CHAPTER 19
EMILY
Coach Ramirez believes in morning meetings.
This is one of her character flaws.
Not the largest one. The largest one is her ability to notice when a player is lying with her posture from thirty yards away. But morning meetings are a close second, especially after a night involving a public injury clip, terrible peppermint tea, one heat pack, and Nathan Bellows’ mouth.
I stare at myself in the bathroom mirror and decide that no one should be required to look professional before coffee.
The woman looking back disagrees by existing anyway.
Hair pulled back. Canada training jacket zipped. Face composed. Under-eye concealer doing humanitarian work. Support wrap secured beneath my shirt. Left side stiff, but not sharp yet.
Yet is an unhelpful word.
I lift both arms slowly.
The left side pulls under my ribs.
Not white-hot.
Not nothing.
I lower my arms.
Then rotate carefully.
Better than last night after the match. Worse than I want. More honest than I prefer.
“Rude,” I tell my reflection.
My reflection remains unmoved.
The hotel room is quiet except for the bathroom fan and the muffled city beyond the window.
My kit bag sits by the door. My phone lies facedown on the dresser, where I placed it after coming back upstairs because apparently I believed distance from the screen would make my brain less interested in replaying a kiss.
It did not.
My brain, regrettably, has excellent footage retention.
Nathan crouching instead of leaning over me.
His hand on my cheek.
The way he stopped first.
The way he said wanting was different from asking.
I close my eyes.
Absolutely not.
This morning belongs to Canada. To Coach Ramirez. To Ava and the defensive line and the next match plan and whatever media circus has formed overnight.
Not to Nathan’s mouth.
A knock sounds from the connecting hallway side.
Not my room door.
My phone buzzes a second later.
Ava: I'm outside with coffee and non-emotional support. Please verify you are awake and not tactically brooding.
I type back.
Define non-emotional.
Her reply is immediate.
Coffee.
Fair.
I open the door.
Ava stands there in team gear, hair damp from a shower, holding two coffees and wearing the face of a young defender trying not to look too pleased with herself.
I take one cup. “If this is terrible, I’m blaming your generation.”
“It’s hotel coffee. It belongs to no generation.”
“Wise answer.”
She steps in without fully entering, like she knows the room still counts as private. Good. She is learning. Or I have accidentally trained a very polite menace.
Her gaze flicks over my face. Not to my side.
Good kid.
“Coach moved medical review up,” she says.
“I saw.”
“She said breakfast after.”
“Cruel.”
“She also said no individual media until after team briefing.”
“Less cruel.”
Ava hesitates.
There it is.
The thing under the logistics.
I sip the coffee. It is barely acceptable, which makes it elite by tournament standards.
“Say it,” I tell her.
She grips her cup with both hands. “People are still posting the clip.”
“Yes.”
“And the Bellows stuff.”
The coffee turns bitter in my mouth.
I swallow anyway. “Yes.”
“I didn’t read all of it.”
“Good.”
“I read some.”
“Less good.”
She winces. “For awareness.”
“That is what people say right before making themselves miserable.”
“I learned from watching senior players.”
“Rude.”
“Accurate.”
I lean against the dresser carefully. “Ava.”
She looks up.
“We do the medical review. We hear Coach’s plan. We train the plan. We do not play defence against the internet.”
Her shoulders settle.
Not fully.
Enough.
“And if reporters ask?” she says.
“Reporters will ask me.”
“They might ask us.”
“Then you talk about the match. The full sequence. The defensive adjustment. Your cover. The team win.”
Her face changes at your cover.
Still young enough to be startled by her own importance.
Good.
“You earned that,” I say.
She nods once. “Okay.”
The hallway beyond her fills with voices. Doors opening. Players moving toward elevators. Morning carrying us whether we are ready or not.
Ava steps back. “Coach said five minutes.”
“Then why are you still here?”
“To verify non-brooding.”
“And?”
She looks me over with deep seriousness. “Brooding contained. Coffee active. Captain functional.”
“You’re becoming unbearable.”
“Leadership development.”
“Go.”
She grins and leaves.
I close the door and rest my forehead against it for one second.
Captain functional.
Fine.
I can work with functional.
The medical room is too bright, too clean, and too full of people who know things.
Coach Ramirez stands by the far counter with her tablet. Our team physio, Lena, sits on a stool, scrolling through last night’s notes. The assistant coach has a laptop open to the full match sequence, not the broadcast clip. Bless her.
No giant screen.
No slow-motion betrayal.
Just the field, the shape, the decisions.
I prefer this room already.
“Morning,” Coach says.
“Debatable.”
Lena smiles faintly. “Coffee working?”
“Barely.”
“Good. We’ll keep the exam brief.”
I sit on the treatment table and unzip my jacket. Ava is not here. Good. This part is mine first.
Lena checks range of motion with the ruthless gentleness of someone who has known elite athletes too long to be impressed by silence. Breathe in. Rotate. Hold. Resist. Press here. Tell me when it changes.
I tell her.
Mostly.
She gives me the look.
I amend.
Fully.
Coach Ramirez watches without interrupting. This is another one of her character flaws: she knows silence is useful and deploys it with criminal precision.
Finally, Lena steps back and writes something on her tablet.
“Well?” I ask.
“Manageable,” she says.
I exhale.
Then she holds up one finger.
Of course.
“Manageable is not ignorable.”
“I dislike how you paired those words.”
“I assumed you would.”
Coach Ramirez’s mouth twitches.
Lena continues. “No evidence that last night turned it into a pull requiring shutdown. That’s good. But the compensation pattern is louder today. Your hip is trying to protect the oblique and making the rotation messier. That means we adjust, or the next contact may decide for us.”
I look at the laptop.
The paused frame shows me just before the clearance.
Balanced.
Ready.
Ava in cover.
The whole play right before pain entered the story.
“What does adjust mean?” I ask.
Coach answers this time. “Modified training today. No contact reps. Tactical walk-through, set-piece positioning, communication work. You start the next match only if the response stays inside agreed limits after activation tomorrow.”
I turn back. “Only if?”
Her gaze holds mine. “Yes.”
The room cools.
Or I do.
“I can play,” I say.
“I know.”
“Then why does that sound like doubt?”
“It’s not doubt.” Coach sets the tablet on the counter. “It’s leadership.”
I laugh once, dry and small. “That word is being used against me a lot this week.”
“Because you respond to it.”
Unfair.
Correct.
Lena caps her pen. “We also recommend no solo media health answers today. Team channel only.”
“I can answer questions.”
“No one here thinks you can’t,” Coach says.
That stops me.
She steps closer, voice lower now.
“The question is not whether you can handle a microphone. The question is whether answering every version of the same bad question helps the team.”
My jaw tightens.
Because she is right.
Because I hate that she is right.
Because part of me wants to stand in front of every reporter and prove the clip has not turned me into a problem.
Which, unfortunately, is how problems get bigger.
Coach leans one hip against the counter. “I need a captain who tells the truth, not a captain who wins every argument about whether the truth matters.”
That one lands.
Hard.
I look down at my hands.
They are resting open on my thighs.
Last night, Nathan’s hands looked like that when he asked what scared me.
Open.
Not reaching.
I hate that the memory helps.
I look up. “So what is the truth?”
Lena answers first. “You’re available under management, pending response. You are not cleared for unlimited load. You are not a medical crisis. You are not nothing.”
Not nothing.
The phrase from practice returns.
The one I hated saying.
The one that did not end me.
Coach nods. “And tactically, we prepare the line with that information. Not around you. With you.”
I breathe in.
The pull under my side answers.
I breathe out.
“Fine,” I say.
Coach’s eyebrow lifts.
I correct myself. “Yes.”
“Better.”
“I remain opposed to morning meetings.”
“Noted.”
“Strongly opposed.”
“Also noted.”
Lena hands me a fresh heat patch. “Use this after breakfast. And Emily?”
I look at her.
“If pain spikes above agreed category, you report it. Not after the rep. Not after the half. Not after you’ve decided whether the timing is convenient.”
I make a face.
She waits.
“Yes,” I say.
Coach looks satisfied in the annoying way of women who have cornered you with your own standards.
“Team room in fifteen,” she says. “We address this once, cleanly.”
My stomach tightens. “The whole team?”
“The defensive unit first. Then full team availability plan.”
“I don’t want this becoming a meeting about my body.”
“It won’t,” Coach says. “It will be a meeting about how we defend the next match with accurate information.”
There it is again.
Accurate information.
I am beginning to suspect honesty has a branding problem.
Breakfast is worse than the medical review because breakfast includes other people pretending not to look like they care.
No one stares.
That is how I know they have been warned.
My teammates are very bad at not staring. Usually, if someone changes her hair part by three millimetres, half the room notices and the other half creates a theory. This morning, they are aggressively normal.
Too normal.
Marta complains that the oatmeal is cement.
Our keeper says cement has more texture.
A midfielder tries to trade a banana for peanut butter and gets rejected by three people.
Ava sits across from me, kicking my shoe under the table once.
I look at her.
She mouths, Functional.
I mouth back, Menace.
She smiles into her coffee.