The press conference was held in the club itself, because Diane Kowalski held a settled view that press conferences in hotel ballrooms were where honesty went to put on a tie. Folding chairs were set in rows on the gym floor, a trestle table stood where the ring apron ended, and behind it someone — Tessa Okonkwo suspected Big Eddie, who denied it with suspicious speed — had hung the youth fund banner slightly crooked, so that the whole event had the air of a school assembly that everyone involved was slightly too famous for.
Dane arrived with his team, which is to say he arrived the way weather arrives, with outriders and noise. Rick Sorensen had a folder. Rick Sorensen always had a folder, but today the folder had been rehearsed. There were statements in it, printed, with the larger points underlined, and the largest point of all was the apology, which Rick had written himself and which Dane was to read in the second minute, looking up at the right places.
Dane read it in the second minute, looking up at most of the right places.
"I want to take this opportunity," he said, "to address the incident that has drawn attention to our club, and to say that my actions did not reflect the values I strive to uphold, and that I regret any distress caused to any member of our Northgate family, and that I am grateful for the opportunity this exhibition provides to give back to the community that has given me so much—"
It went on in that vein for some time. It was not a bad apology as these things go. It had all the components, assembled in the correct order, like flat-pack furniture. What it did not have was a person in it. There was no Greta in it. There was no shove in it, no bucket, no mop handle, no Friday night. There was "the incident" and "any distress" and "our Northgate family", and the words performed their duty and lay down flat on the table, and the room — which contained several dozen people who had seen the clip an average of forty times each — received it the way a room receives weather through a window: aware of it, untouched by it.
Rick smiled the smile of a man whose furniture has been assembled. A few cameras clicked. Dane sat back with the particular relief of a fighter who has done the hard thing, and it was only Greta, watching from the far end of the table where Diane had placed her between Barlow and an empty water glass, who saw his shoulders do what shoulders do when a man believes the worst is behind him.
Tessa Okonkwo raised her hand, politely, in the manner of a woman loading something.
"Dane. You said 'any member of our Northgate family'. Does the apology include Ms. Lindqvist by name?"
The folder rustled. Rick said, "I think Dane's statement speaks to—"
"It is a fair question," Greta said, mildly, and the room turned to her the way rooms had been turning to her for three weeks now, with a hunger that still startled her. She had not planned to speak. She had planned, with some care, to be a still point at the end of the table, a woman in a plain cardigan among the branded hoodies, and to say almost nothing, because almost nothing was what the occasion required of her and because she had a lifelong skill at it. But the question had landed crooked, like the banner, and she found she disliked leaving it crooked.
"I will say this about apologies," she said. "In my work I clean the same floor every night. If I miss a corner, I do not make a statement about the corner. I go back with the mop." She folded her hands. "Mr. Whitaker and I will share a ring in eleven days. That is a kind of going back. I am content to let it be that, and to let the rest be between him and the corner he missed."
She said it without heat, almost gently, and Dane looked at her down the length of the table with an expression that Rick's folder had no page for — not anger, not quite shame, but the alertness of a man hearing, for the first time, the actual dimensions of the room he is standing in.
"Right," Tessa said, and wrote something down with great satisfaction. "Ms. Lindqvist, while I have you. Dane's predictions are famous — he's 'The Weather', he calls his round. Dane, yours for the exhibition?"