She looked into the camera, and it seemed, for a moment, as if she were looking straight through it, past the panel, into the lake cabin, at Dara.
"Please don't take the trials away from her because of me," she said. "I've taken enough things from enough people already this week."
Then she reached forward and her square went dark.
The panel deliberated for forty minutes, off camera. Dara sat at the kitchen table in the borrowed blazer and did not move. Coach Imura made tea and she did not drink it. Her grandmother did not say a word. Jasmine sat on the porch steps outside with her knees pulled up to her chin, watching the lake.
At ten-forty, the screen came back on, and Dr. Angela Ruiz looked into the camera over the top of her reading glasses and read, in a dry, careful, official voice, a statement. The committee had reviewed all available evidence. The committee found that the athlete's actions on the date in question were taken in response to an immediate risk of serious harm to herself and to others, that the force used was proportionate and the minimum reasonably available, and that the athlete had ceased all physical contact as soon as the risk was removed and had thereafter rendered aid. The committee found no violation of section eleven of the athlete code of conduct. The provisional suspension was lifted, effective immediately. The athlete's entry in the national team trials was reinstated.
And then Dr. Ruiz took off her reading glasses and set them down on the table in front of her, and spoke in a different voice entirely.
"Ms. Whitfield," she said. "Off the record. I fought for this country at two Olympic Games. I've been on this committee for eleven years. And I want you to know that I have never in my life seen anyone throw a kick with more discipline than that one." She paused. "Go to Colorado Springs. And for heaven's sake, do it in the ring this time."
Behind Dara, against the wall, out of view of the camera, Odessa Whitfield made a small sound and put her hand over her mouth under her church hat, and Coach Imura, without turning around, reached back and took her other hand and held it.
Dara did not cry. Not then. She said thank you to the panel, very politely, in a steady voice, the way she said thank you to referees after a fight she had won. She closed the laptop. She stood up and took off Jasmine's too-short blazer and folded it carefully over the back of the chair. And then she walked out of the cabin and down the slope and onto the dock at the edge of the lake, alone, and stood at the very end of it in the cold bright morning, looking out at the water, where the mist had all burned off and the far shore was perfectly clear, every pine and every rock, and she cried there, where nobody could see, for a long time. Ninety seconds. Then much longer than that.
* * *
They met again at the gas station on the corner of Linwood and Fifth, two days later, on the morning Dara flew to Colorado.
It was Theo who arranged it. Brooke had sent him a message the night after the hearing, a short one, which he read eleven times before he answered. She had found his account through the video. She wanted to thank him. And she wanted to know, if it was not too strange a thing to ask, whether he knew how to reach Dara Whitfield, because Brooke did not want to message her out of nowhere, did not want to be one more stranger in her inbox, but there was something she wanted to say to her in person, if Dara would let her, and only if Dara would let her.
Theo did not know how to reach Dara Whitfield. But Mr. Farouk did. Mr. Farouk had known Dara since she was twelve years old and had her grandmother's phone number on a sticky note on the side of the cash register, from the time years ago when Odessa had left her wallet on the counter and he had called her to come and get it. And Mr. Farouk, it turned out, now had Theo's phone number too, because on the afternoon after the full video went around the world, Theo had finally walked back into the convenience store with his folded résumé in his hoodie pocket, and put it on the counter, and said, I'd like to apply for the job in the window, sir. And Mr. Farouk had looked at the résumé, and then looked at Theo for a long time over the top of his thick glasses, and said, you're the boy who filmed it. And Theo had said yes. And Mr. Farouk had