Noor sat up. Peter extended a hand to help her, then hesitated, remembering that she had helped Ben up and released Jonas as neatly as a person returning a borrowed tool. She took the offered hand anyway. His grip was careful.
"You saw the pass?" he asked.
"I saw you choose it," she said.
He considered that, still holding her hand a moment longer than assistance required. "I nearly had it."
"Yes," she said. "Nearly was where it happened."
Helen stepped between them with the finality of a referee closing a book. She looked at each of the three men in turn, and then at Noor.
"This is finished," she said. "No repetitions, no rematches, no commentary on the way to the door. The rules were set, they were followed, and the rounds are complete. Devon, the minutes will record the times and the techniques, with no adjectives." Her gaze travelled around the class. "And if anyone is tempted to describe this evening as something it was not, I suggest you remember that the most important skill demonstrated here was stopping."
Noor bowed to Peter, then to Helen. Her face was composed, but under the composure there was a fine tremor in her hands that she hid by gathering the hem of her borrowed gi and smoothing it once, twice, with unnecessary precision.
Fourteen years, and her body had remembered everything at the exact moment she would have preferred it to remember nothing.
Helen saw the tremor. She said nothing about it. She only lifted the stopwatch slightly, as if in salute, and turned to address the class.
The class ended the way classes at Cedarline usually ended, with Helen thanking everyone for their work and Ruth Calder reminding them, from the doorway, that monthly dues were not a suggestion. But nothing after the rounds was quite usual. People put away the loaner belts with excessive care. They folded towels that did not need folding. They found reasons to cross the mat slowly, as if the place where the three rounds had happened might still explain itself if approached at the right angle.
Noor went to the women's changing room before anyone could decide what to say to her.
She sat on the bench with her back against the lockers and untied the borrowed white belt with hands that had begun, belatedly, to shake. It angered her more than the questioning had. On the mat she had been exact. In the ordinary aftermath — wet hair at other women's shoulders, the smell of soap and damp cotton, someone's phone playing music too loudly from a gym bag — her body came back to her with all its news at once. Fourteen years. Divorce papers signed in spring. A new job in a school where the counsellor's office had a window that stuck. A town where the grocery clerk had already learned her face but not yet her name.
She pressed her palms flat against her thighs until the shaking became small enough to ignore.
"You all right in there?" Helen asked through the door.
"Yes."
"You sound like a person answering a roll call."
Noor almost smiled. "Then yes, present."
There was a pause. "Take your time," Helen said. "Nobody is waiting for a speech."
That was the kindest thing anyone had said all evening, because it gave Noor permission to be unremarkable again. She showered quickly, dressed in jeans and a dark sweater, and combed her hair with her fingers. When she came out, most of the class had gone. Maya Okafor remained by the cubbies, holding her white belt in both hands like something she had been entrusted with and was afraid of dropping.
"I wanted to say thank you," Maya said. "For the elbow thing. Earlier. I didn't know it would — I mean, I didn't think they would turn it into all that."
"It was a good elbow," Noor said. "It was only pointed in a direction your shoulder couldn't afford."
Maya laughed, startled. "Is that a compliment?"
"It is a correction. The compliment is that you listened the first time."
"Will you be here Thursday?"
Noor shouldered her bag. "I paid for a month."
It sounded, even to her, less like a promise than like an accounting entry. One month. Four weeks of fundamentals. A measurable amount of beginning again, after which she could decide whether Alder Creek was a place she lived or only a place she had landed.