"The price of what?"
"Of being the kind of person who has to decide."
Brooke nodded slowly. The rain ran down her face and she did not wipe it.
"I keep thinking about what you said," she said. "That morning. Back up. I've played the video so many times I can hear it in my sleep. And I keep thinking, she gave me a chance. She told me exactly what to do and I didn't do it. If I'd just stepped back." She stopped. "My whole life, I think, I've never stepped back from anything. Not once. I always thought that meant I was strong. I'd just push and push and push until something gave. And something always did. Usually me." She laughed again, shakily. "My mom's making me see somebody. A counselor. Twice a week. I'm staying with her for a while. In the town I grew up in. I gave up the apartment. I gave the car back to Tyler. Well. To Tyler's assistant. Tyler's still in Miami." She shrugged. "He didn't call. Not once, the whole week. It was his assistant who texted to ask about the dent in the hood."
"I'm sorry," said Dara.
"Don't be. It's the best thing that's happened to me in two years." Brooke wiped her nose on the sleeve of her sweater. "I got a job. At a bakery in my hometown. Starting next week. It's mostly four a.m. bread. My mom says it'll be good for me. She says nobody has time to be dramatic at four a.m."
"She sounds smart."
"She works in a nursing home kitchen. She's the smartest person I know. I just didn't notice for about seven years." Brooke hesitated. "My account's still up. People keep messaging me. About the video. The hospital one. Thousands of them. People telling me about the worst day of their lives. I don't know what to do with it. I don't want to make money off it. That feels like doing the same thing all over again. But I don't want to just disappear either. Some of them don't have anyone else to tell."
Dara looked at her for a moment.
"Then don't disappear," she said. "Just tell them the truth. Like you did. Without the red." She paused. "And without the makeup, maybe. It's a better look on you."
Brooke laughed again, properly this time, a real laugh, and something in her small pale face seemed to open up, and for a moment, Theo, watching through the rain-streaked window of the convenience store, thought she looked like a completely different person from the woman who had climbed out of the orange car.
The pump clicked off. Dara looked at the screen. Twenty-one point zero gallons. A hundred and six dollars and four cents. A full tank.
"I'm going to show my grandmother that receipt," she said, mostly to herself, "and she's going to have a fit."
She hung up the nozzle. She closed the fuel door. And then she turned to face Brooke, and for a moment the two of them simply looked at each other across the wet asphalt, six feet apart, the tall young woman in the faded academy hoodie and the small young woman in the ankle brace and the big gray sweater.
"Good luck in Colorado," Brooke said.
"Good luck with the bread," said Dara.
And then, after a moment's hesitation, Dara stepped forward. One step. Then another. Across the line. And she held out her hand.
Brooke looked at it. Then she took it.
They shook hands in the rain at pump one, on the corner of Linwood and Fifth, at seven-forty-one in the morning, and inside the convenience store, behind the counter, in his too-big red polo shirt, Theo Navarro did not take out his phone. He did not even think about it. He just watched.
* * *
Nine days later, in a convention center in Colorado Springs, under a ceiling of white lights and in front of a crowd of eleven hundred people, Dara Whitfield stepped onto the mat for the final of the women's under sixty-seven kilogram division at the national team trials.
Her opponent was the girl from Texas. The one who had beaten her by a single point eleven months ago, on a kick Dara had seen coming and not moved away from fast enough. She was tall and fast and fearless and she had a long reach and a vicious spinning hook kick, and she came out of her corner at the referee's command like something fired from a gun.
Dara did not move.