Vy watched all of this from a slight distance at first, because she was still learning how to be in the room without bracing herself. Some mornings she arrived and felt perfectly steady. Other mornings, the smell of the mats or the sound of a body hitting the floor too hard would bring back a flash of that first Saturday, not as a clear memory but as a tightening in her shoulders. She learned to notice it without letting it decide for her. She would breathe, adjust her position, and choose a training friend she trusted for the first round. On days when even that felt like too much, she would sit and watch, or help Mai Lan set up the room, and she stopped treating those days as failures. Recovery, she discovered, was not a straight line back to who she had been. It was a slower, messier process of building a new version of steadiness, one that included what she now knew.
Her studies continued alongside all of this, and that ordinary rhythm saved her in ways she had not expected. She went to seminars, wrote papers, argued with her supervisor about footnotes, and drank too much coffee in the university library. She cooked simple meals, called her family, walked along the harbour when the wind was strong enough to clear her head. Life did not pause to let her heal, and at first that felt unfair. Gradually she understood it as a gift. The world was larger than one academy, larger than one champion, larger than one bad morning, and returning to that larger world reminded her that she was more than the worst thing that had happened to her on a mat.
Ethan Blake remained in her life in a way that was careful and unforced. He did not insert himself into every decision, and he did not treat his intervention on that first Saturday as a claim on her gratitude or her time. He came to watch classes sometimes, sitting in his usual place near the wall, and afterward he would walk with Vy and Linh Dan to the small café near the academy, where the conversation was often about ordinary things. Books. The weather over the bay. A terrible film they had all somehow watched to the end. When Vy did want to talk about the review, or about Damian, or about the strange emptiness that followed a decision she had fought hard to reach, Ethan listened without trying to fix the feeling. He had learned, in his years as a medic, that some wounds needed attention rather than advice, and that presence could be a form of care in itself.
There were moments, in those café conversations, when Vy felt the beginning of something warmer between them, and she was grateful that neither of them rushed it. Ethan never made her safety into a story about himself. He never suggested that because he had stepped in once, he now had a special right to stand beside her always. He asked what she wanted, and he accepted the answer, even when the answer was simply that she wanted to go home and rest. Vy, in turn, did not ask Ethan to be a symbol. She liked him for his dry humour, for the way he noticed when someone at the next table needed a chair, for the fact that he remembered how she took her tea. Affection, when it came, came quietly, in the space left by respect.
One afternoon, Mai Lan asked Vy a question that changed the shape of the months ahead. Would she be willing to help with a beginners class for women who were new to grappling? Not as a head coach, and not as an expert with all the answers, but as someone who could show newcomers, from the very first session, what a safe room felt like. Vy hesitated. She was still a student herself, still learning, still carrying days when her confidence wavered. Mai Lan nodded as if she had expected exactly that hesitation. That was why she was asking, she said. The class did not need a perfect champion. It needed someone who understood, from the inside, why the rules mattered.
Vy agreed to try one session, and then another, and then the class became a regular fixture of her week. She began each session the same way, with the mats clear and the new students sitting in a loose circle, a little nervous and a little excited. She taught them first how to tap, loudly and clearly, and how to release instantly when they heard or felt a tap. She taught them how to fall safely, how to breathe when they felt trapped, and how to say, in plain words, what they were comfortable with and what they were not. She told them that an early tap was not a defeat. It was information, and it was the reason they would be able to come back tomorrow and learn again.