Still there.
"I will," she said.
She put the phone down. She closed the match footage on her laptop. She turned off the desk light.
In the dark, she untied the ribbon from her braid and held it the way she had held it on the first night. Feeling the satin between her fingers. The slight, worn softness of it from months of daily use.
She thought about what Foss said. About center. About the difference between holding a feeling and being pulled under by it. About full presence. About the mat always being now.
She thought about two days from now. The competition in this gym. Dara Vas across from her. The thing that had been arranged to go one way, and the thing she was going to do about that.
She thought about her mother winning in this same gym 22 years ago. The empty seat where Connie should have been. Sandra winning anyway, because the work was the work, regardless of who was watching.
She thought about her own name on the registration form. Her own signature. The choice that was entirely hers.
She tied the ribbon back into her hair. Lay down. Pulled the blanket up.
Outside, Harrove was quiet. The oak in the garden. The lit windows of the athletic building, where Studio B sat dark and empty. The mats, waiting for Friday.
She breathed in. Breathed out.
She was here. She was ready. Not perfectly. Not without weight. But ready.
The wave came. She held it.
And she was still there.
Friday came the way important days always come. Not with fanfare. Not with any signal that this one was different.
The alarm went off at 6:15. The dormitory hallway had the same sounds as every other morning. Someone's shower running. A door closing. The particular quiet of early October, that sits just at the edge of cold without crossing over.
Mia lay in bed for exactly 1 minute after the alarm. Then she got up.
She brushed her teeth. She made coffee on the small single-serve machine her grandmother had insisted she bring. She sat at her desk and drank it slowly, looking out the window at the campus coming awake in the gray morning light.
She thought about nothing specific. That was deliberate. She had learned, from years of competition mornings with her mother and grandmother, that the mind on a fight day needed to be kept clear of narrative. No rehearsing outcomes. No building stories about what would happen. Just the coffee, the gray light, the sounds of the building waking up around her.
When she finished, she opened the small drawer of her nightstand.