Chapter Twenty-One The Fight He Almost Skipped
Two weeks before her due date, Amir had a mandatory title defense scheduled in Las Vegas — a fight he’d tried, uselessly, to postpone, until his manager and Pop both sat him down and reminded him contracts didn’t bend for due dates and the purse would matter for the family he was building.
“I don’t want to be three thousand miles away when she comes,” he told Mika the night before he flew out, pacing the bedroom in a way she’d never seen him pace, not even before a fight.
“Nina’s staying with me. Everyone has a plan.” She caught his hand, stilled him. “You’ve trained your whole life for this fight. Go win it. I’ll be here.”
“And if she comes early?”
“Then Nina drives me to the hospital, calls you the second we’re in the room, and you get on the first plane out no matter what round it is. Amir.” She took his face in both hands. “I need you to trust that I can hold this down. I’ve been holding things down my whole life. I can hold this.”
He went. Fight week in Vegas was the longest five days of his life — he called her three times a day, more than any coach or promoter thought was reasonable for a man in championship camp, and every single time Pop caught him reaching for his phone between rounds of pad work, the old man just shook his head and let it go, because some rules weren’t worth enforcing on a man about to become a father.
The night before the fight, Mika couldn’t sleep, her body too heavy and restless in the final stretch of pregnancy to find comfort anywhere, and she called him at two in the morning his time, apologetic, expecting him to be asleep.
He picked up on the first ring. “You good? Is it time?”
“No, I just — I couldn’t sleep, and I wanted to hear your voice.” She felt foolish saying it. “You should be resting. Biggest fight of your life is in fifteen hours.”
“Ain’t nothing more important than this call,” he said, and she could hear him settling back against a hotel pillow, picturing him clear as day even three thousand miles apart. “Talk to me. Tell me something boring. Tell me what you had for dinner.”
So she did — told him about the plate of eggs and toast that was all her stomach could handle lately, about Nina’s terrible taste in reality television, about the baby’s newest habit of kicking hardest right when Mika finally laid down to sleep — and somewhere in the ordinary, unremarkable rhythm of it, both of them found the calm they needed for the fight still ahead of them, hers and his.
He won in the eighth round, a clean, dominant performance that had commentators calling it the best of his career, and in the post-fight interview, sweat-soaked and breathless, when the reporter asked what was next for the champion, Amir looked dead into the camera and said, “Next I’m getting on a plane, ’cause I got a daughter due any day and ain’t no title in the world worth missing that. ”
Nina texted Mika the clip within the hour.
Mika watched it curled on the couch, one hand on her belly, and cried the good kind of tears, the kind that didn’t come from being small or scared or waiting for the other shoe to drop, but from being, for once in her life, completely and thoroughly chosen.
He landed at eleven that night. She went into labor at four the next morning.