful around a man with a crack in him. His striking coach, a patient Brazilian named Aldo, who had survived six camps and two title challenges without once raising his voice, held the pads and said nothing about the internet at all, which was itself a kind of statement. And twice — twice — Dane caught young fighters at the far end of the mats watching him with an expression he had never been on the receiving end of before: assessment. As if he were a question now, instead of an answer.
He showered, changed, and found Rick in the car park with his phone against his ear and his other hand already raised in the universal gesture of *it's handled*.
"It's not handled," Rick said, when he came off the call, contradicting his own hand. "Apex is 'reviewing activation.' The truck people are 'watching developments.' The truck people, Dane. You sell *trucks* for them. Trucks are supposed to survive weather." He unlocked the car. "Also, full disclosure, I floated the flowers thing past Tessa anyway, just to test the water, and she said — and this is a direct quote from a woman whose job is headlines — 'Rick, if he gives that woman flowers on camera I will personally write the obituary for his career.' So. The climate has shifted. Diane's mad idea may be the only door left, and if it is, you'll walk through it smiling, because I have seen your contract and so have the truck people."
"I am not fighting the cleaning lady," Dane said.
"Nobody is asking you to fight her," Rick said, with the deep soothing falseness of a man walking a horse past a fire. "Diane is asking her. You just have to stand there while the world decides you were brave to be asked. Get in the car."
The scrum, when it came, was not of Dane's making, which he would point out for days afterward, as if that excused what he did in it. A regional television crew had been booked weeks earlier for a harmless segment on the headline card, and nobody at Northgate — not Diane, not Rick, not the club's long-suffering media volunteer — thought to unbook them. So on Friday morning, in front of the club's doors, with the bay glittering behind and the gulls doing their unhelpful best overhead, a reporter from the television crew asked the question that Tessa Okonkwo, standing two microphones over with her notebook closed, had very deliberately not asked yet.
"Any response to the club's proposal, Dane? This charity exhibition people are talking about — you and the cleaner from the video?"
Dane had been mid-smile, the full sponsored smile, the one with the truck in it. He could have said anything. He had been saying anything into microphones for five years, effortlessly, a man born with a quote where other people keep their hesitation. What came out, on every phone and evening broadcast in the region by six o'clock, was this:
"Hey. I respect everybody who works in that building. But let's get real. She *mops* my mat. That's her job and there's no shame in it — but I'm a professional, I'm twenty-four and three, I headline in six weeks. I don't spar the staff."
"Is that a no?" the reporter said, delighted, as microphones bloomed toward him like flowers toward the sun.
"That's a *come on*," Dane said.
Rick, at the edge of the frame, closed his eyes with the particular weariness of a man watching a lit match fall slowly toward a carpet he had only just finished paying for. And Tessa Okonkwo opened her notebook at last, and wrote something down, in shorthand, slowly and with great care, like a woman copying out an inscription.