So he stood still. Ninety seconds became three minutes. Three became ten.
"Most fights," Daniel told him, "are won before they start. Or better, they never start at all."
At the youth center downtown, Blake started using those lessons.
The Eastside Youth Center was an old brick building with a leaky roof and a basketball court with faded lines. Kids came there after school because home wasn't safe, or home was empty, or home was just too quiet.
Blake had started volunteering two afternoons a week. Now it was five.
He helped with homework. He refereed basketball games. He taught a small group of boys some basic martial arts, but he spent most of the time teaching them what Daniel had taught him.
Breathe. Stand still. Choose.
One of those boys was a fourteen-year-old named Marcus Bell.
Marcus was quiet, skinny, and angry in a way that Blake recognized instantly, because it was the same anger he'd carried his whole life. Except Blake's anger had come wrapped in money and privilege. Marcus's came wrapped in an empty refrigerator and a father in prison.
"Why do you even come here?" Marcus asked him one day, bouncing a basketball against the wall. "You're rich. You don't need this place."
Blake thought about it.
"Because a few months ago, I was the worst version of myself in front of a lot of people," he said. "And somebody showed me I didn't have to stay that way."
Marcus looked at him suspiciously.
"That's corny."
Blake grinned.
"Yeah. It is. But it's true."
The test came on a Friday in August.
Blake was locking up the youth center a little after seven when he heard shouting from the alley behind the building.
He walked around the corner and stopped.
Three older boys, maybe seventeen or eighteen, had Marcus pinned against the dumpster. One of them was holding Marcus's backpack upside down, shaking everything out onto the wet pavement. Another had his fist pulled back.