The Price of Discretion #2
“If you strain that joint with a sudden twist this afternoon, you could make the injury irreversibly worse,” she warns me, taking a decisive step that invades my personal space until I can almost smell her perfume.
“And then all your so-called effort to be the best will have been for absolutely nothing.”
“If I don’t play, I’m just a very expensive burden racking up medical bills for the team,” I retort, and the words come out of my mouth with such bitter harshness that they lay bare, unfiltered, one of my deepest fears. “A center forward who’s sidelined is of no use to anyone in this industry.”
The silence that follows my confession is piercing. Clara stares at me intently for several seconds, and I notice how the hardness in her dark eyes gradually softens, revealing a compassion that disarms me.
“What you’re saying isn’t true, Alicia,” she says at last, and her voice drops so low that it sounds almost like a breeze in the middle of a storm.
I let out a dry laugh, devoid of any hint of humor.
“Of course it is. I’ve been in soccer long enough to have seen it happen to teammates who tore their ACLs. And I’m absolutely certain that you, in your medical career, have seen the same thing I have.”
She doesn’t answer me, and her silence—so analytical and laden with unspoken truths—leaves me defenseless.
That’s why, precisely because I don’t know how to handle that truth, I step onto the field that very afternoon.
Out of pure wounded pride. Out of panic at the thought of failure.
Out of that almost sickening, self-destructive need to prove to the club, to Hugo, and to myself that I’m still the same person I’ve always been.
The afternoon practice gets off to a smooth start.
Or, at least, that’s what I force myself to repeat mentally during the first twenty minutes of possession drills.
The field is fast and damp from last night’s storm; the cold English air clears my head of ghosts; and the simple act of sprinting with the rest of the group has an almost addictive quality.
The ball glued to my cleats, the sensation of regaining my speed as I run, my body responding purely on muscle memory…
For a few idyllic moments, I feel once again that everything is damn simple and possible.
Until my luck runs out all at once.
It happens during a routine play, on a sudden, sharp, instinctive change of direction to shake off the center back marking me.
I plant my left foot too hard, my cleat sinks into the mud, I twist my torso too soon, and a brutal, sharp pain shoots through my knee like a clean, savage electric shock.
I have to come to a screeching halt instantly.
All the air in my lungs gets trapped in my throat.
I don’t take a dramatic tumble onto the grass or let out a scream of pain worthy of a newspaper front page.
It’s just that terrible, silent, eternal second in which my mind processes the gravity of what just happened.
I rest my palms on my knees, leaning forward and breathing with excruciating difficulty as the purest, most viscous fear creeps up my chest. Around me, I begin to hear a murmur of distant voices.
Footsteps rushing toward me. The coach shouting my name.
A couple of teammates approaching, looking concerned.
But it’s Clara who breaks ranks and reaches my side before anyone else, first-aid kit in hand, as if she’d been anticipating this disaster ever since we walked into the gym that morning.
“Sit down on the ground right now, Alicia,” she orders me with an unyielding firmness that brooks no argument. Her face is taut with tension.
“I’m fine, damn it… I just landed awkwardly,” I lie through gritted teeth, my jaw clenched so tightly that my teeth ache.
“Alicia, for heaven’s sake, please don’t make it worse,” she pleads with a hint of desperation that throws me off balance.
“I said I can keep training…”
“I said sit down! Now!”
And I end up sitting down because, even though I’m terrified and hurting, I still have that absurd, inexplicable need to obey her above all else.
She examines my joint right there on the field, with that icy, analytical focus she uses only when she’s deeply angry and worried to death at the same time.
The worst possible combination for my nerves.
She doesn’t say much. With impeccable professional detachment, she asks for an ice pack right away, secures it tightly with a compression bandage around my swollen knee, and exchanges four terse words with Hugo before grabbing my arm to take me straight back to the medical area of the sports complex.
The heavy door to the rehabilitation room slams shut behind us, and immediately, the facade of composure crumbles as she launches into her drill-sergeant lecture.
“You should have used your head and said no to Hugo the moment he asked you!” Clara exclaims suddenly, turning around, her face flushed with rage and her whole body tense to the point of unbearable strain.
I plop down onto the examination table and clench my fists, trying to hide the tremor in my leg.
“I don’t need your blessed permission to decide when I’m ready to play, Clara. I’m a professional player, not a little girl.”
“No, what you urgently need is a massive dose of common sense, maturity, and prudence,” she insists, standing a foot away from the exam table with her eyes flashing.
“Come on, don’t blow things out of proportion—it really wasn’t that big of a deal,” I reply, though I’m fully aware that I’m treading on dangerously slippery ground.
She turns toward me quickly, closing the physical distance between us.
“Don’t blow things out of proportion? Do you really have the nerve to tell me I’m exaggerating?
” Her voice rises several octaves, filling the room.
“I don’t know how long you’ve been doing this—blatantly lying to every doctor who’s treated you.
What you have is serious, and if you keep this up… you might not be able to play anymore.”
The silence that settles between us next becomes sharp and cutting, like the blade of a scalpel. I feel my pulse quicken.
I sit up slowly on the examination table, staring her down with wounded pride.