He passed Greta sometimes on those mornings, going out as she was settling the training room after class, bucket in hand for the one floor of the building that was indisputably hers alone. He had learned to greet her the way the building now greeted her: by name first, and as the senior professional in any room they shared. "Morning, champion," he would say, and step aside — he always stepped aside now, theatrically nowhere, just a working man's half-step out of a working woman's path — and she would nod, and once, in April, she answered him in kind, which the harbour pilot swore later she had not imagined. "Morning, student," said Greta Lindqvist, and Dane Whitaker went out into the morning grinning like a man who had been promoted.
On Thursday nights she cleaned the whole club still, and the club, which had briefly not known how to behave around her, had settled into the correct behaviour, which was the old behaviour improved by attention: Eddie left her the corridor wall for the end of her shift without being asked, the way colleagues save each other the good task; the night staff said her name to her face; and the young fighters coming out of late sessions had acquired, as if by osmosis from their champion, the habit of moving their kit bags out of her path before she reached them. Once, a new boy — nineteen, all elbows and apology — had tried to take the mop from her hands entirely, out of a chivalry he had clearly rehearsed, and she had received it the way she received overcommitted punches, by letting it pass and keeping her ground. "It is my mop," she had said, not unkindly. "Yours is your career. Hold your guard higher in the second round on Saturday. Barlow is too polite to tell you it drops." He had stared. Then he had gone away and held his guard higher, and won, and told the story on himself for a month.
The class ended at eight. The women showered, or rushed for buses and wards and boats, and the training room emptied the way rooms do, in laughter and forgotten water bottles, and Greta stayed, as she always stayed, to put it right. She stacked the pads. She hung the spare wraps. She fetched her mop and her bucket from the store cupboard — her name, these days, was on the rota in two places, teacher and cleaner, in Diane's handwriting, at the same height — and she mopped her own classroom floor, unhurried, in the long gold light coming off the harbour, working the water in the old pattern Stefan had never seen and would instantly have understood: corner to centre, centre to door, the floor given back its own reflection a metre at a time. She had been asked, by then, by journalists and new members and once by a documentary researcher who had driven down from Seattle, what it had all meant — the shove, the clip, the three rounds, the wall — as if a life were a sentence that could be punctuated on request. She had her answer ready, the one she had given Barlow in a corridor thirty years and one ocean from where she first understood it, and it was not about the twenty-one fights, or the one night in October, or the photograph hanging level on the wall downstairs. A wall is not admired for standing, she told them. Anyone's wall can stand; standing is just the shape of it. A wall is admired for what it shelters. And on the good mornings now — which is to say, most mornings — she could look at the room she had just taught in, at the mats where nine women were learning where they stood, at her daughter's wraps drying on the rail, at the harbour going about its enormous business beyond the glass, and know the whole inventory of the shelter by heart: a classroom, a pay schedule, a girl who gave ground at full price, an old man with his tapes, a young one learning to keep his hands up and his predictions to himself, and one clean floor, hers, swept and mopped and standing open behind her like water settling — calm, and level, and ready for whoever came next.