Everyone looked at him.
"You corrected Maya's elbow in one sentence, and she kept the correction for the rest of the class," he said. "The rounds only proved you could fight. We have people who can fight." He nodded toward the letter in her hands. "We are short of people who can see. I checked, afterwards. There are four beginners this autumn who stopped coming to other clubs because their first month made them feel like frauds for not already knowing things. We lose them quietly. You would not."
It was, Helen thought, the most Peter-like contribution possible: an apology that had gone away and done research.
Noor looked down at the table for a while. Through the floor came the muffled, rhythmic sounds of the evening's first class arriving — bags dropped, the zip of the mat room door, somebody laughing at the ordinary volume of people who believed the room they were entering was safe. She had come to Alder Creek for a counsellor's office with a sticking window and an apartment full of boxes, and the town kept handing her its unlabelled contents.
"If I consider it," she said, "it will be under conditions. Written ones. Mine."
"Name the day," Helen said, "and bring them. The board will read them as carefully as Peter writes."
"Thursday," Noor said. "I'll give you my answer Thursday."
She stood then, and the three men stood with her — not in unison, they were not quite that rehearsed, but in a ragged, genuine sequence that ended with Ben holding the office door and Jonas moving Devon's crate out of her path with his foot. She thanked the board for its time with the formality of a woman leaving a meeting she had not asked for and had, in the end, not been diminished by.
At the door she paused. On the table by the minutes lay a blank intake form, the new draft Ruth had printed for item five. Previous training? it asked, in the same innocent type as before.
Noor picked it up. She read the line for a moment, and something crossed her face that none of them, later, could agree on a word for — not amusement, not quite; perhaps the expression of a person watching an old locked door and realising that this time, she was standing on the side with the handle.
"Thursday," she said again, and took the form with her down the stairs.
Noor brought her conditions to Cedarline on a single sheet of paper, folded once, the creases worn soft from being opened and closed in her kitchen. She had written them after supper the night before, with the board's invitation lying beside a cooling cup of tea and her unpacked boxes still stacked against the wall. The words were plain because she wanted no one to be able to pretend later that they had misunderstood her. If she taught the First Month class, she would teach it her way: slowly, honestly, and with the tap treated not as an embarrassment but as the first language every beginner learned to speak.
Helen read the sheet standing by the whiteboard, while Ruth Calder kept a pencil poised over the co-op ledger and Devon Achebe waited with the minute book open. Ben, Jonas and Peter sat on the edge of the mat in ordinary clothes, not gis, because Noor had asked that the conversation happen without costume. It was a small thing and not a small thing. Without the black belts at their waists they looked like three men who had come to ask a favour, which, Helen thought, was exactly what they were doing.
The first condition was intake honesty. From now on, if Noor taught beginners, the paper form would be read aloud by whoever welcomed a new student, and the line about previous training would be treated as medical information rather than gossip. "Write your real history," Noor said. "If you have trained, write it. If you have not trained for twenty years, write that too. If you do not wish to explain why, leave the why blank. But nobody here will use a person's history as a target." She looked at no one in particular, which made the sentence land on everyone.