Brooke stared at her.
"Out," Dara said again, quietly. "Like you're blowing out a candle. Go on."
Brooke breathed out. A long, shuddering, stuttering breath. It hurt. Then something in her chest seemed to release, like a fist uncurling, and the next breath came in on its own, deep and full, and then another, and her shoulders dropped, and she was breathing.
"There," Dara said. "You got the wind knocked out of you. Your diaphragm locked up. That's all. It feels like dying. It isn't. It'll pass in a minute." She looked at the woman's face, her eyes, the color in her cheeks, with an expression that Brooke would later describe to a therapist as the most frightening kind of kindness she had ever seen, because it was completely professional. "Are you hurt anywhere else? Your back? Your head? Did you hit your head on the car?"
Brooke shook her head. Then she nodded. Then she shook it again. She did not know.
"Your ankle," Dara said, looking down. "You rolled it. Can you move your foot? Move your toes for me."
Brooke moved her toes inside the pointed red shoe. It hurt, but they moved.
"Okay." Dara nodded. "Probably a sprain. Ice it. Keep it up. If it swells a lot, get it looked at." She sat back on her heels in the puddle and looked at the woman in front of her, and for the first time, something moved in her face. Something that was not professional at all. "You can't pull on a gas nozzle like that," she said, and her voice was not quite as steady as it had been. "Not with it running. Not ever. You could have sprayed it all over yourself. All over that car. That engine's still hot. I could smell it. You understand? You could have—"
She stopped. She did not finish the sentence. She did not need to.
Brooke looked over Dara's shoulder at the side of the gray SUV, at the splash of gasoline still running in thin rainbow streaks down the paint below the fuel door, and at the wider sheen of it on the wet asphalt beneath, oily and iridescent, spreading out slowly into the rainwater in swirls of purple and green and gold. She looked at the orange car behind her, its hood dented where she had sat on it, the heat still shimmering faintly above its engine cover. She smelled it. The gasoline. Sharp and sweet and sickening in the cold air.
And she understood. All at once, and completely. What she had done. What she had nearly done. What the tall woman in leather had stopped.
She put her face in her hands and began to cry.
Not the ninety-second kind. Not the efficient, private, controlled kind that she had perfected over two years in other people's bathrooms. The other kind. The kind she had not let herself do since she was a child. Huge, helpless, heaving sobs that shook her whole small body and came up from somewhere so deep that she could not have stopped them if she had tried, and she did not try. She knelt on the wet asphalt of a gas station on the corner of Linwood and Fifth, in front of a stranger, in the rain, in a red faux-leather skirt with her mascara running down her face in black rivers, and she cried as if her heart were breaking, because it was.
Dara did not know what to do.
She knew how to handle a winded opponent. She knew how to check for a concussion and tape a sprained ankle and talk someone through a panic attack in the warm-up area before a final. She had done all of those things. She did not know what to do with a stranger in red crying like this at her feet. So she did the only thing she could think of, which was nothing. She stayed where she was, kneeling in the puddle, and did not leave. And after a moment, without quite deciding to, she reached out and put one hand on the small woman's bare, wet, shaking shoulder, and left it there.
That was the image that Theo Navarro's phone captured at the forty-first second, before his hand finally dropped and the recording stopped. Two young women kneeling on the wet black asphalt of a gas station in the rain, one in red and one in black and brown, one crying with her face in her hands and the other with her hand on her shoulder, beside the dented hood of a bright orange supercar. It was not the image that would go around the world. That image came eight seconds earlier. But it was the one Theo would remember.
The door of the convenience store banged open.