I don’t turn on the overheads. I don’t want to see the place properly tonight.
I walk the perimeter the way I do every night before I lock up, the way I’ve done a thousand times. Past the lockers. Past the rack of gloves where someone’s left a wrap on the floor. Past the spot where Jenkins used to stretch before sparring and where, yesterday, his locker stood empty for the first time in three years.
I count the empty lockers without meaning to. Seven.
The mats are clean. The ring sits in the center of the warehouse, ropes slack, canvas catching what little light there is. I climb in.
I’ve done this since the night we opened. Stood inside the ring after everyone left, just to feel the space—the give of the canvas under my weight, the way sound dies inside the ropes. A king surveying his kingdom. That’s what I called it the night of Jonah’s big win, alone in this same warehouse with my chest still warm from the noise of the crowd. I remember it because I let myself feel it, and feeling it was a thing I used to know how to do.
Tonight the canvas just feels like canvas.
I sit down in the corner. Press my back into the turnbuckle pad. Look at the ceiling—the network of ductwork and exposed beams I picked out of a real-estate listing seven years ago because the owner couldn’t move it and knocked twenty percent off the lease.
Forty thousand dollars in savings. A contact who knew about the warehouse space.
That’s how I built it the first time. From a hospital bed and a knee that wouldn’t straighten and a career that ended on a single pop somewhere in the lateral ligament. Everyone said Iwas crazy. Everyone said I’d burn through the money in eight months. And I did the math anyway and signed the lease anyway and stood in this empty warehouse for the first time at thirty-one years old, terrified out of my fucking mind, knowing I had nothing else.
I knew how to build a thing from nothing. That’s the part I’ve been telling myself all night.
What I don’t know is whether I have it in me to do it twice.
My knee aches. Phantom ache, mostly. The reconstruction was clean. But it always reminds me, this hour of the night, when I’ve been standing too long. Like the body has its own way of keeping score.
Seven fighters. Eight sponsors by the morning, probably. Thirty percent revenue minimum, Ray said, and that’s before he factored in what the bank told me at four-thirty this afternoon—deferral on the expansion line, polite voice, no eye contact, the kind of “we’ll revisit in Q2” that everyone in the room understood meant no.
I could rebuild. I know how. I’m thirty-eight years old and I know how.
I just don’t know if I want to.
That’s the thought I’ve been avoiding all day, and now it’s sitting in the ring with me.
I built this place because I had no other version of myself left after the knee. I poured everything I was into the walls. And what scares me—sitting here in the dark with the ductwork and the smell of disinfectant—isn’t losing it. I’ve lost things before. What scares me is the version of me that would build it again would have to be someone I haven’t met yet. Someone who doesn’t hide. Someone who walks into a banker’s office as the man in the photographs and asks for the loan anyway.
I don’t know that man.
I haven’t even been him for a full week.
I sit there for a long time. Long enough that one of the cardio standby lights times out and the room gets darker by one small dot. Long enough that I lose track of whether my eyes are open or closed.
My phone is in my jacket pocket. I haven’t looked at it in two hours. I think about the last text I read—Theo’s, before the bank meeting.
Walk in with your head high. You’re not alone in this fight. Not anymore.
I had walked in with my head high. I had walked out without expansion funding.
I pull out my phone. Don’t text him. Don’t want a record of how I sound at one in the morning, sitting in the dark of my own gym.
I climb out of the ring. Lock up the side door. The Charger is the only car in the lot. The engine catches on the first turn, the way it always does, and the warmth of the cabin hits my face like something I forgot I was allowed to feel.
I don’t decide to drive to Theo’s. There’s just nowhere else for the night to go.
I walk through Theo’s door. My body feels like I’ve gone fifteen rounds, every muscle aching with the day’s tension. Theo’s waiting, eyes searching my face for signs of disaster.
I collapse into his arms, burying my face in his neck. I don’t have words for him. Not yet.
His hands stroke my back, gentle but firm. He doesn’t ask. He waits.
After a long minute, I manage: “Hartwell’s been with Dawson for nearly a year. The bank deferred until Q2. I went back to the gym after.”
