"Alana," she said.
Alana looked at her.
Britney's face was gray and streaked and swollen. Her white ribbon was gone. She looked about twelve years old.
"I'm sorry," she whispered. "I'm so sorry. About the crutches. About all of it. I'm sorry."
Alana looked at her for a moment. She thought about the hallway. She thought about charity program, and free crutches, and the laugh. She found that she did not know what she felt about it. She found she did not have to know yet.
"Go get your X-ray," she said. "We'll talk later."
Britney nodded, and closed her eyes, and they wheeled her away.
When Alana turned back, her father was crouched beside her on the mat.
They looked at each other for a long moment. Neither of them said anything. Up close, she could see how tired he was, the gray in his face and the red rims of his eyes, and the little nick on his jaw where he had shaved in a hurry in an airport bathroom at five in the morning. He was looking at her the way he had looked at her across the kitchen table eleven weeks ago, when he told her about the orders. Careful. Unsure. Waiting.
"You were here," she said at last. "The whole time. The coin toss. That was you."
"That was me."
"You flew back this morning. You went to the school. You talked to the principal." It was not a question. She had worked it out in the last ten minutes, piece by piece, kneeling on the mat. "And you didn't tell me. You told me to act like nothing happened. And you were already—"
"I know."
"You said you'd let me handle it."
"I know. I did." He paused. "You handled it, Lani. All day. The steps, the hallway, the video, lunch. The screenshots. The girl who saw. You did all of it. I just made sure the people in charge were looking while you did." He looked at her ankle in its brace, and then back up at her face. "And then you went over that railing on one foot. Which I did not plan for. Which your mother is going to have a great deal to say about."
Alana felt her eyes fill, suddenly and completely, with no warning at all. She was furious with them. Number six. Not in the building. She was not in a building. She was in a stadium. In front of three thousand people.
"I'm so mad at you," she said, and her voice cracked straight down the middle.
"I know, baby."
"I'm so mad at you," she said again, and then she put her arms around his neck and her face into the shoulder of his dress blue jacket, where it smelled of airplane and starch and him, and held on, and he put his big arms around her on the blue mat under the white lights at Cross Field, very carefully, the way you hold something you are afraid of breaking, and held on too.
In the stands, somebody started to clap. And then somebody else. Alana did not hear it. She did not care.
Then there were quick footsteps on the track, and a voice said, "Alana Grace Johnson," in a tone that every child of a nurse in America would have recognized instantly, and Alana lifted her head, and there was her mother, coming through the gate at the end of the field with Alana's crutches in one hand and her purse in the other and her reading glasses on top of her head, with an expression that was fury and terror and pride all at once, and behind her mother, a little way back on the track, holding his helmet, still in his pads, having somehow got himself onto the wrong side of the field during halftime, Jake Martinez, grinning like an idiot.
"Over a railing," said Renée Johnson. "Over a six-foot railing. On a sprained ankle. Have you lost your mind?"
"Hi, Mama."
"Don't you hi Mama me." Renée dropped to her knees on the mat and began, without asking, to undo the straps of Alana's ankle brace with quick, expert fingers. "Let me see it. Malcolm, did you let her—"
"I was on the other side of the field, Renée."
"You were on the other side of the field for her whole life, that's not an excuse." Renée looked at the ankle. It had swollen again, badly, purple and tight. She pressed it gently with two fingers and Alana hissed. Renée sighed. "Well. That's another week. At least." She looked up at her daughter. Her eyes were wet. "That was a very good splint, baby."
"Thank you, Mama."
"I'm still going to kill you."
"I know."
Behind them, at the end of the bench, Madison Cross was sitting alone.