"She helped me write a list of conditions. You're the one calling it a contract because you want a signature at the bottom of it." Dee folded her hands in her lap. Her hands were the oldest-looking part of her, she had always thought, older than her face, the knuckles thickened by years of gripping cloth and canvas and, long before that, other people's jackets. "I want to be clear about something, Simon, because I think you may have misunderstood why I'm sitting here. I am not doing this because I need the room to know who I was. I know who I was. I am not doing it because I need Blake Rennert to respect me. He can respect me or not, the way the weather can rain or not, and I will still be at work at ten o'clock. I am doing it because the other night a room full of people watched a man laugh at a woman with a mop in her hand, and then watched that woman put him on the mat in seven seconds, and half of them have decided the lesson is that I am secretly remarkable. I am not secretly remarkable. I am a woman who trained for ten years and kept training, quietly, for twenty more, and who cleans this building because cleaning is honest work that pays a rent. If there is going to be a second bout, and cameras, and a crowd, then it is going to stand for something true, and the true thing is not me. The true thing is that the people nobody in this building looks at are people. The cleaners. The beginners who come in frightened at thirty-five with bad knees and a Groupon. The kids ageing out of the youth classes whose parents' money runs out in the same month their talent arrives. That is what my conditions are about."
Simon was quiet for a long moment. He turned the paper around and read condition four a third time, and Dee watched him do the arithmetic that had nothing to do with numbers.
"The cleaning review," he said. "You know that's the one that's going to cost me the most. Not the money. The admitting."
"I know."
"You could have just asked for a raise for yourself. It would have been simpler. I would have said yes before you finished the sentence, after the other night. Any owner in New Mexico would."
"I know that too." She smiled, just a little, for the first time that morning. "That's why I didn't ask for it that way. A raise for me, quietly, after I embarrassed your champion on camera, isn't respect. That's a payment for going away. The three women and two men who clean this building with me have never put anybody on a mat in their lives, and they are owed the same review I am. If you want my name on your poster, Simon, that's the price of it. Not me being noble. Me being accurate."
"Sam Whitaker," he said at last. "He'll want paying properly."
"Pay him properly, then."
"And the doctor can't be—" He stopped. "All right. The doctor can't be ours. I'll find one in Las Cruces if I have to." He drew the folder toward him and began, with the air of a man signing up for weather he could see coming, to write in the margin of her sheet, in his small, neat owner's hand: Accepted, then the date, then his initials. "Eddie Krol is going to have a stroke about the marketing condition. Blake's manager is going to have two."
"Then they'll be glad of the medicals," Dee said, and Simon laughed before he could stop himself, a short surprised sound, and shook his head.
"When did you get funny, Dee?"
"I've always been funny. You have to be on the mats at four in the morning or on a shift at midnight to hear it. That's rather the point of condition four."
He signed the club's copy. She signed beneath him, her signature unhurried and completely legible, Dolores Marenco, the same hand she used on delivery notes and time sheets and, once a year, on Carla's birthday card, which she always signed with her full name as a joke between them because Carla claimed no other mother in the world signed a birthday card like a legal document. Then Simon stood and held out his hand, and she stood and shook it, and neither of them made a speech.
Jenna was waiting in the corridor pretending not to wait, holding Dee's coffee gone cold and her own gone colder. She looked from one face to the other. "Well?"
"Well," Simon said, "your friend drives a harder bargain than any manager I've dealt with in twenty years, and that includes the man currently representing my champion." He looked at Dee with something that was not quite ruefulness. "Four in the morning, she said you train. If I'm paying for a main event, I suppose I ought to come and watch my investment train at least once."
"You'd be welcome," Dee said. "Bring your own coffee. And Simon. Four in the morning is when the building is mine. You can watch. You can't advise."