"Can't get to you directly, so he goes to someone next to you."
"That's the read."
Another pause.
She could hear, faintly, the background sounds of his gym. The place where she'd spent more of her childhood than anywhere except her own house. The buzz of those fluorescent lights. Probably a late class finishing up.
"You remember what your daddy said," he said. "The night before your first regional. You were so nervous you couldn't eat dinner."
She did remember.
She'd been 13. She'd stood in the kitchen and looked at the food on her plate and felt like the floor was moving.
Her father had sat across from her and said, "Don't fight the fight they want. Fight the fight you're ready for."
"Yeah," she said. "I remember."
"So what fight are you ready for?"
She thought about it.
"Not this one," she said. "Not yet."
"Then what are you waiting for?"
"I'm building something," she said. "It takes time to build."
"Right. How much time?"
"I don't know yet. But I'll know when I have enough."
Silence. The comfortable kind.
Ray Dunbar was a man who understood the difference between waiting out of fear and waiting out of strategy. He'd taught her that distinction. He knew which one she was doing.
"Twenty-nine days," he said.
"I know."
"You training every morning?"
"Evening when the gym's open."
"Weight?"
"On track."
"How's the spinning heel?"
"Cleaner than it's been all year."
"Good."
A pause.
"Your daddy ask about you?"
"Called Sunday. He's good."
"Tell him I said hey."
"I will."
"Thursday," he said.
Which was his way of saying goodbye. A reminder that he'd call again. That the thread would continue. That she wasn't out there completely alone.
"Thursday," she said.
She put the phone down.
She sat at her desk for a moment. Outside the window, the campus was lit up in the evening. Students crossing the quad in small clusters. Lights in the library windows. The distant sound of a car starting in the parking lot.
She picked up her highlighter and went back to the reading.
Chapter five. Power structures in closed communities. The conditions under which they sustain themselves. The conditions under which they collapse.
She highlighted a sentence.
The structure fails when a member who does not require the resource controlled by the dominant group introduces an alternative source of authority.
She looked at it for a moment.
Then she wrote in the margin, small and neat: Or when the dominant group makes a mistake that creates its own record.
She kept reading.
* * *
It was the Friday of the second week when Reagan found out about the deadline.
Not from Delia. Not from Ford. Not from anyone she'd spoken to directly. She found it the way she found most things: by paying attention to a room.
She was in the library, second floor, in the quiet section near the periodicals that nobody used anymore.