"I wouldn't dare," he said, and went back into his office, and shut the door, and Dee heard the phone begin ringing almost at once, the first of what would be a great many calls, and she felt the whole large machinery of the thing begin to move, the way she had felt, at twenty-six, a different machinery begin to move in a hospital corridor in Albuquerque, and she put her hand for a second flat against the corridor wall, painted the particular grey-green that she herself had chosen from a chart three summers ago because it did not show the scuffs, and breathed.
"You're really doing it," Jenna said.
"I'm really doing it," Dee said. "Once. Properly. With Sam in the middle and a doctor's signature and rules read out loud like a fire drill. And then I am going back to my life, which I like, in case anybody asks you."
"Can I ask you something, though?" Jenna fell into step beside her, down the corridor toward the light coming through the high windows over the main hall, where the mats lay empty and shining from Dee's own work in the night. "That list. The scholarship, the cleaners, all of it. Did you write that list for them, or did you write it so that you'd be able to stand yourself if you lost?"
Dee considered it honestly, because Jenna had earned honest answers by bringing coffee at dawn and never once, in two years of friendship, asking Dee a single question about the other night that began with the words seven seconds.
"Both," she said. "A thing can be true for two reasons. That's most things, in my experience. Come on. If I'm a main event now, I suppose I have to train like one, and main events, I am told, do not get to go home and sleep through the morning like sensible women."
Yusuf Adeyemi arrived at four in the morning on the third day after the signing, carrying his own keys, which he had never surrendered in the nine years since he stopped coaching wrestling at Copperline, and a canvas bag that Dee recognised, with a small lurch of something she refused to call sentiment, as older than Jenna.
"You asked Simon if you could watch," she said, unlocking the side door for a man who had a key. "You didn't ask me if you could corner."
"I am asking now." He stepped into the dark of the hall and stood still, the way old coaches stand in rooms they used to run, not looking around so much as listening to the room report itself: the mats, the bags, the faint tick of the heating, the smell of disinfectant and canvas and old effort that no cleaning ever quite removed and that Dee, who had tried professionally for six years, no longer wished to remove. "I watched the other night from the back, Dolores. I have watched you at dawn, on and off, for perhaps four years, through that door, and gone away again because a woman training alone at dawn is a woman who has arranged to be alone, and I respected the arrangement. Now the arrangement has changed. Now there is a bout, with a referee and a doctor and a crowd, and a young man who will spend every day between now and then learning how to hurt the thing you did. You should not prepare for that alone, out of habit. Habit is not the same as wisdom. I learned that at sixty, which is later than I recommend."
"I never asked you because you weren't my coach," Dee said. "You were the wrestling coach. I was a judoka. Different rooms."
"I was not your coach," Yusuf agreed. "I am not offering to become your coach in the time remaining; you are forty-eight and fully formed, and a coach who arrives at the end and claims the work is a thief. I am offering to corner. A corner is a smaller and more honest job. A corner watches the other man. A corner says true things between rounds in a voice that does not panic. A corner holds the towel and means the towel." He set his bag down. "I know about towels. And I know Sam Whitaker, and I know Eddie Krol, and I know what a frightened champion looks like in the second minute when his plan has finished. May I corner?"