7 September, the year before
Leesa
Some people go out with a bang – they hit that final round number: 50 wins! 100 wins! Break a record. Wild cheering and bike wheels raised in tribute.
I went out flat on my back, in throbbing pain under a grey sky, a stone windmill at the edge of my vision, the striped sails rotating listlessly in a half-hearted salute to my lacklustre career in road cycling. An anticlimax was all I’d earned in ten years of racing.
No records broken – just a bone, I was pretty sure. My left wrist had that stabby pain, my nerves screaming that something was very wrong. The usual twisty pain flared through the rest of me, sharp enough that I didn’t want to move, even to check if my arm was still on the correct angle.
Mud spatter had made it inside my mouth, tasting of rotten life forms, moss and iron. Or maybe the iron was blood. Supporters wildly waving cardboard signs at the side of the road had caused a split-second lapse in concentration from the rider in front of me and we’d all gone down. ‘Wheel contact’ it was called, although ‘asphalt contact’ felt more appropriate to the burning scrape on my hip.
So this was it. The end. I wouldn’t even be able to finish my last race from this position halfway down an irrigation ditch, with only one functioning arm. My final result: ‘did not finish’. I could imagine those words on my tombstone.
The sails of the windmill flickered and went blurry and for a second Iwantedto pass out, to get through this next part unconscious. It was easier than accepting that I’d failed. A cool drip at my temple revealed why my vision was blurred and that was worse. I couldn’tcryabout a stupid sporting career. I had my whole life ahead of me: graduation, internship, a good job with a decent salary.
This sport had chewed me up and spat me out, a muddy, bloody mess in a ditch on the last day of my last race. I never wanted to touch a bike again – didn’t want to see the faces of my teammates. Crap, now I was thinking about the others – Bonnie and Doortje,Lori– my vision wasn’t just blurry, but swimming. I was letting them down.
‘Leesa!’
Urgh, that voice. I didn’t want to hear it in my moment of self-pity, even if his tone was genuinely alarmed, rather than the usual mocking drawl.
‘Leesa!’ It was louder now, shocking me into lifting my head. Bad idea. I couldn’t pretend I was unconscious any more and it hurt like hell. That, and I made the mistake of looking at him, the golden boy of the men’s team, who played juvenile pranks and screwed up spectacularly on occasion but still managed to be universally popular.
Lori’s little brother.
His face was closer now, hovering above me. ‘The medics are coming. Stay still, ay? We’ve got you.’
Fingertips under my chin released the helmet strap and I could breathe a little easier. Was this one of his sick jokes? Or was I truly unconscious and my brain was tormenting me with images of the guy who’d once slipped blue food dye into my oatmeal.
‘Hang in there, sweetheart.’
Sweetheart?I couldn’t be entirely conscious. Surely I was imagining him – the gentle fingers at least?
‘Colin… Gallagher?’
‘That’s me,’ he said, his voice smooth. ‘Shhh.’
This was a prank gone wrong – surely, like the time he’d hidden a Bluetooth speaker in the room I was sharing with Bonnie and played ‘Baby Shark’ in the middle of the night. He thought this was funny, right? Showing up just when I was crashing out of my life?
‘What thehellare you doing here?’
Chapter 1
Leesa
Get a good education, a steady job and make your own happiness.That’s what my parents had been telling me since I was old enough to understand the words – in English and Polish, since they’d insisted on speaking both all through my childhood. The education part I’d finally managed after a decade of part-time study around my race schedule, but the other two? A long way off.
Eight months into my transition from women’s elite cycling to normal life and I couldn’t say it was going well. After two rounds of surgery and physio, my wrist was completely healed, apart from a knobbly purple scar. I couldn’t say the same for my spirit – or my bank balance.
I was living in a tiny room in a tiny apartment in Pasadena – and even those precarious developments could all come crashing down in a few weeks when my internship came to an end, shortly followed by my sublet.
When my parents were my age, they’d both qualified as doctors, moved to the US to set up their practice and had a baby on the way. All I had to show for myself at nearly 30 was one competitive – but ultimately demoralising – career and the beginning of another, transitioning from sports into sports marketing, neither of which paid much at the bottom rungs, I had discovered – at least not for women. And while I appreciated I was lucky my mom and dad had helped out with college fees, I still had a student loan the size of their crushing expectations.
Maybe I should have taken their advice and enrolled in pre-med, but I’d been inspired and wanted to walk my own path – or rather, cycle it, before I’d quit all that once and for all. That inspiration was supposed to serve me well in my internship at Redwin, a prestigious sports marketing agency in LA, but after four months of being dismissed as inexperienced and performing mind-numbing, repetitive tasks for others – not to mention the sad fact that inspiration doesn’t pay the bills and neither does an intern’s salary – that well was empty too.
My feet were heavy as I arrived at the office one morning at the end of April. Even the trophy wall in the reception area, with framed photos of previous campaigns in professional and grassroots sports – even the campaigns directed at women that usually got me in the chest – couldn’t shift the chip on my shoulder.
I was out of cash and would soon be out of time, unless Redwin offered a real job at the end of the internship. So much for being school valedictorian, a bachelor degree summa cum laude from NYU and a masters from Rice – plus the intelligence test results in my medical file that my parents strictly forbade me from ever mentioning outside the family but talked about constantly between themselves.
