They signed. Simon signed the conditions as well as the bout agreement, and, because Rosa and two of the other cleaners had been invited by Dee, not summoned, and came in their own clothes at the end of a shift with the wary dignity of people unaccustomed to being in the owner's office for any reason short of bad news, Simon read condition four aloud to them as well, and told Rosa, in front of witnesses, the date by which the review would be finished and where the results would be posted, and Rosa, who was fifty-two and had cleaned three buildings a night for a decade, said, "We will hold you to the date, Mr. Greer," with such complete composure that Simon, to his credit, said, "I rather hope you will," and meant it enough for the room to hear.
A week out from the bout, the club had begun to hold its breath in the particular way of places that have sold tickets to their own conscience, and Dee, who disliked held breath in rooms and in people, kept her hours exactly as she had kept them for six years, which was its own kind of statement and one the other cleaners understood perfectly. She cleaned at night. She trained at dawn. She ate breakfast standing up in her kitchen, as she had done since Carla was in school, and she slept in the afternoons behind blackout curtains while, across the city, Blake Rennert trained in full light in front of cameras he had begun, Eddie noticed, to ask to have switched off.
On the last dawn of that week she trained without Jenna, who had been put on a rest day by Yusuf with the finality of a papal ruling, and so it was only Dee and Yusuf in the hall and the long early light coming through the high windows in bands across the mats, and the work was not dramatic work. It was the work underneath the work. Entries repeated until they were quiet. A grip taken and retaken. Her breath going out on effort the way it had gone out in Colorado Springs with wet hair, the way it had gone out over a hospital bed rail when the news was bad, the way it went out now, at forty-eight, measured and unspectacular and entirely hers. Yusuf said very little. Once he said, "Again, but slower; you are showing off to nobody, which is when showing off is most dangerous." Once he said, "Good. That is the bout, if he lets you have the bout. If he doesn't, the other thing is also the bout." Mostly he watched, and held the towel over his forearm, and meant it.
She did not know Blake was in the doorway. She would not have changed anything if she had, which was perhaps the thing that undid him. He had come early for a session Eddie had since cancelled by text, a text he had not read, and he stood in the half-dark of the corridor with his bag still on his shoulder and watched the night janitor work through the last movements of a training session as plain and unadorned as sweeping, the same woman, the same hour, the same unhurried completeness he had interrupted once with a joke and a photographer. He understood, watching, that none of it had been arranged for him: not the dawn, not the years, not the seven seconds, which had not been a message she had sent him but a door he had walked into, in a house she had lived in all her life.
He did not laugh. The laugh was available; he could feel the old machinery reach for it out of habit, the grin that edited the world before the world could edit him, and it did not come, and in its absence he felt, very clearly, both his fear and, underneath the fear like a floor under a mat, something steadier that he had not exercised in years. He stepped back before the session ended, quietly, so that she would not have to decide what to do about him in her own hour, and he walked out into the morning in San Tomas with his bag on his shoulder, past the poster in the club window that showed two adult competitors, both medically cleared, under a referee, and no mop anywhere on it at all.