Reagan stood at the edge of the parking lot. She didn't pull out a campus map, didn't check her phone. She just looked, slowly, deliberately, the way someone looks at a place when they're not just seeing it, they're reading it.
The layout of the buildings. The sight lines. Where the light fell and where it didn't. Which paths were worn into the grass by foot traffic, which ones were official walkways that nobody actually used.
The maintenance man noticed her standing there. He gave a small nod.
She nodded back.
Then she picked up her bag and walked toward the dormitory.
* * *
Now, I want to tell you something about where Reagan came from, because it matters. It matters a lot.
Harlan County, Kentucky, well, West Virginia border country, that whole region, it is beautiful. Don't let anyone tell you different. Those mountains have a kind of dignity to them that you don't find in a lot of places. The trees go on forever. The rivers run cold and clear in the morning.
But it is also a place that has been forgotten by a lot of the people who were supposed to remember it.
The coal industry had been dying since before Reagan was born. Her father, Dennis Holloway, had worked the mines for 19 years. Good work, honest work, the kind of work that a man is proud of even when it's hard.
Then came the accident.
Reagan was 11 years old. Dennis Holloway came home from the mine with two broken ribs, a compressed vertebra, and a left hand that never quite closed all the way again. He was out of work for eight months.
Then the company restructured. Then the mine closed.
He found other work. Odd jobs, fix-it work, driving for a while until his back made that too hard.
He never complained. That's the thing about Dennis Holloway that you need to understand. Not once, not in all the years Reagan could remember, did that man sit down at the kitchen table and say life wasn't fair. He just kept going, and he raised his daughter to do the same.
Reagan's mother had passed when Reagan was nine. Breast cancer. Went fast, which people said was a mercy, though Reagan was never entirely sure that was the right word for it.
What she remembered most about her mother wasn't the sickness. It was the Sunday mornings. Her mother singing in the kitchen. Not well. Nobody would have called her a singer. But with a kind of full-throated happiness that made the whole house feel bigger.
After she was gone, the kitchen was very quiet on Sundays.
* * *
Reagan was seven years old when she walked into Ray Dunbar's gym for the first time.
It wasn't much of a gym. A converted storage unit on the edge of town. Rubber floor mats, a heavy bag hanging from a chain, fluorescent lights that buzzed when the temperature dropped. No heat in the winter, no air conditioning in the summer.