"It's a public records request," Reagan said. "Submitted through proper channels."
A pause.
"Is he going to be okay?" he asked.
And in his voice was something complicated. The emotion of someone who has spent time close to a person who has done real harm, and is trying to sort out what they feel about that.
Reagan thought about it carefully.
"I don't know," she said honestly. "That's up to him."
Ford looked at the table.
"For what it's worth," he said. "What you did. The whole thing. You didn't come after him. You just built a wall."
"I wasn't trying to destroy him," Reagan said. "I was trying to stop him. There's a difference."
He looked up.
"Yeah," he said. "I see that now."
He stood up, picked up his bag.
"American history," he said. "Wednesday. I'm going to sit in the third row. Just so you know."
He left.
Reagan watched him go.
She thought about what it cost someone to move from one side of something to another. The weight of it. The way it changed your relationship to a version of yourself that had stood still while something wrong was happening.
She didn't think Ford Beckett was a good person who'd made bad choices. She thought he was an ordinary person who'd made ordinary choices in the direction of his own comfort. And who was now beginning the longer and more difficult process of figuring out what he actually believed.
That was not nothing.
She went back to her reading.
* * *
The Saturday before the competition, Coach Ray Dunbar drove up from Harlan County.
He didn't announce it. He texted when he was pulling into the parking lot.
Here.
Reagan met him outside Carver Hall.
He was driving the same truck he'd been driving for 12 years. A blue Ford F-150 with a dent in the passenger door that had been there since she was ten years old, and had never been fixed because, as Ray had once said, "The truck runs fine, and the dent doesn't bother anybody who matters."
He got out.
He was 61 years old, with the particular build of someone who had spent four decades in a gym. Not for show, not for vanity, but because it was simply what he did.
His hair had gone fully gray in the last two years. He had lines around his eyes that weren't there when Reagan had first walked into his storage unit gym at seven years old.
He looked at her for a moment.
"You look good," he said.
"I feel ready," she said.
"You look ready."
He glanced up at the campus. "This place been okay to you?"
She thought about that question. What it meant, and what it actually asked.
"It's been honest," she said. "In its way."
He nodded. That was enough.
They walked to the gym.
He watched her run through her full competition sequence. The patterns and combinations she'd built for this specific tournament. The techniques she'd polished over the last six weeks.