"Okay," Mia said. "Show me what we're working on."
They trained every evening that week. Foss and Mia in Studio B, after the regular session ended. Sometimes one or two of the other team members stayed to help with drilling, but Foss kept the broader picture quiet. What Mia was doing, and why, was not broadcast.
The body came back faster than Mia expected. By the third day, the hesitations were mostly gone. By the fifth day, she was moving with something close to her old fluency. The sequences connecting the way they were supposed to. The transitions clean.
What didn't come back as fast was the stillness.
In competition, the stillness was everything. Her grandmother had called it "center." Not emotional blankness. Not detachment. The opposite. Full presence. Being so completely in the moment that there was no space between you and what was happening. No lag, no commentary. Just response.
She had had it once, reliably, before. She knew what it felt like. She could feel its absence now. A slight delay. A small part of her that was watching from outside, instead of being fully inside.
Foss saw it. Of course she saw it.
On the fifth evening, she sat Mia down after training and said, "Talk to me about the ribbon."
Mia looked at her.
"I'm not being abstract," Foss said. "I mean the literal ribbon. What does it mean to you right now?"
Mia thought about how to answer that honestly.
"It's the last thing of hers that I carry," she said. "Everything else is at the house, or gone. The ribbon is with me."
"And when Sloan cut your hair and it fell on the tray, what happened in you?"
"Something large," Mia said. "Large like fear. Large like..." She searched for it. "Like being reached all the way down to the bottom of something and pulled."
Foss nodded slowly. "And you held it."
"Yes."
"That holding. That's the center. That's what you're trying to get back to." Foss leaned forward slightly. "The center isn't the absence of feeling. It's the ability to hold the feeling without being pulled under it. You did it in the dining hall. You can do it on the mat."
Mia was quiet for a moment. "My mother had it," she said. "Profoundly. How did she build it?"
Foss was quiet for a moment.
"She lost her father when she was 16. He was sick for a long time before that. She spent 3 years watching that and holding her family together. And then she came here, and she trained, and I think the training gave her somewhere to put it. The mat was honest in a way that most things weren't. You couldn't pretend on the mat. You couldn't manage an impression. You just were what you were."