Rick stood up. His jaw was tight.
"I gave up everything for that boy's fighting. Paid for every class, every tournament, every pair of gloves. I'm not going to let a gym teacher talk him out of the one shot he's got."
"I'm not talking him out of anything," Emma said. "It's his choice. It should be his choice."
Rick paused at the door. For just a second, something in his face cracked. Something tired and old.
"Nobody gave me a choice," he said. "Nobody gave me a shot."
Then he was gone.
Emma sat alone in her office and listened to the heating vents hum.
She understood men like Rick Mason better than he would ever know. She had served with them. Men who measured themselves by the one door that never opened. Men who carried that closed door around their whole lives.
She hoped Jake wouldn't have to carry it for him.
Two days later, Jake signed the contract.
He told her himself, standing in the gym after practice, his gym bag over his shoulder.
"I did it," he said. "I signed with Iron Crown."
"Okay."
"That's it? Okay?"
"What do you want me to say, Jake?"
"I don't know. That I'm making a mistake. That I'm selling out. Something."
Emma sat down on the bottom row of the bleachers, easing her left leg out straight. "Is that what you think?"
He sat down next to her, heavily. The bleachers creaked.
"My dad cried," he said quietly. "When I signed. I've never seen him cry. Not when my mom left. Not at my grandpa's funeral. He just sat there in Hale's office with the pen in his hand and cried." Jake stared at his hands. "How do you say no to that?"
"You don't always have to say no," Emma said. "Fighting isn't wrong, Jake. Competing isn't wrong. Wanting to be great at something isn't wrong. The question is never whether you fight. It's why. And what you're willing to become to win."
Practice at Iron Crown started the next week. Jake still came to Westbrook every day for his classes, still showed up at the school's training group on Tuesdays, but he looked more tired each time. Hale had him running at five in the morning and sparring at night. Hard sparring. The kind that left bruises yellowing along his ribs.