Alicia asked her to take the trash out.
It was the first thing she said after opening the door. She had a bag in one hand and a towel over her shoulder, and she looked neither surprised nor particularly grateful that Rae had come. Rae took the bag automatically. Alicia pointed down the side passage.
"Lid sticks. Hit it on the left."
Rae did, and the lid opened. In the small yard a tomato plant leaned out of a plastic bucket toward the only patch of sun. A child's bicycle had been turned upside down, rear wheel missing. Somebody had left two mugs on a folding chair. The place was full of the ordinary evidence that Alicia had continued existing.
When Rae came back, the woman was at the sink. "Wash if you want coffee."
Rae washed. The soap smelled of lemon and was almost empty. Alicia tipped the bottle into her palm to get the last of it, then set it upside down on the counter beside the sink. They could have spent the afternoon doing small jobs instead of speaking. Rae wanted to offer another.
"Bike?" she asked.
"My grandson's. His dad's coming back with the tube."
Grandson. Rae had known Alicia had a daughter, vaguely, as a fact attached to an opponent's biography before a fight. The daughter now had a child old enough to ride that bicycle. Twelve years acquired a different size.
They sat at the kitchen table. A school flyer lay under a fruit bowl. On the wall there was a picture of Alicia at perhaps thirty, laughing with two women Rae didn't recognize. Not a boxing photograph. Rae studied it while the kettle boiled, grateful for a version of the face that asked nothing from her.
"You want milk?"
"Black's fine."
"I’d put milk in it."
Rae took milk. Alicia put a packet of cookies between them and opened it. One had broken. She took the pieces for herself.
For a minute the visit could have been social. They asked after people they both knew. A trainer had retired to Florida and hated it. A former promoter was selling insurance. Alicia smiled at the news, and the relief of that smile made Rae speak too soon.
"Mick said you were all right after."
Alicia put her mug down. "When?"
"The fight. He said the money cleared what you needed."
"Did he."
"I didn't know what he meant."
"You didn't ask."
Rae looked down at the mug. A little brown line marked where the spoon had touched the rim. "No."
Alicia reached for a whole cookie this time and broke it in two. She appeared to consider eating before deciding against it.
"It wasn't just the purse," she said. "There was extra if I didn't come out. I talked to your promoter first. Didn't trust him to pay me. I told him that."
Rae saw Dorian with his clipboard. A younger man finding rooms for people, listening while somebody else did the talking.
"Then your trainer came over," Alicia said. "I was taking my wraps off after the press thing. Hands shaking, trying to look like I was cold. He put his hand under my elbow. Held it steady so I could pull the tape. Said the money would be in by Monday. I wouldn't have to chase anybody."
The repaired gate. Rae's arm tiring, the phone light shaking, his hand already beneath it.
"Mick," she said.
"Yes. He was the one I believed."
The refrigerator hummed. Rae could hear a faint, irregular rattle inside it, something touching something else each time the motor worked harder.
"He arranged it?"
"Through the promoter. But Mick made sure I knew what I was agreeing to. I spoke to him. It wasn't a rumor that somebody told me after."
Rae sat very still. She had expected something smaller: an injury Alicia hid, a corner decision she'd regretted, an argument about whether she'd been hurt. Even suspicion had arrived dressed in ordinary explanations. The sentence on the table was too plain to fit inside any of them.
"For what?"
"To stop. At the point we agreed. On the stool."
"You weren't—"
"You hit me. It was a fight. I didn't enjoy it. I wasn't finished."
Rae could feel the old result resisting. The ache of her hands, the exhaustion after, the belt's weight, Mick's face. She had lived inside those things. Alicia was asking her to keep the physical work and remove the meaning she'd placed on top.
"Why would he do that?"
"Ask him."
"You must know what he said."
"He said you deserved the opportunity. He said it would be good money for me and a chance for you. He made it sound sensible. He was good at sensible."
Rae saw Mick testing a hinge, putting a towel under somebody's head, choosing the smaller spoon. She looked toward the back door before the images could settle.
"How much?"
Alicia's mouth tightened. "Would a bigger amount make me better or worse?"
"I just—"
"Enough that I did it. More than I was making from that fight properly. Enough to clear what was pressing. That's the number you need."
Rae wanted a small number, something she could call help for a woman who was going to lose anyway.
"I had rent," Alicia said. "Bills. A child. Not a child dying in a bed. She needed shoes and a school trip and her mother home sometimes. I'd been boxing long enough to hear the way people spoke about me when they wanted an opponent. Experienced. Durable. Good test. You know those words."
Rae did. She had started receiving them herself.
"I thought I was being practical. I could lose for the purse, or lose and get the extra. They told me you'd go on to better things. I thought that sounded fine as long as I could pay the electric."
She laughed once, without pleasure. "That's what I told myself. Then I sat on that stool."
Rae saw it again, not the edited clip but the full night. Looking across the ring. Expecting the woman to rise. Then the trainer stepping away, the referee looking, a little movement in the opposite corner that became the end of everything they'd been doing. Her first thought: Get up. She had wanted to finish it herself. Even then she'd been denied the clean feeling she later claimed.
"I didn't know," Rae said.
Alicia looked tired. "Maybe."
"I didn't."
"I'm not saying you did. I don't know what you knew. I know what I said to Mick and what I did."
"He never told me."
"Then ask why."
Rae pressed her hands flat on the table. The left thumb had healed enough that she could spread it without pain. It seemed obscene that the body could finish a small repair while the rest of a life sat there changing.
Outside, a car door closed. Alicia glanced toward the window. A man appeared in the side passage carrying a packet and the missing bicycle wheel. He waved through the glass. Alicia held up one finger, and he nodded and went to work in the yard.
"You need to—" Rae began.
"He's fine."
They waited while the man fitted the new tube. He was perhaps Rae's age, in work clothes, doing a job before going home to another. Alicia's life did not pause for this revelation. Rae was grateful and resentful in the same breath.
"Did you regret it?" she asked.
"Which part?"
"Taking it."
Alicia rubbed a thumb along the handle of her mug. "Some days. Other days I paid what needed paying and didn't think about you."
Rae felt a small sick recognition.
"I wasn't waiting twelve years to tell you," Alicia continued. "I had a life. I stopped boxing. Did other work. My daughter got older. Some things were good. Then every so often somebody would find the clip. They'd want to show me how young I looked. Or ask what happened. Usually I said I was done. It was easier than explaining what I chose."
"Why now?"
"Because you're selling it again."
Rae looked at her.
"Not the fight. The lesson. My face on a stool, and you telling people how to make a quitter. That man at work showed me and waited for me to laugh."
The sentence put Rae back in the gym supper. Ellis asking what was wrong with the woman. Flo on the table. Her own voice doing the easy line, everyone giving her the laugh she'd expected.
"I shouldn't have said it."
"You said it a lot."
"I know."
"Do you?"
Alicia got up to refill the kettle. She took Rae's mug without asking whether she wanted more. Rae let her. Her hands looked strange empty, too large for the table. She could remember having them raised in the ring and feeling that the world had finally seen what Mick saw. A regional belt. Better fights. The route to the title she had later earned. She wanted to put that later title on the table like evidence: I was good. You didn't buy all of me.
She did not say it. Alicia had never claimed she did.
"I went on," Rae said instead.
Alicia turned from the counter. "Yes."
"You didn't."
"I chose things too. Don't make me a saint because it's less awkward than knowing me."
Rae gave a little startled laugh. Alicia's mouth softened. They were, absurdly, close to finding each other funny.
"I wasn't going to," Rae said.
"You were starting to."
The kettle clicked. Alicia poured, and for a moment the steam hid her face. Rae could see the woman she had fought in the movement of her shoulders, the efficient reach. It made her want to go back to the ring and ask a different question across it.
"Could you have beaten me?"
Alicia put down the kettle. She considered this longer than the rest.
"Maybe not. You were good. I wasn't thinking you weren't."
Rae hated how much she needed to hear that.
"I could have tried the rest of the fight," Alicia said. "That's what I know."
They sat again. The man in the yard spun the repaired wheel. Its spokes made a faint ticking sound that traveled through the open window. Alicia watched him for a moment, then returned to Rae with the expression of someone finishing a piece of work.
"I want the clip off your gym screens. The versions where you talk over it. I know you can't take it off the whole internet. Take down what you control. Stop teaching people that my sitting there proves they know what was inside me."
"I can do that."
"And correct it. With my name. Not a post about how you've learned nobody's perfect."
Rae looked up.
"You know what I mean," Alicia said. "I've read those posts. Nobody gets named. Name me."
"What do you want me to say?"
"What happened. What I did. What you used it for. You don't have to tell people I'm wonderful."
"You'd be admitting—"
"I know."
Rae stopped. Alicia did not need Rae to introduce the consequences of a fact she'd been living with for twelve years. She had come prepared to say it aloud and was asking something specific in return.
"I need to speak to him."
"I assumed."
"Before I put it out."
"I'm not setting you a deadline for dinner. Just don't go back to selling the story while you decide how much you can bear knowing."
There was nothing in her tone Rae could call unkind. That made it harder to leave as a victim of the visit.
She took her mug to the sink. Alicia told her to leave it. She washed it anyway until Alicia said, "Rae. Leave it." She put the mug on the drying rack. Alicia was already waiting by the door.
At the door Alicia's son-in-law was wiping his fingers on a rag. He nodded to Rae, polite, not noticeably recognizing her.
"Got it on," he told Alicia. "He'll need the seat up soon."
"He says he's tall enough now."
"Of course he does."
They smiled. Rae stood between them holding her car keys, an unnecessary famous person in a small household exchange.
Alicia walked her to the front door.
"Are you going to say I was lying?" she asked.
Rae looked at her. "No."
"You haven't heard him yet."
"I know."
Alicia held her gaze for a moment. "Then don't promise it because it's the nice way to leave."
Rae put the keys in her pocket so she could stop moving them. "I'm not."
Outside, the street looked indecently unchanged. A man pushed a trash can toward his gate. Somebody had left a small pair of sneakers on a windowsill to dry. Rae walked to her car and opened the door, then shut it without getting in.
She could call Mick. He would answer before the second ring if his hands were free. He would hear something wrong in the way she said his name and ask where she was. He might come. The certainty of that hurt more than the fear that he would lie.
Rae took out her phone, found his name and looked at the photograph attached to it: a birthday, Mick trying to blow out a candle that wouldn't stay dead, his face full of comic outrage. She had taken it. She had chosen it because it always made her smile before answering.
She put the phone away.
At the gym the regional belt's empty place on the shelf was cleaner than the wall around it. Rae stood beneath the pale rectangle and waited for the evening class to finish before she went near the screen.