He took his face off the website banner and replaced it with a photo of the youth class, twenty kids in white gis lined up on the mat, Lily front and center with her gap-toothed grin. He started a Wednesday night class that he called Fundamentals, for adults who had never trained before and were nervous about it, and he made a rule that nobody in the class was allowed to go harder than fifty percent, ever, for any reason. The first night, four people showed up. By May there were thirty.
He sat Brad down and they had a long conversation. Brad apologized for posting the video. Damien told him he didn't need to.
"You didn't do anything," Damien said. "I did. The camera just showed it."
Brad looked like he wanted to cry. "I was laughing, man. The whole time. I was laughing."
"So was I. Right up until I wasn't."
He also called his father.
It was the hardest phone call he had ever made, and it went exactly as badly as he had expected. Richard Cole had watched the video, and the apology video, and he had a great deal to say about both of them. He said the first one had embarrassed the whole family. He said the second one was worse. He said that a man who goes on the internet and cries about his feelings was no son of his. He said a lot of things.
Damien listened to all of it without interrupting. When his father finally ran out of breath, Damien said, "Dad, I love you. I'm going to keep calling you every Sunday. You can pick up or not. That's up to you."
Then he hung up.
His father did not pick up the next Sunday. Or the one after that.
On the third Sunday, he did. He didn't say much. He asked about the gym. He asked about Megan. He asked, gruffly, whether the arm was all right. And at the end, just before he hung up, there was a long pause, and Richard Cole said, "That old man. He could've broken it, couldn't he."
"Yeah, Dad. He could have."
Another pause.
"Well," his father said. "I'm glad he didn't."
It was not an apology. It was not anything close to one. But it was something, and Damien sat in his truck in the gym parking lot for a long time after the line went dead, holding the phone in both hands.
* * *
In the middle of April, Curtis called.
"They want to talk," he said.
"Who?"
"The promotion. The big one. They've watched the apology video. They've talked to people in Odessa. Somebody from their PR department apparently called that diner and talked to a waitress for forty-five minutes. Whatever she said, it must have been good, because they're back at the table."
Damien sat down on the edge of the ring apron.
"What's the offer?"
"Four fights. They want you on a card in Houston in September. Against a guy named Marcus Oyelaran. He's ranked eleventh. He's very, very good, Damien. He's a better wrestler than you and he hits like a truck. They're not handing you a soft one."
"I don't want a soft one."
Curtis laughed. "Yeah. I figured you'd say that."
* * *
Dominic came back through Odessa on the second Tuesday in May.
He had not planned to. He had been routed out of Dallas with a load of building supplies headed for Tucson, and he could just as easily have taken Interstate 10 the whole way. But somewhere around Abilene he found himself thinking about the cracked mug, and about Sarah, and about the forty dollars he had left on a table and the way she had looked at him when he walked out into the rain. And without quite deciding to, he took the split for Interstate 20 instead.
He pulled into the gravel lot behind O'Malley's a little after eleven.
The neon sign was still half-dead. The bell over the door had been fixed. When he pushed it open, it gave one clean, cheerful chime, and every head in the diner turned toward him.
Sarah dropped her order pad.
"Well, I'll be," she said. "Dom Hayes."
"Evening, Sarah."
She came around the counter faster than he had ever seen her move and threw her arms around him. He stood there stiffly for a moment, not used to it, and then put one hand on her back and patted it twice.
"Look at you," she said, pulling back and holding him at arm's length. "You look better. You look like you've been sleeping."
"Some," he admitted.
"Sit down. Sit down. I've got something for you."
He went to his booth. The back corner. Wall behind him, door in front. It had been wiped clean and there was a little folded paper sign on the table that said, in Sarah's handwriting, RESERVED.
"You reserved my booth?"
"Every Tuesday since March," Sarah said. "Never know when you'll come through."
She reached under the counter and came back with the white mug. The crack ran down from the rim like a thin dark river, sealed with a bead of glue. She set it in front of him and filled it with black coffee, and some of it leaked very slightly through the crack and pooled at the base, and neither of them said anything about it.
"Thank you, Sarah."
"Don't thank me yet. Look who else is here."
Dominic looked up.
At the counter, two stools down from an old man in a Carhartt jacket, Damien Cole had turned around and was looking at him.
He was wearing a plain T-shirt and jeans. No Ironclad logo anywhere. There was a fork in his hand with a bite of scrambled egg still on it, and he seemed to have forgotten it was there.
For a long second, neither of them moved.
Then Damien set the fork down, got up off his stool, walked over to the corner booth, and held out his hand.