Chapter Nineteen

The gun.

She took the first hundred the way it had been planned for seven years. Knees. The bend, tight, no gifts. The field came with her and then it didn’t. Don’t look back. Two hundred. The noise of the place pressed down on the lanes and she went through it. Not enough. More. Three hundred meters, and the dead place coming, the place his voice had carried her through every race of her life, and the commands rising to meet it the way they always rose. Again. Don’t look back. Again—

Nothing.

Breath.

Footfall.

Blood, in her ears.

No voice of any kind.

She looked where she had looked since she was eight years old.

The line.

It was empty.

Nobody was standing there. Nobody told her what to do next.

Eighty meters of covered earth, and nothing in them but her.

And then her legs did something her legs had never done — found a rhythm that had no author, longer at the back and quieter at the front, and she went down the last eighty meters on it, on nothing, on nobody’s voice, on her own breath in her own ears, and somewhere around sixty out her face was wet, and it wasn’t rain, because there wasn’t any.

The tape broke across her. She hardly felt it.

And at the line, exactly where she had looked for him her whole life, for one second:

Her father.

The man from the sheet. Smiling. His hands were empty.

Gone.

Then the sound came back all at once and she was on her knees on the covered earth with the stadium pouring down on her, and the wet on her face just kept coming, and she let it.

Somebody hung the gold on her neck. Cameras went off like weather. She had her hand around the medal and could not have told you what it weighed.

High on the back straight, in all of that standing, one person was sitting still, with a hand over her heart.

The line, when she finally looked back at it, was just a line.