"And the next year?" Jenna asked.
"The next year was the second step. Nearly. I was beaten in the final by two penalties and a yuko, and I have replayed that final perhaps four hundred times in my life, most of them while mopping, and I have never once found the version where I win it without being a different and worse person to do it. She was better. Fine. Silver. Then the year after that, the year I was supposed to go for the gold properly, with a sponsor, a small one, a car dealership in Albuquerque that put my name on a banner the size of a bed sheet—" Dee stopped. Yusuf, sitting very still on the other side of her, did not prompt. The heating ticked.
"That was the year your mum got ill," Jenna said quietly.
"That was the year my mother got ill," Dee said. "Strokes are not dramatic in the way people expect, or not only dramatic. The first one was small. She called me herself, from the kitchen floor, very cross, because she had been reaching for the kettle, she said, and the floor had come up and hit her, and would I come home because the floor was behaving strangely. I drove four hours with my kit bag still in the car. The second one, six weeks later, was not small." She turned the water bottle in her hands. "There was money, or the lack of it, and there was the care, and there was a choice that was not really a choice, although people who love you will spend years trying to present it to you as a choice so that you don't have to carry it. The sponsorship paid for travel if I kept placing. The national squad wanted a commitment I could not give from a bedside and a night shift. I was twenty-six. I told my coach I was taking a season out. Everybody, including me, used those words. A season out. I have been taking a season out for twenty-two years."
"Do you hate it?" Jenna said. "Sorry. Do you resent—"
"I know what you asked. No." Dee shook her head slowly. "I grieved it. Grief is different from resentment; resentment has an address, it wants somebody to be at fault. Nobody was at fault. My mother did not choose her arteries. I did not choose to be the only child within four hours' drive. The sport did not choose to be poor, which is what nobody tells you about judo, it is a rich person's hobby wearing a poor person's clothes, and when the money goes, the mat goes with it, because the mat is never just a mat, it is travel and entries and a physio and time, time most of all, and time was the thing I had run out of first."
"But you kept training," Jenna said. "That's the bit the canteen can't understand. If it was over, why dawn, why alone, why four a.m. in an empty club for years and years when nobody was coming to give you anything for it?"
"Because it was never only for what it gave me." Dee stood, because sitting still with that particular sentence was harder than moving with it, and Jenna and Yusuf stood with her, in the instinctive courtesy of training partners. "At first, after my mother died, because that came three years later and nobody should think this story hurries, at first I trained because the hour before dawn was the only hour that was entirely mine and my body was the only thing in my life that did exactly what I asked it. Then Carla. I was pregnant at twenty-four, in the middle of all this, which the canteen also doesn't know and you will not tell them, and Carla's father was a good man who was entirely unsuited to staying, and he left kindly and early, which I have always counted in his favour, and I raised her around the edges of night work. When you clean offices at night with a baby at home with your mother, and then, later, clean them with a daughter doing homework at the kitchen table, you learn that a thing you love has to fit in the hour nobody wants, or it doesn't fit at all. So it fitted at dawn. It fitted for love. Not ambition. Ambition needs an audience eventually, even if the audience is only a selection committee. Love just needs the mat to be there." She picked up her towel. "And the mat was there because I cleaned it. There's a joke in that somewhere that Krol's people would pay for, and they can't have it. Rounds. Again. And this time, Jenna, stop defending like you're apologising."