She had thought about it, which surprised her. She had thought about it on the dawn walks to the club and over the quiet arithmetic of her bank statements, and she had thought about Stefan, which was the real examination any large question had to pass in her life. What settled it was not the money, which she did not need badly enough to lie for, nor the belt, which she had held better versions of and given back. It was the press conference in her memory, and Dane's prediction lying on the canvas where she had put it, and her own voice in her own head saying the truest thing she had said in public in thirty years: I came to be standing at the end. A career — even a small, late, exhibition career — is a machine for making a person stand in places she did not choose, on other people's evenings, until the standing itself becomes the job. She had done that job at twenty-four. She had buried the man who'd shared it with her at thirty-one. The woman she was now stood where she chose, and the choosing was the whole estate she had left boxing with, and she would not sell it back to boxing at any price a promoter could print. "No," she said, and when Rick began, courteously, to negotiate, she raised one hand — the left, the one that had kept the world at its proper distance for thirty years — and he stopped, because everyone in Port Ellery had seen the tape by then. "No, thank you. You may tell them the Wall is not for touring. She is load-bearing. She stays where she was built."
Diane signed the other document that afternoon, in her office, with the blind half-drawn against the harbour light, and of the two papers on the desk that day, the club's own history will record that the second was the one that mattered. The cleaning staff's contract review had been one of Greta's written conditions for the exhibition, drafted in a plain hand on plain paper: night rates for cleaning work at Northgate had not moved in six years; the review equalised them with the evening event staff, added the differential the night work had always plainly deserved, and set the whole schedule to be re-examined annually instead of whenever someone viral made it necessary. Diane had honoured the condition in the signing of the exhibition contract; she honoured it now in fact, with the club's accountant present and Big Eddie Pratt summoned from the equipment room to witness, because Eddie had cleaned Northgate for eleven years and a signature about cleaners ought, Diane said, to have a cleaner in the room. Eddie read the new rate twice. He looked at Greta. He looked at the ceiling, a man rearranging eleven years in his head. "Well," he said at last. "Man's going to be able to fix his truck." "You were always able to fix your truck, Eddie," said Diane. "Now I can pay somebody to fix my truck," said Eddie, with enormous dignity, "and watch." He shook Greta's hand with his whole arm in it, signed as witness in a hand like a fence being built, and went back to the equipment room whistling through his teeth.
The new schedule was pinned up in the cleaners' store room that night, beside the rota and the kettle, and it stayed there — nobody took it down, nobody wrote on it, which Eddie said was a first in the history of the store room wall. The two part-time lads who did weekends read it standing up, twice, the way men read weather charts before a crossing, and one of them, eventually, said the thing that would be quoted in the club for years, though he never knew it: "All that. For a mop." He had not seen the fight. He meant it as arithmetic. It served perfectly as history.