Room Enough for Three (Seattle Emeralds #4)

Chapter 1

Natalia

The hum of the air conditioning is always the same. I’ve heard it in S?o Paulo, in Lyon, in Manchester, in New York. The language on the signs changes. The curtains change. The sea changes, or the missing sea, on the other side of the window. The sound doesn’t. It’s almost identical everywhere.

Eleven years sleeping in hundreds of hotels with the same sound.

Now it’s Florida’s turn. Preseason. I’ve been with the team three days, and last night, before I fell asleep, I tried to count how many of my teammates I could recognize from behind. I only got to six. I fell asleep hunting for the seventh.

This isn’t how I pictured landing at the Seattle Emeralds. The truth is I never pictured landing here at all. It wasn’t in any of my plans.

But a reporter got in the way. A conversation the cameras didn’t catch, and a shove they did. Four seconds of video that went around the world. An assault with none of the audio that explained it.

I pull the pillow over my head. I’m not going to think about that at five thirty in the morning.

What came after is tidier, because people signed it in an office.

Lawyers, agents, the kind who know contracts and clauses.

A four-game suspension. A trade for one of Seattle’s players that on paper said mutual, though there was nothing mutual about it, nothing at all.

And a clause my agent agreed to without asking me, because asking me was apparently too much.

Twice a week I have to report to the club’s training fields to help coach a team of eleven- and twelve-year-old girls.

As if I were a good role model.

I still don’t get why they signed something like that. But there it is, on paper, my name under it.

Like my grandmother would say, it is what it is.

***

At eight in the morning, at breakfast, the whole team looks like it’s had too much coffee, and some of the players slide from English to Spanish without a hitch. I stand there a few seconds with my tray, working out where to sit so I bother the fewest people.

But I barely get the chance.

“Iwis, no, no, I’m fawwing! Look, iz Nata!” a little kid yells from across the dining hall, and before I can work out that this “Nata” is me, a player with a blond ponytail barrels toward me at full speed. She’s got a boy hanging off her neck like a sack of potatoes, laughing and shrieking.

Iris Vance. Her I recognize. Everybody recognizes Iris.

“Oh man, Brazil, quit hiding in the doorway like you’re fresh off the plane. You’ve been on the team three days, that excuse doesn’t fly anymore.” She sets the boy on the floor in front of me. “This is Wesley. Boss, say hi, she’s on the team.”

The boy studies me with a seriousness that doesn’t match his round face. He’s four, tops. Then he sticks out his arm and tries to hand me a piece of banana he’s squeezed in his fist until it’s basically mush.

“Iz foh you,” he announces.

“No, no, thank you so much, I’m not hungry,” I say fast, freeing one hand from the tray in case I have to keep him from getting any closer.

Iris crouches, takes the kid’s head in both hands, and buries her nose in his hair. Then she closes her eyes like she’s breathing in something crazy expensive.

“Pure magic,” she murmurs. “Here. You smell him.”

“I’m good, thanks.”

“No, no, no, you have to smell him, Brazil. I’m serious, it’s a ritual. We all do it. Pure magic.”

“I really am fine,” I insist.

“Brazil.” She’s not joking now. She looks dead serious. “You’re not fine. I can see that. But we’ll fix that another day. Today all I’m asking is that you smell the boss.”

The boy lifts his face and watches me, patient. So I shrug, because there’s no way out, lean down, and fake a sniff.

“Nata, you smell weiwd,” the kid says, wrinkling his nose.

“What?”

“Weird. He means weird. Don’t take it personally, this year he says it to everyone,” Zoe Méndez explains. I played an international match against her a while back, and she drove us crazy with her passing.

Wesley looks at me again and goes quiet for a bit, like he’s deciding something important.

“You’we Nata,” he declares, and runs off to sit with another player.

Nata. At clubs I’m Costa, or Costa Oliveira. When I play in Europe or Brazil, I’m Natalinha. Nobody has ever called me Nata.

“He likes you,” Iris says, with a slow nod. “And the boss has great taste in deciding whether he likes a new player, so congrats. Eat something, come on, you’re skin and bones, and Hades is taking us to the beach today.”

***

And sure enough, Hades takes us to the beach.

A run on the hard sand, down by the shoreline, sun still low and the water gone orange. Then a technical session on the grass at the sports complex next to the hotel. Rondos, transitions, a small-sided scrimmage.

I play well. More or less. Nothing you’d frame on a wall, but solid. I don’t cough up the ball on dumb touches, I get where I need to get. In Brazil I learned to stand out to survive, and I’ve spent half my life learning to adapt to new teams.

Diana Creed watches me all morning, though she doesn’t say a single word to me.

At first it makes me nervous. Then, watching her correct the others, I start to see how she works.

If Hades corrects you, it’s because she thinks you can get better.

Sometimes she does it screaming, like she might murder you any second, but she’s fair.

If she watches you in silence, she isn’t blowing you off.

She’s studying you. She’s deciding what you’re capable of before she spends any breath on you.

I finish practice soaked and with no idea what she makes of me, though I suspect she liked what she saw.

***

At night, they set up dinner on a terrace, long tables with a view of the hotel pool.

Alexandra Drummond, the general manager, stands up with a glass and gives a speech.

She talks about family, about the project, about high standards, about the legacy of the Emeralds.

It’s a fine speech, corporate, the kind you forget while you’re still hearing it, not so different from the ones I’ve sat through other years at other clubs.

To my right, Iris mutters something I don’t quite catch. Next to her, a player I think is named Tina spits half a sip of champagne onto her napkin and has to smother the cough. Drummond shoots them an annoyed look, though Iris makes a face like she never said a word.

To my left is Mireya Guerrero.

Mireya didn’t need an introduction either.

For two weeks I’ve been reading my name and hers in the same sentence, in the same articles.

Both signed from outside, both stuck proving the same thing.

Costa Oliveira or Guerrero? Like we’re two options on a menu.

Like there’s only room for one of us on the field.

We don’t talk much. At some point during dinner, I reach for the bread basket, and she passes me a piece before I can ask.

“We’re going to play on different wings,” she tells me under her breath, like she has information the rest of us don’t.

The second I get to my room, I open the laptop and call Bianca.

She picks up on the third ring. She’s in the kitchen of her place in Belo Horizonte, a TV going behind her and someone’s voice. Julia, I’m guessing.

“How are you?” she asks when she sees me.

“All good.”

She looks at me through the screen a second longer than normal. She’s twenty-two and sometimes she looks at me like she’s seventy.

“You’re not okay,” she sighs.

“I’m fine, Bianca. Really. Tired from the travel and the training, but fine.”

I know she doesn’t believe me. I know because I know her, and because she’s been lied to plenty and has learned to tell when what she’s hearing is true. But she doesn’t push. Bianca learned a long time ago not to push, and that’s the part that hurts me most.

We talk for ten minutes about everything and nothing. The Florida heat, the Belo heat, a player on her team who got hurt. When we hang up, I sit a while with the closed laptop in my hands, on the bed, staring at the ceiling and listening again to the hum of the air conditioning.

I’m about to kill the lights when someone comes down the hall, stops dead in front of my door, and pounds on it.

Iris pokes half her face in when I open. She’s in sweats, barefoot, and for some reason I can’t figure out, holding a toothbrush.

“Okay, Brazil, one quick thing and I’m gone.

” She talks a mile a minute, like she’s late somewhere, though I don’t think she’s late anywhere.

“Tomorrow you train better, yeah? You left two balls behind you in the scrimmage today. Don’t think I didn’t catch it, I catch everything.

I tell Hades I need glasses, but that’s a lie.

For this coach, leaving a ball behind you is a felony, worse than showing up late, and showing up late is bad, trust me, I know from experience, I’m a repeat offender.

If someone steals the ball off you, you have to sprint after her like she just grabbed your phone, even if you’re faking it.

Anyway. That’s it. Night,” she adds before she goes.

She heads off down the hall barefoot, not waiting for an answer.

And a smile slips out of me.

It slips out without my meaning to, in a hotel room identical to every other hotel room I’ve been in, in so many cities, listening to the same hum of the air conditioning.

I think it’s the first time I’ve smiled since I left my old club.