Greta had not moved. That was the detail the crowd would talk about afterwards, more than the knockdown itself. Fighters are taught to swarm a hurt opponent, to pour forward in the seconds when the other man's legs are still negotiating with the floor, and Dane Whitaker, had the positions been reversed, would have been across the ring before the count reached three. Greta stood at the neutral distance she had chosen, gloves up, breathing through her nose, and waited for the referee to bring the fight back to her. She had never once in twenty-one professional fights rushed a downed opponent in his first unsteady seconds, partly out of sportsmanship and partly out of arithmetic: a man recovering is a man watching, and a man watching is dangerous, and the fight is not scored on eagerness. She let him have his seconds. She let him have his dignity with them. When the referee waved them together again she met him in the centre as calmly as she had met him in the first round, and if there was anything in her face, it was not triumph. It was something closer to respect for the fact that he had got up and come forward to meet her at all.
And then the strangest thing happened, which nobody in the building had paid to see and which Barlow would later call the best boxing of Dane Whitaker's life. He did not charge. He did not swing for the prediction that was already dead on the canvas behind him. He set his feet. He put his jab out and meant it, and when she slipped it he did not chase the miss; he stepped back to his own ground and made her come the half-step to him. He boxed. He feinted once, properly, with his shoulder and not his feet, and when she did not buy it he did not sulk or force the moment; he touched her glove with a jab that was a question and accepted her answer when it came back short and clean to his ribs. This was the education his talent had always let him skip, and he was taking it now at full price, in front of everyone, without flinching from the cost. For the remaining two minutes of the second round, the most gifted natural puncher in the region boxed carefully, behind a high guard, off a patient jab, choosing his punches the way careful men choose words, and though she touched him twice more with counters that scored without stinging, and though the round and the fight were plainly hers by then, he finished it on his feet and in his senses, learning in public, at twenty-seven, the lesson she had come out of retirement to teach by example: that a round is not a debt to be collected. It is ground to be kept.
In his corner, Rick Sorensen was on his feet shouting instructions that Dane was no longer hearing, and Tessa Okonkwo at ringside was writing in her notebook with the slow care of someone who knows she will not need to embellish a word of it. In Greta's corner, Barlow slid through the ropes with the stool and the water and said nothing at all for the first ten seconds, which was his way of saying everything. Then he said, "He's boxing now," and Greta, mouthguard out, breathing slow and even as a woman half her age might envy, said, "Yes. Now it is a fight." She looked across at Dane sitting in his corner with a towel over his shoulders and his eyes on her, not on the crowd, not on the cameras, on her, the way fighters look at the person across the ring when the performance has burned off and only the work is left. She inclined her head to him, the smallest acknowledgement between professionals. After a moment, to her own surprise as much as anyone's, he inclined his head back. She drank a little water and handed the bottle back, and her hands, when Barlow took it from her, were as steady as they had been at the weigh-in, as steady as they were on a mop handle at two in the morning. He had believed her for twenty-seven years on the strength of one fight seen from a borrowed seat in Gothenburg, and belief, he thought, was a debt a man carried alone until the day the world agreed to share it. Tonight the world was sharing it, loudly, and still her hands were steady, because the steadiness had never been for the world. It was simply how she did things: floors, distances, griefs. You kept your hands steady and you did the work in front of you and you did not perform the keeping. The stool scraped. The seconds were called out of the corners.