Page 33 of Last Line of Defense

And that’s precisely why—out of pure pride as a forward and an almost obsessive need to break out of this isolation—I fire off my reply before she has a chance to speak up.

“I’m 100 percent ready and dying to play, Coach. I need to get back into the flow of the team right now. I’m climbing the walls in this gym, and I’m dying to touch the ball on the field.”

Hugo claps his hands together, visibly satisfied and relieved to have his star player back.

“That’s the attitude I wanted to hear! Excellent, Alicia. Well, I want to see you in your uniform on Field Three at four o’clock sharp. And don’t even think about being late.”

“I’ll be the first one there, Coach—you can count on it,” I confirm firmly.

As soon as the door closes behind Hugo, the silence that settles over the rehab room becomes so thick, heavy, and laden with reproach that I can barely breathe. I remain seated on the mat, feigning complete calm as I adjust my elastic bandage with exasperating slowness, trying to ignore the fact that Clara’s eyes are piercing the back of my neck.

She’s the first to break the silence, and she does so in a tone that exudes a lethal mix of concern and frustration.

“You shouldn’t have said yes. You know perfectly well that you haven’t been medically cleared to train at full intensity,” she murmurs, taking a step toward me with her fists clenched at her sides.

“Well, wouldn’t you know it, that’s exactly what I did, and the coach is already counting on me,” I reply, meeting her retort with practiced calm.

“Alicia… I’m being completely serious. Don’t turn your health into another one of your stupid games of provocation. This isn’t the time to test your limits against me,” she scolds me, and I can hear her voice trembling slightly with rage.

I jump to my feet, ignoring the faint warning twinge in my knee, and stand just a few centimeters away from her, looking her straight in the eyes.

“This has nothing to do with you, Clara. I need to be with my team on the field. I can’t stay cooped up within these four walls for even one more day, feeling like a useless burden.”

Clara crosses her arms tightly over her chest, shielding herself behind her rigid posture, while her expression hardens.

“What you call feeling useless, I call the biological healing process. You need to let your knee heal and not push that damn left leg just to satisfy your stupid ego and prove to the world that you’re made of iron.”

“But I need to play, Clara!” I insist, raising my voice, feeling the desperation burn inside me. “If I’m not out on the field scoring goals, what’s the point of me being here at this club? What’s the point of anything else?”

“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…”