Kell slit the envelope with a silver letter opener, and forty cameras watched him pull out a sheet of paper with nothing on it.
"Ms. Kowalczyk's termination," he said, gently, to the ballroom. He turned the page front and back. "I have read it three times."
Jo's name was on that envelope in her own typing. It was November 17, a hotel ballroom, and she sat at the head table with her hands flat on the cloth so nobody could see them move. At the next table Sasha Vell, the champion, leaned over with a glass of orange juice and whispered, loud and friendly, "Oh no, is this a bit?"
It was not a bit. Kell laid the blank page on the podium like a dinner napkin.
"The exclusivity has renewed three times, October seventh, October twenty-first, November fourth. It renews again tomorrow at five." He smiled at Noor, two chairs down. "Ms. Kowalczyk sells me the gym on December thirty-first. Noor will be very happy at Kell Promotions."
The room made a sound. Pens. Somebody laughed and stopped.
Jo stood. Her chair scraped. "I typed that letter," she said. "On my father's typewriter. I sealed it myself. It went certified on September twenty-eighth and I have the green receipt pinned to a corkboard. He swapped it."
"A blank page terminates nothing, Josephine," Kell said, with real sorrow, as if she had brought a child to a funeral.
Noor was looking at her. Not at Kell. Her face was flat as a closed door.
In the car Noor ate nothing, which was how Jo knew. She had a granola bar in her coat pocket and she did not take it out.
"Were you going to sell me?" Noor asked the windshield.
Jo had a dozen answers, and all of them were lawyered. Her father's eye, the one that leaked through, saw the right hand sitting low in Noor's lap. She gave the true one.
"In September, yes."
They hit a red light on Harbor Street. Noor opened the door and got out. She did not slam it. She shut it softly and walked up the sidewalk in her gym slides with her hands in her hoodie, and the light stayed red, and Jo let it go green behind her until somebody honked.
She had been noticing things for a week, and she laid them out in the car like inventory. Noor humming less. Noor leaving the gym by the back, before Jo came in. A new phone, face down on every surface, a good one, nothing Noor could afford. And Samira Haddad, Noor's mother, whom Jo had met by the speed bags on Thursday, saying with a proud little laugh that the back rent was caught up. Paid in full, she said. In cash.
Jo said it to the dashboard. "He got to her."
Kell did not lose things. He bought the thing next to them first.
She turned the office light off at nine.
Her father's office was glass on three sides, and in the dark it was a fish tank looking at the gym. She sat on the army cot with her coat on and her phone in her hand, the screen turned down against her thigh. Through the glass the ring was a gray shape. The single work light by the post stayed off.
If she was right, whoever came would come late, and they would come here.
At eleven she took the violet stub out of her wallet. March 17, 2012, Row W. She held it by the soft fold and rubbed the corner with her thumb until the cardboard started to fuzz. Out on the post, in the dark, the stopwatch was a pale thing still counting. She did not look at it. She did not put the stub away either.
Midnight. Twelve forty. The smokehouse beams ticked as the cold came in.
At ten past one, footsteps on the stairs from the apartment, soft, bare heels. Noor came down in sweatpants and a coat with her new phone in her fist and snapped on the work light. Alone under it, she looked about fifteen.
Then the street door. A big man in a gray hooded sweatshirt, hood up, face lost in it, came in under the light with the careful walk of someone who knew where the loose boards were. Broad as a doorway. Jo knew the gray hoodie. Marco, Kell's driver. She had watched him hold a car door for Kell on Harbor Street twice.
He took an envelope from his front pocket. It was thick enough that it bent.
"Half now," he said, low. "Half after. Sixth round, not before. And make it look real."
Noor weighed it in her hand and did not open it. "And he lets me go? After?"
"He tears up your contract the day she signs. Spring rematch. You're free."
Jo's hand shook so hard that the phone knocked once against the cot frame. Neither of them heard. She thumbed the camera awake and switched it to video, and the red dot sat under her finger, and her thumb went still above it.
"Chief," the man said, and Jo's whole body listened. His voice had changed, gone warm and loose. "I promise, chief. It's the best deal anyone's going to get."
He pushed the hood back to wipe his face with his sleeve.
The work light found his face. Dark hair, broad cheeks, a mouth that had talked its way out of everything since he was nine. Her brother.
Frankie.
Jo did not breathe. Her feet were somewhere very far off. In the work light Frankie was grinning the tired, wet, nervous grin he used on landlords, and Noor was standing in front of him holding the envelope with both hands, not counting it, not opening it, just holding it like a bird that might go.
Her thumb had already pressed down.
The torch flared and lit the glass white. The phone gave its start chime, tinny and enormous in the silent gym.
Frankie and Noor both turned toward the dark office.