Greta heard the quiet and understood it, and was sorry for it, slightly; she had not wanted to be an occasion. But she had lived long enough, and cleaned enough rooms after other people's occasions, to know that the quiet was not really for her. It was the sound of eight hundred people revising themselves. She let them. She went to her corner and stood with her back to the crowd while Barlow settled the stool and her gloves were checked, and she looked, for a moment, not at Dane and not at the crowd but at the canvas at her feet — this canvas, which she had mopped on perhaps a hundred nights, whose scuffs and stains she knew like a chart of the harbour, every mark a small event she could date. It was a good floor. She had kept it well. Standing on it in the light, she felt the last piece of the evening's strangeness settle: that there had never been two worlds, the night one and the lit one. There had only ever been the one room, and her in it, and the only thing that had changed was that everyone else could see her now.
"Greta." Barlow's hand on her shoulder, briefly. "When she calls you to the middle — take your time getting there. The ring is yours. Walk it like you own the lease."
"I clean the lease," she said.
"Then walk it like the woman it's afraid of." He took his hand away. "Stefan's wraps are in your locker and these are new and plain, and I am in your corner and your girl is at the door, and your chin, madam, is exactly where it has been for twenty-one professional fights. Nowhere he can find it."
Across the ring, in the noise his own corner made around him, Dane Whitaker had stopped bouncing. He was standing still, watching her come into the light, watching the quiet do its work — and what he felt, he would say later, badly, to Barlow, in the archive room, was not fear, and not the old contempt, but the thing that comes in the moment after weather arrives, when the front has passed over and a man stands in the sudden calm at the centre of it and realises the calm has a name, and the name is not his.
Referee Okafor stepped to the centre of the canvas, into the light, and raised one hand toward each corner.
The bell was an old one, brass, older than the club — Diane had refused the electronic tone the sanctioning body offered, on grounds she did not elaborate — and its sound went through the hall the way a gull's cry goes through fog: not loud, but leaving nothing untouched. Okafor brought them together at the centre, gloves touching at her instruction, and said the last things referees say, and Greta looked at Dane Whitaker across the small formal distance and saw, up close and at last, what twenty-four wins and three losses and a month of doubt had made of him. He was very young. It had taken her until that moment, with his headgear fastened and his eyes bright above it, to see how young: not a villain, not a weather system, just a young man whose talent had outrun his teachers, standing in the one classroom he had never been able to buy his way out of.
"Box," said Okafor, and stepped clear.
He came forward the way he had come forward in all the footage Barlow had shown her: fast, loose, certain, the jab snapping out as both question and answer, the right hand already travelling behind it like a rumour. Against younger men the rumour had always arrived true. Greta watched the jab come — she had all the time in the world to watch it, that was the thing nobody believed until they stood where she stood — and she was not where it arrived. A slip is a small thing. To the untrained eye it is almost nothing: a head moved perhaps eight centimetres, a shoulder turned, the punch passing close enough to move the air against her cheek. To the front rows, who had come for a spectacle, the first exchange looked like a miss, and the second exchange like another miss, and it was somewhere in the third exchange — Dane advancing behind a combination he had finished a hundred men with, right hand, left hook, right hand — that the hall began, section by section, to understand what it was watching.