Frame by frame, the bucket going over. Frame by frame, the shoulder of a woman in a cardigan receiving the full careless weight of him — and the feet underneath her doing something so small and so complete that it looked, at a tenth of the speed, like a signature. She never braced. That was the thing he kept rewinding to. Every instinct in every fighter he'd ever met said *brace* — plant, tense, take it, give it back. She didn't take it. She agreed with it, briefly, on terms she dictated, and came out the other side of his momentum still standing in her own geography, barely wet.
He watched it eleven times. Then he watched his own last fight — the third-round finish, the one on the poster — and for the first time in his life he watched it feet first too, and saw, with a clarity that felt like cold water, how open he stood in the pocket when he committed, how his whole defence had always been the other man's hesitation. Nobody had ever made him pay for the geography. Nobody, in twenty-seven fights, had owned the floor the way the woman in the tape owned it.
It was past one when he put the phone down. He did not sleep well. What sleep he got was full of a harbour hall in 1998 and the sound, very close, of punches arriving where a person no longer was.
He was at the club at six the next morning, an hour he'd previously regarded as theoretical. The cleaners' shift was ending; somewhere down the corridor a bucket squeaked, once, and stopped. Barlow was in the archive room making tea in a mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST COACH, a gift from some long-ago Christmas that he had kept, characteristically, forever.
"You said five weeks is when a man could start," Dane said, from the doorway, without preamble, a little too loudly for the hour. He lowered his voice. "So start me. Just — don't make it a thing. No announcements. No *content*." The word tasted bad and he let it. "I just want to know what I'm looking at, in there. In five weeks. I want to not be the only man in the building who doesn't know."
Barlow looked at him for a long moment over the steam of the tea — at the twenty-seven-year-old champion standing in his doorway at dawn, unshaven, undefended for perhaps the first time in his professional life, asking. "All right," he said. He set the mug down and pulled the second chair out with his foot, the archivist's chair, the one nobody had sat in for years. "Sit down, son. We start with the feet. Everybody watches the hands. We start with the feet."
And so it began, unrecorded and unannounced, in the last dark of the morning, with the harbour going grey-blue outside the high windows and the first gulls starting up over the cannery roof: the most gifted striker in the region, sitting in an archivist's spare chair with his hands hanging empty between his knees, learning — an inch at a time, the way a door moves in a draught — how to not be where the punches were.
The club was a different building at five in the morning. Greta had always known this. She had cleaned it at night for three years, when it belonged to the smell of disinfectant and the hum of the ice machine, but the dawn version was quieter than the night one, and cleaner in a way that had nothing to do with her mop. The light came in grey off the water and lay flat across the canvas, and the heavy bags hung still, and for an hour the place was not a business or a stage. It was just a room where work could be done.
She changed in the locker room the way she always had, unhurried, and it was only when she reached the bottom of her bag that she stopped.
Stefan's wraps were where they always were, folded into a square the size of a paperback, the cloth gone the colour of weak tea. She had carried them through three countries and eleven apartments and one marriage's worth of other people's houses, and in all that time she had never once put them on. She had not needed to decide not to. There had simply never been a morning that asked for it.
This morning asked. She sat on the bench and unfolded them across her knees.