Rosie insisted on carrying it. She held it over her head in the rain like an umbrella all the way to the doors, where they stood in a line of families in team sweatshirts and rain jackets, and a man ahead of them in a Kennewick hoodie turned around and grinned at the sign and said, "One-thirty-five, huh? Who's she got in the semis?"
"I don't actually know," Tom said.
The man's grin faltered for just a second, the way you'd look at someone who didn't know his own address. Then he recovered and said, "Well, good luck to her," and turned back around.
Inside, the noise hit them like a wall. The floor of the Dome had been laid with mats, more mats than Tom could count at first—he would learn later there were sixteen—each a bright square of red or blue or gold with a circle painted in the middle and a scoring table at its edge, and on every mat there were two kids grappling, and around every mat there were coaches crouched in chairs yelling, and above it all, in the steep curving stands, thousands of people were yelling too, in a sound that was like weather. Rosie clapped her hands over her ears. Tom dug out her headphones and put them on her, and she looked up at him with an expression of enormous relief.
He texted Dani: HERE. WHERE ARE YOU.
Nothing. He scanned the floor, hopeless. All the girls in singlets looked the same from up here.
"Daddy." Rosie tugged his sleeve and pointed. "There's Coach Bea."
She was right. Down by the far end of the floor, near a tunnel marked ATHLETES ONLY, a short, broad woman with a gray buzz cut and a red Cutler Springs Coyotes windbreaker was standing with a clipboard and a cluster of girls in red singlets. Tom picked Rosie up, sign and all, and started down the stairs.
Dani saw them before Ortega did. She was sitting on a folded mat against the wall with her knees up and her earbuds in and her hood pulled over her head, and when Rosie shouted "DANI!" loud enough to be heard over the roar of sixteen matches, she pulled the hood back and smiled in a way that made her look about nine years old. Then the smile went somewhere else, carefully, like a thing put away in a drawer.
"Hey, Dad."
"Hey, champ."
"Not yet," she said. "Don't jinx it."
Rosie wriggled out of his arms and threw herself at her sister, and Dani caught her and folded her up and buried her face in Rosie's hair for a second longer than she needed to. When she came up, she was looking at the braid.
"Who did this?"
"Mama," Rosie said. "Yesterday. I slept on it."
"It's a disaster." Dani turned her around and began to undo it with quick, practiced fingers. "Hold still."