Chapter Nine Bigger Rooms
Amir won his next fight, then the next one, then the one after that, and over the following months his name stopped needing an explanation. Sports blogs picked him up. A regional network wanted to do a feature. A shoe company that had ignored him for six years suddenly wanted to have lunch.
Mika watched it happen from the passenger seat of his life, proud and a little dizzy. The gym on Hells Kitchen stayed the same — Pop wouldn’t let him train anywhere else — but everything around it got bigger. Bigger purses, bigger rooms, bigger crowds of people who wanted a piece of him.
And bigger crowds of women.
She wasn’t naive about it. She’d known, from the very first poster in Renee’s locker, that a man who looked like Amir and moved like Amir was going to draw attention, and she’d told herself she could handle it.
What she hadn’t prepared for was the specific, grinding erosion of watching strangers online debate whether she deserved him.
It started small. A comment under a photo Nina posted of the two of them at a charity event: he can do way better than her.
Then another: she looks like his assistant not his girl.
Then a whole thread, dozens of strangers with nothing better to do, picking apart her plain dress, her flat shoes, the fact that nobody had ever heard of her before he blew up.
She’s not even pretty like that. He must like em quiet and broke.
She read that one at two in the morning, alone in her apartment while Amir was at fight camp in Atlantic City, and something in her chest folded in on itself.
“Don’t read that stuff,” Nina told her the next day, tugging Mika’s phone out of her hands with the practiced ease of someone who managed a public figure’s account for a living. “It’s not real. It’s noise. People who got nothing going on in their own life gotta invent a villain.”
“They’re not wrong, though,” Mika said quietly. “I am quiet. I don’t have money. I’ve never once had my hair or my nails done for free because somebody wanted to be seen with me.”
“And?” Nina fixed her with a look. “You think Amir wants somebody who’s about attention?
Baby, he had that. For years. Girls throwing themselves at him since he was fifteen.
He picked the one who looked bored when he tried to impress her the first day.
Don’t let strangers rewrite a story they weren’t in. ”
Mika wanted to believe her. Most days, she did.
But the comments kept coming, and so did the women — at every event now, someone new, prettier, louder, better dressed, angling for a photo, a moment, a chance.
She started to feel like a placeholder in her own relationship, quietly certain that any day now Amir would look around at his bigger life and notice she didn’t quite match it.
The shoe company took him to Seattle for a launch dinner, the kind of event where the tablecloths cost more than her monthly loan payment, and Mika went because he asked her to, in a dress she’d bought secondhand and pressed carefully the night before so no one would know.
She spent most of the evening standing slightly behind him, smiling at names she wouldn’t remember by morning, while a rotating cast of executives’ daughters and athletes’ cousins found reasons to lean in close and laugh too hard at things that weren’t funny.
“You’re quiet tonight,” Amir murmured to her once, between handshakes, his hand finding the small of her back the way it always did in a crowded room, an anchor she hadn’t asked for but had come to depend on.
“I’m fine. Just watching.”
“You sure?” He studied her face in that way he had, like he was reading something written in a language only he could see. “You don’t gotta perform for none of these people.”
“I know.”
She didn’t tell him about the woman in the emerald dress who’d asked, with a smile sharp enough to cut, whether Mika did “something in entertainment too,” the assumption sitting there plain as day — that there was no other reason a woman like her would be on his arm.
She didn’t tell him because she didn’t have the words yet for how many small cuts like that one she was absorbing every week, quietly, without complaint, the way she’d absorbed things her whole life.
On the drive home, exhausted, her feet aching in shoes she’d worn three sizes too small because they were the only heels she owned, she caught her reflection in the passenger window — small, folded in on herself, a woman disappearing by degrees into the passenger seat of somebody else’s ascent — and thought, for the first time with real fear instead of vague unease: I don’t know how to be big enough for this life. I don’t know if I’m supposed to try.
She didn’t say any of that out loud. She’d gotten so good, over so many years, at keeping the heaviest things quiet, that even the man who noticed everything about her didn’t yet know how much weight she was carrying alone.