"Miss Callen," Hargrove said, wasting nothing. "I am calling in an official capacity and also not. The panel has my report. You will have my report described to you by people who will make it sound like a love letter. It is not a love letter. It is an account of a plate. Are you listening?"
"Yes, Chief."
"In the autumn you will be shot at by every coach in the state in the form of advice. They will want to rebuild your position. They will want to modernise your equipment. They will want to give you a routine with a name. Some of it you should take. You are twenty-three and your left side tires at a rate that will cost you in a long match, and that is work, and work is honest, and you should do it. But I have put one sentence in my report in the place where panels cannot pretend not to have read it, and I am calling to tell you the sentence personally, so that if it is ever misquoted to you you will know the original. The sentence is: Do not coach the looking out of her." There was a pause, of the kind he specialised in, which had silence on both sides of it like bookends. "I watched Tom teach you to look at one thing. I did not understand, for thirty years, that he was not teaching you a trick for a target. He was teaching you how to remain the person doing the thing while the thing was being done to you by an audience. Guard it. That is all. Your mother tells me Thursday's menu is a disgrace and she is not responsible for it, which I believe, as I believe everything she tells me. Good day, Miss Callen. Shoot well, and write your scores down in ink."
"Chief—" Willa said, and found the line already cooling into silence, and stood in the kitchen holding a dead receiver, laughing and stung and entirely awake, while Rose, at the counter, said without turning round, "He is exactly like your father, only with better trousers. Those men think a compliment should be issued like a licence, one per lifetime, framed by refusal. Sit down and eat something before the autumn, you're wasting away at a rate that will be in his next report."
Danny Mercer waited a week, which everyone who knew him agreed was the most disciplined thing he had ever done, and then he did not telephone and he did not send a message through his coach. He drove out to the range on a plain weekday morning when there were no banners up and no crowd, only the caretaker's truck and the mountains being indifferent at the correct distance, and he found Willa where she would predictably be found, at the far end of the covered stand, cleaning the old wooden rifle at a bench with her father's notebook open beside her, held down against the small desert wind by a chipped mug.
He stood in the doorway of the stand with the sun behind him, as he had stood on the morning of the final, and this time there was no rifle in his hands and no smile prepared on his face, and Willa looked up and understood at once, from the plainness of him, that the conversation was going to cost him something real and that the decent thing was to let it cost exactly that and no more.
"I practised what to say in the truck," Danny said. "It was good. It had parts."
"Do you want to use it?"
"No. It sounded like my coach wrote it and my father paid him." He came a step into the shade. He was in a plain shirt, done up, and jeans, and he looked younger without the performance and also, somehow, less finished, like a scorecard before the totals. "I want to say the walk part. When we were walking back from the plate, Sheriff Grant ahead with his clipboard and Hargrove saying things about his jacket, and you were still standing there at the line because nobody had told you you could stop. I kept thinking, she stood like that the whole time. Not just the shooting. The waiting. I have never waited for anything in my life without checking who was watching me wait. You know what I did while they were measuring? I tried to remember if I'd ever once, in a final, not known where the cameras were." He turned his cap in his hands, a gesture borrowed from men older than him. "I couldn't remember one time."
Willa set the cloth down. She had been braced, in the days since, for two kinds of Danny: the Danny of the apology tour, saying large things into microphones, and the Danny of resentment, explaining to interviewers that the light, the wind, the plate, the history, anything, had conspired. She had prepared faces for both of them. She had not prepared a face for a Danny who had come alone to tell her what he had noticed about himself, accurately, in the shade of an empty stand.
"That's a hard thing to know about yourself," she said, carefully.
"It is a hard thing to know at twenty-seven in a truck. My dad—" He stopped, and restarted on a different road, which she recognised, because it was what she did with her own father, whose memory could derail any sentence that approached it at speed. "My dad rang that night. After. He said the association would be mad to overlook commercial considerations. He had a phrase for you. I won't repeat it. I told him if he said it again I'd—" He shook his head. "I didn't finish that sentence either. On the phone. To him. So I am not here being brave, exactly. I'm here being next." He looked, directly, at the rifle. "I want to train. Not be seen training. Train. Standing. Your way, the looking thing, if you'll teach it and if teaching it doesn't—" He wrestled the sentence to its end with visible effort. "I am asking, Willa. Not assuming. I know what I did with that rifle at the start of the day and I know it is on film and I know an apology that costs a man nothing is just a noise. So. Is there a version of this where I come here on weekday mornings and you teach me to stand and I shut up and hold a position until you say?"