Chapter Fourteen

The next morning she was at the track before light, and so was he.

He was careful with her. He didn’t announce anything. He set himself at the line and watched her hands.

Her hands were empty.

“You’re not timing?”

“I can see it.”

He ran. She watched the whole of him come off the bend instead of the part of him the watch could see — the arms, the head, where the stride went long and where it went brave — and gave him the corrections one at a time, and he took them one at a time, and the mist sat on the lanes and the morning went on like that.

He came off a two-hundred and stood with his hands on his knees, and when he had his breath back he said:

“What song is that?”

“What song?”

He didn’t answer. He just looked at her.

And then she heard it — the tail of it, still in her throat. Four bars. Slightly wrong.

“...My coach’s,” she said.

He nodded, the way children nod at facts, and went back to the line.

“Again,” she said. “From the bend.”

He went. He came through with his hands loose and his head quiet and the last forty still alive, and she clicked nothing, because there was nothing to click, and said:

“Better.”

He went back to the line at a jog.

He had never jogged back before.

The sun cleared the ridge and the mist went off the lanes, and they ran until the football arrived.