Enhanced Oversight

Five weeks later, a stranger in the Whole Foods parking lot throws a smoothie at your windshield.

It's mango. It's everywhere. The guy shouts "Hendry was robbed!" and peels away in a truck with a Titan sticker on the bumper, and you sit in your car watching orange slime slide down the glass and think, very calmly, that you have a medical degree.

You don't cry. You've done your crying. You drive to Nkem's with the wipers smearing mango in arcs.

"Again?" Nkem says when she opens the door. She's in scrubs and gold hoops, a neurologist who looks like she should be on a magazine cover, holding a wine glass she pretends is for you. "What was it this time?"

"Smoothie."

"Flavor?"

"Mango."

"Disrespectful." She hands you the wine. "Also, your face is on TV again. Don't look."

You look.

On her giant TV, Whit Mallick stands at a podium in a suit that probably cost more than your car. Silver hair, beautiful tan, the smile of a man who owns things. Behind him a banner reads TITAN 64: UNFINISHED BUSINESS.

"The fans were robbed," Mallick says warmly, like a grandfather at a barbecue. "Reeve Hendry was robbed. So on June twenty-seventh, we're going to give them the ending they paid for. Hendry. Lorca. Two."

The screen cuts to a slow-motion replay of you climbing into the cage. Somebody at Titan has color-graded it so you look like a horror movie villain.

Then Reeve is on screen, at a separate press table, in a black hoodie with the scar through his eyebrow now healed into a thin pale line. It makes him look worse, which means better, which is unfair.

"I don't blame Lorca," he says into a microphone. "Santi's a good dude. I blame the lady with the flashlight." The press laughs. He leans back. "Doc, if you're watching? Sit somewhere else next time."

Nkem turns off the TV.

"He's very pretty," she says. "I hate him on your behalf."

"He has a scar because of me."

"He has a scar because a man elbowed him in the face. You have a hashtag because of him." She sits beside you. "Did you talk to Dr. Cabrales, Ava?"

Dr. Cabrales is your ER chief. He talked to you. He said things like distraction and liability and maybe step back from the ringside work for a while, Ava, for your own sake.

"He wants me to quit the commission."

"Do you want to?"

You think about the cage. The lights. Reeve's left eye lagging on your finger. The way your whole body knew.

"No," you say. "I was right."

"I know you were right," Nkem says. "I'm the one who had to listen to you explain it eleven times."

The State Athletic Commission lives on the fourth floor of a beige building downtown that smells like toner. Dr. Benita Zarate's office has one window, a cactus, and a stack of files so tall it looks structural.

"Sit," she says, without looking up. Reading glasses on a beaded chain. Fifty-seven, iron-gray bob, the only person in Nevada combat sports nobody has ever called sweetheart twice.

You sit.

"You've seen the announcement." She finally looks at you. "June twenty-seventh. Ten weeks out from his medical suspension ending. Mallick wants a quick rematch while the outrage is fresh."

"That's fast, after a cut that deep."

"The cut's healed. His post-fight scan came back clean from Titan's clinic. On paper, he's fine." She folds her hands. "But on paper isn't good enough this time. Since your stoppage, this commission has been called corrupt by four senators, two podcasts and a man in a hot dog costume outside our building. The board passed the enhanced oversight rule last week. High-profile title rematches get a commission physician assigned to the fighter's camp. Weekly exams. Full access to his medical records. Authority to flag anything."

You already know what she's going to say. You feel it in your stomach.

"No," you say.

"I haven't asked yet."

"Dr. Zarate, he hates me. The whole internet hates me. If I walk into his camp, it'll be a circus."

"It's already a circus." She slides a file across the desk. HENDRY, REEVE A. DOB 29 YRS. "You're the only doctor who saw that eye up close. You're the only one who wrote down a head clash in round two. Nobody else's card mentions it, including the referee's."

You stare at her.

"I read your notes, Dr. Ridgeway," she says. "You were right to stop it. Now go make sure he walks into the rematch as healthy as you'd want him to be. Or as healthy as you'd need him to be to say no again."

"And if he doesn't want me there?"

"He doesn't get a vote." She takes off her glasses. "Neither do you, frankly. Monday. Castagna's Gym, Henderson. Eight a.m."

Castagna's Gym is an old brick warehouse off a road full of tire shops and taco trucks. The sign is hand-painted. The parking lot has more pickup trucks than cars and one gleaming black Mercedes that doesn't belong.

You sit in your car for three minutes with your kit bag on your lap.

You've walked into trauma bays with gunshot victims. You've told families the worst news of their lives. You've stood in a cage while eighteen thousand people screamed at you. This is just an exam. He is just a patient.

You check your hair in the mirror anyway, and you hate that you do.

Inside, the gym hits you all at once. Chalk and sweat and old leather. A swamp cooler groaning in the corner and losing. Rap from a speaker somewhere. Heavy bags swinging. Fight posters on brick walls, some of them older than you: faded boxers, faded dates. A man in a cardigan, the coach from fight night, is holding pads in the cage for someone.

Then one of the heavy bags stops swinging.

Then another.

The music cuts. Somebody laughs, nervous, and stops.

Every head in the room turns toward you.

The man inside the cage turns last. He's shirtless, gloves on, sweat running down a body that looks like an anatomy chart somebody drew to show off. The pale scar cuts through his left eyebrow. His hair is damp and pushed back. His gray-green eyes find you across the whole gym and go very still.

You hear a woman by the bags say, under her breath, "Oh, he's going to kill her," and you aren't sure if she means it as a warning or a compliment.

Reeve Hendry pulls off one glove with his teeth and leans his forearms on the top of the cage.

"Doc," he says, and the word drops through the silence like a stone into water. "You came all the way to Henderson to finish the job?"