Tom stood there with his hands in his jacket pockets, watching his older daughter rebraid his younger daughter's hair on a gym mat at the state championships, and felt the specific uselessness of a man who has arrived at a place everyone else already understands. Dani was seventeen. She was five-foot-five and a hundred and thirty-four pounds, every one of which she had earned and weighed and counted, and she had her mother's straight dark eyebrows and his own blunt chin, and there was a fading green bruise on her cheekbone he hadn't known about.
"Kessler." Ortega had appeared at his elbow. She shook his hand the way she did everything, like she was trying to get a takedown on it. "Glad you made it. Roads okay?"
"Little snow on the pass."
"Good." She looked at her clipboard. "She's on mat seven at nine-fifteen. Semis. Girl from Spokane, Hailey Brandt." She looked at Dani. "She's going to try to stall you out. You don't let her."
"I know, Coach."
"You don't let her sit on her heels. You make her move."
"I know."
"Hands—"
"Are a conversation," Dani said, and Rosie, still being braided, said it with her at the same time, and Ortega raised her eyebrows.
"Your mom tell you that one?" she asked Rosie.
Rosie nodded.
"Smart lady." Ortega glanced at Tom, and there was something in the glance, some careful neutral thing, that told him she knew about the separation and had decided it was none of her business. "Where's she sitting?"
"She's not," Dani said. "She can't come."
Ortega's face did not change. "Okay," she said. "Then we'll make sure she sees it on the stream." And she clapped Dani once on the shoulder and walked away to yell at a girl who was jumping rope too close to the tunnel.
Dani tied off Rosie's braid. It was tight and even, straight down the back of her head, and Rosie reached up and touched it with the reverent caution of someone touching a new tooth.
"Did she say anything else?" Dani asked. She wasn't looking at Tom. She was putting her earbuds back in their case. "Mom. Yesterday."
Tom thought about the doorway. The very straight way Lena had stood. Tell her to keep her hands busy.
"She said to tell you she loves you," he said. "She said she'll watch the stream if she can."
"If she can." Dani snapped the earbud case shut. "It's a class. She'll be sitting in a chair. What, they don't let you look at your phone?"
"I don't know, honey."
"It's fine." She stood up and shook out her arms, a loose, rolling movement from the shoulders, like a dog coming out of a lake. "It's whatever. It's not like it matters who's in the stands. The mat doesn't know."