"You wrote conditions," Freya said at last. "You wrote *conditions*, like a treaty. Boxing only, headgear, referees, published accounts — Mum, the poster thing. Equal size letters. And the cleaners. You made them review *the cleaners* before you'd pick up a glove."
"Eddie's knees are bad and the night rate has not changed in six years," Greta said. "If my name is suddenly worth money to these people, some of it can walk in a useful direction."
"And Dane Whitaker signed it."
"Eleven days," Greta said. "His manager wrote to Diane that he is 'fully bought in.' I am told this is a sports phrase. It means he had no choice."
Freya laughed, and then, in the warm dark of the car with the harbour lights smeared on the windshield, found that her eyes were wet again, which was becoming a theme of her week. "I'm proud of you," she said, and heard how inadequate it was, and how it was also the largest true thing available. "I'm also *terrified*, which we'll discuss. You're fifty-two and you're boxing a professional."
"I am boxing three exhibition rounds under a referee with headgear on, against a young man who is about to discover that I am extremely hard to reach," her mother said. "Now go home and sleep. You have the early boat, and I have a floor. Everything is exactly as it was, Freya. Only now it is written down."
Later, alone in the staff room at the end of the shift, Greta stood in front of her locker with her coat on and her bag over her shoulder, and rested the flat of her hand against the cold metal door. She did not open it. What was inside was not a thing she needed tonight, and there would be time — dawn time, quiet time, before the building woke — to decide what her hands were going to carry into that ring and what they were going to leave behind. She took her hand away, switched off the light, and went home through the sleeping port, unhurried as weather going out.
It was Rick's idea, and like most of Rick's ideas it arrived disguised as an errand. "Media prep," he said, on the phone, at seven in the morning. "Archive room, ten o'clock. Barlow's got old tape the broadcaster wants to license for the undercard package. Twenty minutes. Bring coffee, look interested, it's good optics for the—"
"Don't say optics," Dane said.
"—for the *optics*," Rick finished, serenely. "Ten o'clock. And Dane. Watch the tape properly. That's all I'm asking. Watch it like it's a fight, not a photo opportunity."
Dane arrived at ten with the coffee and the particular loose-limbed brightness of a man who has decided in advance how boring a thing will be, and Frank Barlow was already there in the humming dark of the archive room, with the big old monitor warmed up and a cassette in his hands that he held the way other men held hymn books. Rick stood by the door with his phone face-down on the desk, which Dane registered, distantly, as unusual, the way you'd register a dog not barking.
"Gothenburg, nineteen ninety-eight," Barlow said. "Regional broadcast. Picture's rough — it was rough then, it's not going to apologise now." He fed the tape in. "The girl in the dark trunks is twenty-five years old. Remember that while you watch. The other one's a Finn, name of Aho, hits as hard as anyone I ever saw at the weight. This is round four of ten. Watch her feet first. Everybody watches the hands. Watch the feet."
Static. A harbour-town hall, low ceiling, a crowd in winter coats, commentary in Swedish too fast and too far from the microphone to follow. And then the fight, grainy and grey-blue and unmistakable: a fair-haired young woman, compact and utterly still between movements, in front of a bigger opponent who came forward behind punches like weather systems — Dane heard himself breathe out, a small involuntary thing — and the young woman simply was not there when they arrived. The shoulder rolled. The head moved an inch, two inches, the way a door moves in a draught. Aho threw eleven punches in the first exchange of the round, combinations, real work, the kind of pressure that folds professionals — and scored, by Dane's count, one glancing touch on an elbow.
"Count her feet," Barlow said quietly, beside him. "She's never crossed. She's never square. That floor's her whole life, and she knows every inch of what's hers."