She had tried to keep fencing after that spring. She had given it two more seasons, honest ones. But something in the calculus had changed โ not her feet, never her feet, but a half-beat of willingness somewhere behind the eyes, the tiny treason of expecting the light to stay dark. Etienne, who saw it before she did, had asked her what she wanted to be when she stopped being almost. A physio she knew from the national team had moved to Houston. The word Houston had sounded, to a woman sitting in the rain in Lyon with a broken body cord in her lap, like the name of a planet. She had come for a year. The year had become six.
"You're doing the face," Priya said. "The fifteen-fourteen face. I know that face. It means you're about to go and be alone with a ladder drill until you feel better, like a normal person with a hobby."
"I do not have a face."
"You have one face and it's usually excellent and right now it's the face. Come and eat lunch with actual humans. There's a place now, two streets over, they do aโ"
"Thursday," Sabine said, and stood, and offered Priya a hand up, which Priya took with the theatrical grunt of a woman half her actual strength. "Thursday I will eat lunch with actual humans and you may tell me about carbohydrates. Today I have the beginners at eleven, and Vic wants me for something at ten. He used the word 'exciting' in a message. Vic has never used the word exciting. I believe someone may have stolen his telephone."
Vic's office was a converted store room with a window cut into its door at exactly the height of Vic's eyes when standing, which he claimed was for safety and everyone else understood was so that fighters could see him seeing them before they knocked. Carla was already there when Sabine arrived, tablet in hand, and Dana Whitfield was there too, which explained the word exciting and possibly also the theft of Vic's telephone, because Dana Whitfield was not a person who appeared in small rooms without consequences following her in like staff.
Dana was forty-six, the regional promoter whose cards filled the mid-size arenas between Houston and Baton Rouge, and she had the promoter's particular gift of making everyone in a conversation feel that money was a form of affection she was personally prepared to show them. She knew every fighter in the club by name, record, and marketable angle, and she knew Sabine โ everyone in the sport's small Texas world knew Sabine, in the way people know a curious fact: the fencing lady at Bayou City, the French coach, one touch from the Olympics, teaches the big boys to dance.
"Coach Renaud," Dana said, rising, shaking her hand with both of hers. "The most underused asset in this building. I say it every time."
"You say it to Vic," Sabine said, "in the hope of a discount."
"I say it because it's true. Discounts are separate. Sit, sit โ Vic has news and I have a chequebook and Carla has the face of a woman who has already done all the actual work, so this will be a short meeting."
Carla, without looking up, said, "Circle Night. Three weeks from Saturday. It's in the calendar."
It had been in the calendar, in fact, for two months, in the unglamorous way of good ideas: the club's annual charity night, when Bayou City opened its doors to the neighbourhood, ran demonstration bouts and games and a raffle, sold too many hot dogs from a grill in the loading bay, and gave the whole of the proceeds to the women's self-defence programme that Carla ran out of the club on Sunday mornings โ free classes, forty women a week, in the hall that the fighters vacated. Sabine taught the movement module of that programme herself: how to stand, how to turn, how to be suddenly and unhelpfully elsewhere. It was, although she would not have used the words, the work in the building she was proudest of.
"This year," Vic said, "we're making the Circle the headline." He said it the way a man announces a menu change in a restaurant he has run for decades: bravely, and watching for the flinch.