The girls' 135-pound final was the ninth match of the night. Tom sat through the eight before it without seeing them. He watched the clock on the scoring table and the tunnel and his phone, which stayed dark, and Rosie, who had gone quiet and was sitting cross-legged on her seat with the sign in her lap, picking at the edge of the cardboard.
Then the announcer said Dani's name again, and she came out of the tunnel with Ortega beside her, and climbed the three steps onto the platform, and the lights hit her.
She'd taken off her warm-ups. In her red singlet and black headgear under those lights, she looked smaller than she had that morning, and also harder somehow, like something that had been through a kiln. Mia Castellanos came up the steps from the other side, long and loose and calm. The two of them walked to the center of the gold mat and put their toes on the lines, and shook hands, and the referee looked at each of them and blew the whistle, and the arena noise went up so suddenly that Tom felt it in his teeth.
Castellanos scored eighteen seconds in.
It happened so fast that Tom didn't see it. One moment the girls were circling, hands snapping, and the next Dani was on the mat and Castellanos was on top of her and the referee was holding up three fingers and the green-and-white half of the arena was on its feet. Rosie grabbed his arm.
"It's okay," she said. "It's okay, it's okay, it's only three."
On the mat, Dani was flat on her stomach with Castellanos draped across her back like a heavy coat. Tom watched his daughter push up to her hands and knees and get flattened again. Push up. Get flattened. The clock on the scoring table ran down, a minute twenty, a minute ten. Castellanos had an arm wrapped under Dani's arm and over the back of her neck, and she was cranking, slowly, trying to turn her over, and Tom could see Dani's face pressed into the mat, red, her eyes shut.
"Get out," Tom said. He didn't know he was saying it. "Get out, get out, come on, honey, get out—"
With forty seconds left in the period Dani got to her feet with Castellanos still hanging on her, and turned inside the taller girl's arms, and broke her grip with both hands, and was free. The referee held up one finger. Escape. Three to one.
The first period ended. Dani walked to her corner with her chest heaving and sat in the chair and Ortega crouched in front of her talking, fast, both hands moving. Dani nodded and nodded. Then she looked up. Tom saw it again—her eyes going up, past the side stands, to the top. Searching. Coming back down empty.
Rosie stood up on her seat.