“You don’t have to make everything a contest,” Eli told him one afternoon at the gym.

Trent was pacing around the cage, still angry from a sparring session he had lost to a smaller fighter.

“People follow me for fights.”

“People follow you because you’re funny.”

“That doesn’t pay anything.”

It was Richard who introduced the idea of filming a neighborhood challenge.

“Labor Day,” he said over dinner. “Everybody will be together. You need something big before the sponsor review.”

Trent’s mother, Marianne, looked up from her plate. “Please tell me you aren’t planning a fight in the street.”

“A challenge,” Richard corrected. “Friendly. Gloves. Somebody tries to last thirty seconds. No harm done.”

“And if somebody gets hurt?”

Richard shrugged. “Trent knows how to control himself.”

Deacon Price would have laughed at that. Trent had been warned twice in training for finishing exchanges after his partners called stop.

Marianne looked at her son.

“You know you can say no, don’t you?”

Trent stabbed a fork into his dinner. “I’m not a baby.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Richard pushed back his chair. “Enough. It’s a little community content. People like seeing athletes interact with neighbors.”

Later that night, Trent heard his father on the phone in the study.

“Miller is the problem,” Richard was saying. “He’s the one objecting to the easement proposal. He gets other people reading documents. Next thing you know, they start asking about drainage studies.”

Trent slowed in the hallway.

“No,” Richard said. “I’m not talking about threatening the man. I’m talking about showing the board that he’s disruptive. Let him get angry on camera. That’s all.”

The door was nearly closed. Trent could see only the wedge of his father’s shoe against the rug.

“The boy is an athlete,” Richard continued. “He’ll know how to put on a show.”

Trent stood there longer than he meant to.

He had known his father wanted a video. He had not known the video was meant to settle something about a property proposal.

When Richard stepped into the hallway, Trent asked what he had meant by “disruptive.”