The second came with forty seconds left, when honest fighters sometimes trade honesty for desperation, and it said everything about the round that he did not. He stepped in behind a double jab — the first double jab of his career thrown without a haymaker hiding behind it — and turned a left hook to her body and head in one motion, the hook climbing, the shot she had been waiting for all night in its final and most dangerous form. She caught it on the high guard, elbow tucked, shoulder rolled under it, and the force of it walked her back exactly one step, which she took cleanly and gave back within a breath, reclaiming her ground with a jab of her own that landed light and precise on his forehead, a punctuation mark rather than a blow. One step. In three rounds of boxing, against a puncher twenty-five years her junior, the sum total of the ground she surrendered was one step, taken and returned in the same exchange. Barlow, watching from the corner with his hands white on the ropes, thought of the tape at home in its archive box, and of the word the Swedish newspapers had chosen in 1998, and understood that the word had never been a nickname at all. It had been a scouting report.
She controlled the distance to the final bell the way she had controlled every distance of her life, by deciding where it would be and then being there first. In the last thirty seconds he pressed with everything left in him, not wildly now but earnestly, throwing in twos and threes, and she slipped and rolled and parried in her small geography at the centre of the ring, touching him with the jab whenever his enthusiasm carried him an inch too close, each touch a small act of administration: here, no further; here, and no further. The ten-second clapper sounded. He did not swing at it. She did not pose. They boxed, clean and close and professional, until the bell itself stepped between them, and then — before the referee could — they each took one step back and lowered their hands at the same moment, like two people setting down something heavy together.
The crowd was on its feet before the announcer had the card in his hand. It was an exhibition, and exhibitions are not supposed to produce verdicts that matter, but the conditions Greta had written in Diane Kowalski's office had included licensed scoring, because she had insisted that if it was worth doing it was worth doing properly, and so a proper verdict was read aloud into the loudest quiet the Northgate Athletic Club had ever held. The exhibition was scored for Greta Lindqvist, on control and clean work — the announcer read the phrase exactly as the judges had written it — and the room came apart in a noise that had nothing to do with humiliation and everything to do with witness. Dane Whitaker stood in the centre of it with his gloves still on and did something no one who knew him would have predicted a month earlier. He applauded her. With boxing gloves, which makes a poor, muffled, ridiculous sound, he stood in front of four hundred people and clapped for the woman who had beaten him, and kept clapping until his own corner, startled, joined in, and Rick Sorensen, after a visible internal negotiation, joined in too.