Chapter Eighteen The Bar Exam and the Belt
Two things happened in the same September, six weeks apart: Mika sat for the bar exam, and Amir fought for a world title.
She studied for the bar the way he trained for the fight — obsessively, before dawn, with a coach’s discipline, everyone around them adjusting their whole lives to protect the runway.
Nina cleared her schedule to quiz Mika on the multistate essay questions.
Pop banned all boxing talk from the dinner table for a full month so Mika could think in peace.
Tre took over cooking duty entirely because Amir, deep in his own camp, couldn’t be trusted near a stove and Mika couldn’t afford the distraction.
The night before the bar exam, Amir sat across from her at the kitchen table, hands wrapped in ice from a hard sparring session, and said, “You ready?”
“I don’t know. Are you ready for the fifteenth?”
“No,” he said honestly. “But I’m gonna be ready anyway. That’s the whole trick. You don’t wait to feel ready. You just show up and do the work you already put in.”
She passed the bar in October, the letter arriving on a gray Tuesday that she’d remember for the rest of her life — she screamed loud enough that Nina, two blocks away, texted to ask if she was okay.
She was more than okay. She was, for the first time in her whole complicated life, exactly where she was supposed to be.
Amir won his title fight the following month, a bruising twelve-round war that left him with a hairline fracture in his hand and a belt he held over his head in the ring while searching the crowd, as always, for her face first and the cameras second.
Backstage, hand already swelling under the wraps, he found her before he found the doctors, and pulled her into a hug that smelled like blood and Vaseline and twelve rounds of everything he had.
“You did your thing three weeks ago,” he said into her hair, voice hoarse from shouting instructions to his own corner all night.
“I just been trying to catch up to you ever since.”
“You just won a world title.”
“And you passed the bar with a new job at non-profit and a mother who wouldn’t leave you alone, all in the same six weeks.
” He pulled back to look at her, pride plain and unguarded on his face.
“Ain’t no version of this where I let anybody say you the one riding my coattails.
You built your whole self before you ever met me. I’m just lucky I got a front row seat.”
They celebrated both wins the same weekend, in the same small house in Soho that had somehow, without either of them quite noticing the shift, become simply home.