By nine the fountain worked and Rae couldn't get off the floor.
She had made the mistake of sitting down beside it. Now one leg lay straight in front of her, the other bent, and every available method of standing involved a muscle Dana Ellery had spoken to the night before.
Flo stepped over her carrying a box of lost property.
"You want help?"
"I'm thinking."
"Looks strenuous."
Her niece wore cut-off jeans and a yellow work shirt with a hole under the arm. At twenty she had her father's long face and none of his willingness to pretend Rae was amusing. She put the box on the desk. A single boxing shoe stuck out of it, sole up.
"Who leaves one shoe?" Rae asked.
"A person having a better Saturday than us."
Flo disappeared into the back office. Rae planted one hand on the wall, got the good foot beneath her and rose in stages. There were six people in the gym, all pretending they hadn't seen. She appreciated that about paying customers. They wanted their version of her to survive.
Mick arrived with breakfast she didn't want and a newspaper she did. Her win had made a short item beneath a larger story about a college player getting arrested. Mick had circled her name.
"You think I'd miss it?"
"At your age."
She took his coffee by way of reply.
He watched her eat half the sandwich before he left. There was a water pump waiting at the mechanic's, apparently, and he had promised to be irritating about the price in person.
"You need anything?" he asked from the door.
"A younger body."
"I've asked around. Nobody wants yours in trade."
She threw the balled-up wrapper. He caught it, which pleased him more than it should have, and took it to the trash on his way out.
Dorian Senn came at ten exactly, wearing a blue cotton jacket that managed to look expensive without looking hot. Rae had met him at other people's fights and once at an awards dinner where he'd helped her move a drunk man away from her table without making a show of it. She remembered the useful thing first. He shook her hand without squeezing.
"Good performance."
"You could sound more surprised."
"Would that cost less?"
She liked that. Annoyingly.
They went into her office. Flo had left a note on the chair: Window sticks. Do not demonstrate strength. Rae moved it under the keyboard before Dorian could read it.
The office had once been a storage room. Rae had installed a desk too large to come back out without taking off the door. On the wall behind it hung the 2017 world title photograph. She'd tried putting it in the main room, but people stood in front of it instead of listening. In here she could turn her back on it.
Dorian took the visitor's chair. Rae tried the window once, failed, and left it alone.
"July third," Dorian said. "Ten rounds. Non-title. Celia Vega."
Rae set the coffee down.
Outside, a boy hit the heavy bag three times and stopped. Three times and stopped. She wanted to go tell him that resting with his hands down wasn't a system.
"No," she said.
Dorian waited.
"She's got people she can fight. Young people. Actual contenders. People she doesn't need to make a point at."
"She wants this one."
"I want central air."
"Forty-five thousand."
Rae looked at the circled item in Mick's newspaper. The black ink had come through onto the advertising below it.
"Official purse," Dorian said. "Subject to the agreement and approval. We have the date. We have a venue. Your name still sells a room. Last night helps."
Forty-five thousand. For a fight she could lose honestly, which was an important consideration when discussing Celia. Rae hadn't become so old she couldn't count. The girl—woman, she corrected herself with an irritation that felt private and stupid—had been winning while Rae took calls from people who began with sympathy.
Forty-five wouldn't do it.
She could pay the arrears. She could pay Flo and Tony, settle the most insistent bills, and be back in the same office on July sixth when the building balance came due. The mortgage company had sent a letter with a yellow sticker directing her to sign. She had signed. The amount remained ninety-five thousand dollars whether she looked at it or not.
"What else?" she asked.
Dorian leaned forward, elbows on his knees. "What else do you need?"
"If it was just the forty-five, you'd have called."
"Some things are better in person."
Rae looked toward the door. Beyond it Flo was laughing at something. It was a large laugh for a narrow room. Rae could hear it over the bags.
She got up and closed the door. Flo's laugh disappeared behind it.
Dorian put his phone facedown on her desk. He didn't ask her to do the same. The casualness of it made her colder than a demand would have.
"A hundred and eighty thousand in addition to the purse. Forty now. One-forty after."
Rae sat back slowly. "To do what?"
"Get stopped in six."
She laughed. The noise was too loud for the office.
Dorian waited for her to finish.
"Six?"
"Yes."
"Why not four? Save everybody an evening."
"Six is what I'm offering."
The coffee cup still had Mick's thumbprint on its lid. She moved it away from Dorian's phone.
Dorian spoke in the same voice he'd used to describe the date and venue. "An official stoppage in the sixth round. It has to look like a fight. She can do that part. You know she can."
"And if she does it in three?"
"Then it isn't the result."
"If I hit her and she falls over?"
"Don't take a job you don't think you can do."
That stopped her. Not the suggestion of skill. The job.
She picked up her coffee and found it empty. She turned the cup, looking at the seam where a little brown liquid had seeped beneath the lid.
"Does she know?"
"No."
The answer came immediately. It was the first thing Dorian had said that made the room feel larger.
"And she wouldn't."
"No."
"Then how—"
"You know what she throws. You know what makes a referee step in. I'm not discussing a routine with you. You box. She boxes. The result is what I said."
Rae could hear the three punches outside again. This time there were four. Someone had corrected the boy without her.
She knew the duty that came with what she'd just heard. People had put the language in front of her on licenses and agreements often enough: report a suspected sham, promptly. Not after deciding if you could use it. Saying yes wouldn't turn a crime into a private fee because the money came without a spectator.
"Why me?" she asked, and hated how it sounded. As if he were offering a gift.
"Because you have something to keep."
Dorian stood. "Take five minutes."
"I didn't ask for five minutes."
He looked at Rae. "Would you like them?"
She could say no. She could tell him to leave, take the phone off the desk, walk into the gym and find Flo something useful to do. She could begin the version of the morning in which she hadn't been interested.
"Yes," she said.
Dorian went out. Rae listened to the latch catch and reached for her phone.
Mick was the first name in her recent calls. She pressed it, then ended the call before it could connect. She could hear him asking her to start again, slower. He would come back. He would sit in that chair, feed her the sandwich she hadn't finished, and she would have to say the offer aloud to him.
She opened the calculator instead.
She looked at the ceiling. A dark mark beside the fluorescent strip had been there since the winter leak. She'd painted it twice. It kept coming back, shaped like a country she couldn't place.
Mick knew about the building because she had needed him to know. He'd sat beside her when she went through the numbers. He knew about Tony's wages and the repair card and the property taxes she kept moving between accounts as if the right route could make the amount smaller.
Ninety-five thousand left on the building. Forty-four thousand in overdue wages, bills and the other debts on her list.
One hundred and thirty-nine thousand dollars to make the room stop tilting.
Forty-five and a hundred and eighty made two hundred and twenty-five. Eighty-six left after the obligations she already owed. Not eighty-six to spend. Taxes. Camp. Paying people who had become good at not asking. But room. For the first time in years, room.
She could own it. The building, the doors, the stupid sloping floor. No call to explain why a direct debit had failed. No lying to Flo about when things would settle. The summer class could run whether four people came or twenty.
Her phone dimmed. She touched it and the eighty-six came back.
She had won last night. The little circled item said so. She could beat Celia too, if she came looking for a person who wasn't there anymore. A counter she hadn't seen. A mistake she made because she needed Rae to watch her make it. Rae could still imagine the shot with such clarity that her right hand tightened beside the phone.
The account would be the same afterward. She erased the calculator and entered the figures again.
Rae stood and went to the window. The bottom pane had two little crescents where Mick's ring had struck it over the years. In the yard a man from the neighboring shop was smoking beside the dumpster. He saw her and raised a hand. She raised hers back.
She went to the door herself. Dorian stood in front of a photograph from the world title, listening to Flo tell him that the gym wasn't taking personal-training bookings without a deposit anymore. He was nodding seriously. Rae felt a sudden urge to pull him away from her niece.
"Come back in," she said.
He did not smile as he passed her.
"How does forty arrive?" she asked when the door was shut.
The forty would come from an event account he controlled, outside the official purse. He asked where she wanted it sent. Rae found the account details she used for gym payments and read them from her phone, making him repeat the last four digits. He said the transfer would carry the event company's name. Rae asked him to repeat the amount after the fight. He did. She asked about a stoppage outside six. He said no.
"And you don't tell me how to move," she said.
"I wouldn't know how."
"You don't talk to her."
"Not about this."
"Nobody in my gym hears it."
"They won't hear it from me."
She looked down at his phone. Nothing had appeared on the screen. It lay there like an ordinary thing.
"All right," she said.
Dorian picked up the phone and put it in his jacket. He told her when she would hear from him, stood, and thanked her for the coffee she hadn't given him.
Rae let him out through the main room. The boy at the bag turned toward her.
"Rae, can you look at this?"
"In a minute."
"It's just my right—"
"I said in a minute."
He stepped back as if she'd touched him.
Dorian left. Through the office window Rae could see Mick's newspaper spread on her desk. She walked to the bag and took the boy's wrist gently in her hand.
"Show me again," she said.