Mia sat with that.
"She used to say," Foss continued, "that the mat taught her the difference between what she was afraid of and what she was actually facing. Those are different things. Fear is always about the future. The mat is always now."
Mia looked at her hands. The wrapping she'd put on before training, still on. White athletic tape over the knuckles. The old, familiar weight of it.
"I stopped because I couldn't separate them," she said quietly. "Being on the mat, from her not being there to watch. It felt like..." She stopped. Started again. "It felt like if I went back to training, I was saying it was okay. That things were okay. And they weren't okay."
"They still aren't," Foss said. "And they don't need to be for you to be here."
Mia looked up.
"Grief doesn't have a finish line," Foss said. "You don't complete it and then get to go back to your life. It's not sequential. You carry it, and you also do the other things. Both at once. That's the only way through."
The studio was quiet around them. The evening light had gone, and the overhead lights were on. The particular flat brightness of an athletic space at night.
Mia thought about her mother, driving to a competition she never reached. About a ribbon set on a dresser that no one tied. About 7 months of not being able to go back through a door, because she had associated the door with the loss.
She thought about Connie in 1972, or whenever it was, training in a sport that told her she shouldn't be there. Training anyway. Passing it down.
She thought about what Foss said. Both at once. That's the only way through.
"Okay," Mia said. "I understand."
She didn't mean she was over it. She meant she understood what she was being asked to hold. That was different.
And it was enough.
On the eighth day, Reese found out she had entered the competition.
She was in Brennan's coffee shop, same corner table as before, when Burke appeared without Reese, which was unusual. He stood at the counter, ordered something, then turned and looked at her in a way that was too deliberate to be accidental.
He came over.
"Hey," he said.
She looked up. Said nothing.
"Heard you signed up for the MMA thing," he said.
She waited.
"Reese thinks it's funny," Burke said. He was trying to sound casual and not quite landing it. "He wants you to know you can still withdraw."