trace their jagged edges to this place and time. I wanted her to understand what they had all cost.
As I watched, a man entered the suite and walked over to Nora. He wasn’t one of the other partners I’d met at Parrish Forensics last Friday. He was shorter, with a round face and beard, and wore an untucked Hawaiian shirt. When he handed Nora a glass of wine, she grazed his cheek with an absent kiss, her eyes still fixed on the crowd below, and my entire body stiffened.
“Who’s that?”
“No one. Just Nora’s husband.”
She hadn’t worn a wedding ring in Atlanta. Of that I was sure.
He gestured animatedly with a bottle of beer, carrying on a one-sided conversation while Nora appeared to ignore him. She held the wineglass rigidly and her gaze moved to the crowd of reporters flocked around Logan. The longer I stared at them, the more familiar the space between them became, the hole in every marriage that gaped larger and larger until neither person knew how to cross it anymore.
“What now?” Sara asked, as the announcer began escorting Logan through the concourse toward center stage. The giant glass doors began swiveling shut, throwing blinding sunlight across the stadium, and for a moment Nora, her husband, and everyone else packed into the arena looked like they’d been set on fire.
“Now the fights begin.”
NORA
NORA STOOD on the balcony of the suite next to Mike. She’d changed back into her suit for the tournament, but the costume wasn’t helping. She’d never felt less professional in her life.
The money was everywhere, wafting off the chef-catered grills, lining the red carpet snaking through the vendor booths, and humming in the screens positioned at strategic angles that broadcast everything from press conferences with the elite international fighters to the trainer demonstrations happening live on the concourse. Standing in the shadows and holding a wineglass, Nora counted. Cost. Revenue. Risk. Reward.
She totaled the tournament expenses her team had compiled, spread it over the number of tickets sold, calculated the average spend of the heads milling below. Fixed overhead, variable costs, the factors that could spin an event like this into profit or loss. Projections had always soothed her, their steady columns and reliable results the one thing she could depend on. So why weren’t the numbers doing their job?
Mike was talking. She couldn’t bring his words into focus. She continued making calculations until the arena dimmed and the music swelled into a hard driving beat. The fights were about to start.
Thousands of people turned toward the jumbotrons where a montage of images illuminated the stadium. Logan, knocking out an opponent. Logan, holding a golden belt above her head as people flooded the ring. Logan, playfully waggling a protein bar like a fifties’ mobster with a cigar. A ribbon-cutting in front of a club. More fighters. Students, seniors, dozens of women striking bags, and two exhausted, laughing people hugging each other in the ring, their sweat dripping together like raindrops to anoint the heads of the crowd below.
A microphone-laden table appeared on-screen and one of the Japanese fighters leaned toward the cameras.
“It’s the largest purse in kickboxing history. I couldn’t believe it when we got the news.”
It cut to another fighter, another press conference.
“This isn’t just a fight. It’s mind and body, giving back, rising up. Win or lose, I don’t want to go home.”
Then Merritt Osborne filled the screens, laughing. “It’s definitely not the Olympics, y’all. It’s better. So much better.”
A few more clips aired, snippets from the elite fighters talking about becoming the next face of Strike. Their excitement was palpable; it seeped into the crowd, drawing attention to the giant banner that towered behind the last ring showing the signature Strike image of Logan’s face partially covered by a boxing glove. A fifty-foot-tall eye glared at the crowd, dominating the thousands of heads swarming below it.
The press conference clips forced Nora to think of another face, the one she’d seen on a badge hanging over a dusty computer. How would Aaden Warsame have described what Strike Down meant to him?
Nora still didn’t entirely understand what he and Logan had been to each other. Gregg had assumed they were intimate, but Logan’s quiet admissions earlier sounded more like a grieving parent’s. She couldn’t ask Aaden. All she knew for certain was that he’d thought of Logan last. His suicide note had said Logan, I’m sorry. But was he apologizing to an employer, a mentor, a lover, or a friend?
After she’d gone through