He said almost nothing. Just watched, the way he'd always watched. With the absolute attention of someone for whom this was the only thing in the room.
When she finished, he was quiet for a moment.
Then: "The spinning heel is the best I've ever seen it."
Coming from Ray Dunbar, that was an aria.
"The footwork reset after the jump back. Half a beat slow. Fix that before Friday."
"I know," she said. "I felt it."
"Good. You feel it, you can fix it."
He drove back that evening.
Before he left, he stood by the truck and looked at her.
"Your daddy's going to be in the stands Friday," he said.
She looked at him.
"He drove down this week," Ray said. "Staying with his cousin in Lexington. He didn't want to make a fuss about it."
She felt something happen in her chest. Something that had been held carefully for a long time, the way you hold things that are too large and too important to look at directly.
Her father.
Eleven hours on a Greyhound. A paper bag sandwich. A scholarship letter read three times and folded very carefully.
Her father, in the stands on Friday.
"He didn't tell me," she said.
"He didn't want you thinking about it while you were preparing," Ray said. "He thought it might distract you."
"It won't distract me."
"I know."
Ray opened the truck door.
"But he's 73 years old, with a bad back, and he drove four hours to watch his daughter compete. So whether it distracts you or not, I thought you should know."
He got in the truck.
Reagan stood in the parking lot and watched him go.
The autumn dark had come down fully now. The campus lit up warm around her. Someone was playing music somewhere in the dorms, too distant to identify. Just a rhythm carried on the night air.
She thought about her father at the kitchen table. The scholarship letter.
Your mama would have made a lot of noise about this.
She thought about her mother singing on Sunday mornings. The full-throated happiness that made the house feel bigger.
She thought about a seven-year-old girl walking into a converted storage unit with buzzing fluorescent lights. Handed a pair of training gloves too large for her hands. Looking at a man who would spend the next 11 years teaching her that the strongest thing you can do is wait until you're ready.
She looked down at her hands.
The old gloves were in her bag. She never trained with anything else.
* * *
The regional championship was on a Friday.
Reagan woke at 4:30. Lay in the dark. Let the charge in her chest be exactly what it was. Not anxiety, not fear. Just readiness with nowhere to go yet.
Delia was asleep. Her houseplants lined the windowsill in the early dark.
Reagan dressed quietly and went downstairs. She did not go to the gym.