"Is the girl going to be okay?"
"I don't know, honey. I hope so. That's why Mama did it. So she'd have a chance."
Rosie was quiet for a long moment. On the mat above them, a boy from Spokane pinned a boy from Puyallup, and the arena roared, and neither of them looked.
"So Mama didn't have a class," Rosie said.
"No."
"She had a girl."
Tom closed his eyes. "Yeah," he said. "She had a girl."
* * *
They gave Dani her medal at a quarter to nine. She stood on the top step of the podium in her red warm-ups with Mia Castellanos on the step beside her and two girls Tom didn't know on the steps below, and a man in a blazer from the state association hung the gold medal around her neck on a red-white-and-blue ribbon, and the photographers' flashes went off, and Dani smiled the polite, closed smile she'd had on all day. When the man in the blazer moved on to Castellanos, Dani leaned over and said something to her. Castellanos laughed, surprised, and the two of them gripped hands for a second, hard, like people who'd been through something together.
Tom was waiting at the bottom of the podium steps with Rosie and the paper. He thought about Lena's underlined words. This is HER day. He thought about what Lena would want. Then he thought about Dani in the parade of champions, looking at the empty seats at the top of the arena, and he thought about what Dani would want, and he thought—for maybe the first time in a long time—that he didn't get to decide for both of them, and he didn't get to be the one who kept the secret just because he'd been handed it.
Dani came down the steps. She saw him and stopped. Her face did something complicated.
"You were at the top," she said.
"Rosie made me."
"You held up three."
"I didn't know if I was doing it right."
"You were doing it wrong." She was trying not to smile. "You're supposed to keep your thumb tucked. You had it sticking out. It looked like you were ordering three beers."
He laughed. It came out of him like something breaking. And then he stepped forward, and she stepped forward, and he had his arms around his daughter for the first time in he didn't know how long, the gold medal pressed between them, her headgear knocking against his collarbone.
"I'm sorry," he said into her hair. "I'm so sorry for what I said. You were right. About all of it."
"I know," she said into his jacket.
"And I need to show you something."
He held the paper out. She took it. He watched her read it, watched her eyes go down the page, stop at the crossed-out name, keep going. Stop at the margin. Go to the bottom line. Go back to the top and start again.