"Dani—"
"Do you know how many of my matches you've seen? Like, actually seen, in a gym?" She was holding the paper boat of rice so hard it was crumpling. "Four. I counted. Four, in seven years. Mom's seen like three hundred. She's driven me to Spokane in a snowstorm. She learned how to tape fingers. She learned the whole rulebook. She learned the rulebook, Dad. You didn't know who I was wrestling this morning. That guy in line asked you and you didn't know."
He hadn't realized she'd heard about that. Then he realized: Rosie. Rosie had told her, during the braiding.
"You're right," he said. "You're right. I haven't been—"
"And then she misses one. One. Because of some stupid class, or whatever it is, and she's probably sitting in it feeling like garbage, and you get to be mad at her? You get to be the one who showed up?" Dani stood up. The rice spilled a little over the edge of the boat onto the concourse floor. "You don't get to be the one who showed up, Dad. You're just the one who's here."
She threw the rice and the banana peel in the trash can by the window, hard, and walked away down the concourse toward the athletes' tunnel with her hood up and her hands in her sweatshirt pocket, and she didn't look back.
Rosie had taken off her headphones. She was looking at the little spilled grains of rice on the floor.
"Daddy," she said, "you made Dani sad."
"I know, Rosebud."
"Are you going to say sorry?"
"I'm going to try."
She considered him with her mother's eyes. "You have to mean it, though. Or it doesn't count."
"I know," he said, and put his face in his hands.
* * *
He tried to find Dani, but the athletes' area was closed to parents, and a volunteer in a yellow vest at the tunnel entrance told him, politely and firmly, that finalists were in a holding area and could not be disturbed, sir, and that if he had an emergency he could speak to her coach. He didn't have an emergency. He had a daughter he'd hurt five hours before the biggest match of her life. He wasn't sure that was the kind of thing you could tell a volunteer in a yellow vest.
He texted her. I'm sorry. You're right. I'm proud of you. I love you. He looked at it, then added, I'll be here no matter what. Then he thought about what she'd said—you're just the one who's here—and almost took the line back, and didn't, because it was true and it was all he had.
No answer.
He sat on the bench by the window with Rosie leaning against him, eating the rest of her hot dog, and he scrolled up through his texts with Lena, back through the months. They were almost all logistics. Can you get R at 3:15. Dani needs $40