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Cruz straightens. “You did not drop me.”

I narrow my eyes. “I dropped you twice.”

“It was slippery.”

“It was a dry mat and a clean double leg, and Eli saw the whole thing.”

Eli doesn’t look up from his plate. “She dropped you twice.”

Cruz points his fork at each of us in turn. “This is a hostile household.”

Brady is laughing into his water glass, and Dante has his eyes closed the way he does when he’s memorizing a moment, and I sit there with my hand on my belly and let it all wash over me. The teasing. The absolute ordinariness of five people eating lunch on a Saturday.

Two years ago I ran from a life not worth living. I thought safety was the most a woman like me could hope for. Four walls Gerald couldn’t get through and a cage where the violence had rules.

I was so wrong about what I deserved.

After lunch we migrate to the living room, same as every Saturday, bodies finding their spots without discussion. I end up in Cruz’s lap with Eli against my side. Brady claims my thigh as a pillow. Dante stretches out with his feet across Eli’s legs, and Eli lets him.

The TV plays on low. Somebody put on the interview again, the one from six months back, and nobody moves to change it. There we are on screen, the five of us on a couch that isn’t this one, in clothes Theo picked out because he insisted we couldn’t go national looking like we dressed in the gym lost and found.

Going public was Dante’s idea, Victor’s blessing, Theo’s production. A sports journalist who’d covered Victor’s story since the beginning, a controlled narrative, the ethics laidout clean: I’d retired, Eli coached fighters outside of the relationship, the guys trained under different staff. No entanglement. No violations. Just five people who loved each other and were done hiding it.

On screen, the journalist asks Brady the question that made the clip go viral.

What would you say to your family, if they’re watching?

And Brady, my Brady, who spent years believing his own heart was a sin, looks straight into the camera and says: “I’d say I found what you always told me family was supposed to be. Just took me leaving to find it.”

The real Brady lifts his head from my thigh. “I still can’t watch that part.”

“I can,” Cruz says. “I watch it every week. I cry every week. It’s a whole routine.”

Brady clears his throat. “You cried at the ultrasound.”

“Everybody cried at the ultrasound,” Cruz replies.

“Eli cried the hardest,” Dante says.

“Eli will not be discussing it,” Eli says, and pulls me closer.

I feel the smile he presses into my hair.

The response to the interview wasn’t all roses. Nothing ever is. But the hate got drowned out by something none of us saw coming: Letters. Emails. People stopping us at the grocery store. A kid at the gym who told Cruz, voice shaking, that he showed the article to his parents because he didn’t have the words himself and we did.

Oath is something bigger than a gym now. The waiting list runs months, and ever since the interview, the cross-town rivalry with Ironside has gotten complicated in ways that have nothing to do with fight cards. Micah keeps getting matched against their top dog, Zane Butler, and the two of them circle each other at weigh-ins like the hatred is a language only they speak. Cruz has fifty dollars on it being something else entirely.Jonah’s beenreviewing filmwith one of their trainers three nights a week, which nobody believes and nobody says so. Even Theo’s assistant, Sloane, has two fighters. One of ours, one of theirs carrying her coffee like it’s a title belt. And Remy, Kai, and Finn have gone from mentor and students to something the three of them haven’t named yet, so quiet and steady together it makes my throat tight to watch.

Fight for who you are. Fight for who you love.It’s painted over the main cage, and it used to be a motto. Now it’s just a description.

“Victor and Theo’s anniversary is next month,” Dante says. “First one. Theo wants to do a thing at Eclipse.”

“Theo always wants to do a thing at Eclipse.”

The wedding made national news last spring. We sat in the front row, all five of us, and I held Eli’s hand while two men who paved our road promised each other forever. Victor cried. Victor, who could bench press a car, stood up there in front of God and the cameras and wept like a child, and Theo wiped his face with a pocket square and never let go of him once.

“We’re going,” I say. “Obviously we’re going.”

“Obviously,” four voices say together, and Brady snorts at the unison.