Not because she had decided anything. She told herself that on the walk over. She was just looking. Just seeing what it was. The way you open a door to a room you've been avoiding. Not to go in. Just to look at it in daylight and remind yourself it's only a room.
Studio B was at the end of the athletic building's east corridor, past the wrestling room and the equipment storage. The door was propped open with a rubber doorstop. She could hear it before she got there. The specific sounds of a training space. Bodies moving, breath, the soft impact of contact.
She stood in the doorway.
Eight people on the mats. Mixed ages, mixed sizes. Some drilling technique in pairs. Two sparring in light contact at the far end. Coach Foss stood near the center, watching a pair work a takedown sequence, arms crossed, saying something low that Mia couldn't hear from the door.
The gym smelled like every gym she had ever trained in.
That smell hit her before anything else. Rubber mat and sweat, and something underneath it. The faint chemical clean of floor disinfectant. It was the most specific smell she knew. More specific than any perfume, any food, any place. It lived in a part of her brain that was connected directly to her body, bypassing thought entirely.
For a second, she was 9 years old, in her grandmother's backyard gym on a Saturday morning. Connie showing her how to fall correctly. How to take the ground with your whole arm and not just your wrist. How to make the impact something you do, instead of something that happens to you.
Then she was back in the doorway. 19 years old. A long way from home.
Coach Foss had not looked up. She was still watching the pair on the mat, still talking low. But she said, clearly, without turning her head, "Come in or don't. But don't stand in the door."
Mia came in.
She sat on the bench along the wall. She didn't change. Didn't stretch. Didn't do anything that would signal she was there to train. She just sat and watched.
Foss let her. She didn't come over. Didn't acknowledge her beyond that first sentence. She ran the rest of the practice the same way she would have run it if no one was sitting on the bench. Corrections, demonstrations, a short conditioning circuit at the end. Business. No performance.
Mia watched the sparring pair at the far end. A young man and a young woman, both about her age, working at about 70% effort. She could see things in their movement, the way she had always been able to see things. A habit in the young man's footwork: he planted slightly too early before a shot. A tendency in the young woman to drop her right hand after she threw the left.