*Five. Before the exhibition, the club formally reviews the contracts and night pay of its cleaning staff. Not because of me. Because the last week has shown everyone what this building thinks we are, and the thinking should cost something to change.*
*If these are agreed, in writing, I will box. — G.L.*
Diane read it three times. Then she sat for a while with her hand flat on the page, in her office with the hoist beam overhead and the gym going on below her, and she thought about the fifth condition for longer than the other four put together — thought about what it had taken for the woman to ask for nothing for herself, not money, not billing, not an apology with flowers, only a fair process for Eddie Pratt and the two girls who did the weekend offices, people whose names the sponsors would never learn. She signed the bottom of the sheet, under Greta's handwriting, with the club's pen. *Agreed, all five, without amendment. D. Kowalski, owner.*
Dane's signature took eleven more days.
Eleven days of Craig from Apex Hydration becoming steadily less professional on the phone. Of the truck people "watching developments" with the cold attention of farmers watching a sky. Of the headline card's broadcaster developing, through Rick, a sudden contractual interest in "acts of sportsmanship." Eleven days in which Dane laughed it off in public and argued it in private and discovered, meeting by meeting, that the doors of his own fame had all been quietly locked from the outside. On the eleventh day Rick put the sheet of ruled paper on the table of a rented meeting room in the sponsor's offices, with Craig present and a lawyer present and a photographer, somehow, also present, and Dane read Greta's conditions with his jaw set, and read them again, and heard himself say, "Headgear? She wants *headgear*? I'm not wearing headgear, that's—"
"It's number one on the list, Dane," Rick said, in the tone of a man reading weather he did not make. "It's all one list. Sign under Mrs. Kowalski."
"And if I don't?"
"Then Apex reviews activation on Monday," Craig said, almost gently. "And the broadcaster reviews their interest. And we spend six weeks explaining to the region why the exhibition fell through, and the explanation has your name in it and not hers. Or you sign, you do three exhibition rounds for a children's charity, you wear the headgear, and you're the man who stood up and made it right. That's the whole menu, Dane. There is no third thing on it."
Dane looked at the ruled paper a long time — at the level, spaced, unhurried hand, so unlike the signatures and slogans his life was papered with. "She writes like an engineer," he said, at last, to nobody. "Fine. *Fine.*" He signed, largely, the way he signed everything, and shoved the pen away across the table. "Three rounds. Headgear. Whatever. Tell the old—" He stopped himself, with an effort the room could hear. "Tell Mrs. Lindqvist I'll see her at the weigh-in."
"Already a better sentence than the last one you gave about her," Rick said, closing the folder. "Growth. We'll build on it."
Diane told Greta herself, that evening, in the corridor, and handed her back the sheet of paper with both new signatures standing under her own handwriting like guests who had arrived at a small house and found it larger than expected.
"He took eleven days," Diane said. "You took four."
"I asked for things that were mostly for other people," Greta said. "He was asked to agree that I exist. That is sometimes the slower signature." She folded the sheet once and put it in her apron pocket, and if she felt anything large about the moment, it did not show; she looked, Diane thought, the way she looked when a long floor came out well. "Thank you for signing the fifth one quickly."
"It was the only one I was ashamed of," Diane said. "The rest was just business." She hesitated. "You know Barlow will want to be in your corner."
"I know," Greta said. "He has waited twenty-seven years. Let him not wait longer." A small smile. "Also he is the only person in this building who will not shout at me to do foolish things. Stefan never shouted. I do not work well with shouting."
Freya heard it over the phone that night, sitting in her car outside the terminal after the last crossing, and was quiet for so long that Greta said her name twice.