He plucked a tissue from a box and held it out to me; when I didn’t take it, staunching my nose with my fingers, he let the tissue go and it floated elegantly into my lap.

‘Enough,’ he said.

I dared a look at him but I couldn’t read his expression. Behind Aleks’s head there was a portrait of him as a younger man, executing a dive in competition – there was no platform in the photo and no water, just the tan twist of his body against a pale blue sky.

‘Now you know how it feels. Real competition. Now you know what it’s like when someone rattles your cage. They’re all doing it, you know. The other teams. Even your own team.’

I thought of Grace and her medal, her Gatorade, how she’d jerked her ankle, flapping the hotel slipper against the sole of her foot over and over again.

‘I don’t mind you failing,’ Aleks continued. ‘This time. I think it will be like a splinter in your finger. I think a little humiliation will do you the world of good.’

When I got home and told Lou about the meeting, she said, ‘He meant humility.’

I thought about how, when he’d finished speaking, he’d risen and come over to my side of the desk. He tapped my head and then my shoulder, pat pat, pat pat, like I was a friend’s dog he felt obligated to pet.

‘No,’ I said, ‘he didn’t.’

Perhaps the humiliation was good for me. Driven by spite, I came to training sessions with a newer, deeper sense of focus. I did additional weights sessions, alone in the gym that was attached to the aquatic centre. I actually followed the plan for recovery and stretching I had been given, instead of ignoring it. As the weeks passed, I improved. And when we watched the videos of our dives, I was so critical of my own performance – ‘My pelvis is rotated’; ‘I need to relax my shoulders’; ‘My toes are curling back’ – that often Aleks was left with nothing to say.

In our next competition I won a silver medal.

‘Congratulations,’ said Grace.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Better luck next time.’

She shook her head and smiled grimly.

‘Fuck you, Joan,’ she said.

Before doing what I had made my mind up to do, I waited until Lou was in the middle of another trial. And this one promised to be particularly complex. A man – only barely a man, he was my age – had sent text messages containing pornographic photos to his girlfriend, who was three years younger. The parents had gotten the police involved.

‘How bad was the porn?’ I’d asked. This was always a crucial question.

‘Bad. Tentacles.’

She’d slipped her fingers beneath her glasses and rubbed the skin around her eyes.

I told Lou I could take the bus home until the trial was over.