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"Mi hijo," Mama sighs as she comes into the living room.

In one hour, I need to go to the courts for my divorce. It's my fucking birthday and I should be celebrating, being happy. Instead my mouth tastes of last night's vodka and this morning's regret, stale and sharp at the back of my throat. I've spent nearly the whole year on the bench, supposedly I'm lucky that Real Madrid didn't cancel my contract.

There's just one year left to go.

And I can see that it's going to be the longest year of my life.

"We need to get going."

I nod my head, not facing her. We meaning the whole family and more. My two brothers, their wives but not their kids. My cousins, aunts and uncles. The joy of being Spanish is the fact that we all stick together, even when I don’t deserve it.

Elena used to help me with my drinking. She used to help me with a lot of things. Mama always said that she was too good for me, but I didn't realize how good she was for me until it was too late. Until she left, and I have no means of getting her back.

Today I have to face her, and it's one of the hardest things that I've ever done. My family have a big mouth. Hers even bigger, but not one of them have let on where she is. I don't know if she's still in Spain or gone back to Manchester where we were living for four years before we came back home.

I suck in a breath as if it's my last and then hang my head down low.

"Hold your head up high," Papa says. I can smell the whiskey on his breath from where I'm standing, thick and warm and sickeningly familiar. As I've done so many times before, but now it turns my stomach.

"Can't you be sober for once?" I ask.

"Don't speak to your father like that. He's coming to support you."

And there it is. The reason why I never want to come back to this house. Mama defending him, making him feel like the hero that he isn't.

He sold me out to anyone who would get me a contract just so I could pay the bills, because the old man was too drunk to do so. He was drinking the booze that they should have been selling in the bar they once owned. His antics drove away most of the customers. The good ones. The paying ones. And kept the hangers on, the type you don't want to attract in a bar, just so that they could get free drinks from him. They knew once he had one too many whiskeys it would be on the house. And they loved that. A long hard day's work rewarded by a drunk man's generosity with money that wasn't his to give.

"Jorge. Come." My sister Belen says it quietly, standing in the doorway with her coat already on, her eyes doing that thing where she's disappointed but won't say it directly. She has said it so many times out loud already.

Remember Papa. Remember what we went through as kids. Why do you want to be like him?

The truth is I can't stand the sight of him. He reminds me of everything I don't want to be, but for some reason I've ended up being like him anyway. The man I love to hate.

I sigh as I grab the letters, the ones I've written to Elena every week since we've been apart. Forty-something envelopes, sealed and unread, stacked with a rubber band around them. I've never written to anyone in my life, but I remember her reading a book once, P.S. I Love You by Cecelia Ahern, telling me it was the most romantic thing in the world. I remember the smile on her face when she finished it, her brown eyes lit up, her pale skin flushed with something warm.

I tried.

I read somewhere that the best thing to do was to write what you know, so the first letter was about football. The words came easily then, filled the page without effort. But the next time I tried to write about love, about how I felt, nothing came. I sat at the kitchen table for an hour staring at white paper.

I kept trying anyway.

"I'll give them to her," Belen says, snatching the letters from my hand. Her and Cecilia, who is Elena's sister, are best friends. But they both refused to tell me where Elena has been, as if the one woman I've ever truly loved disappeared from the face of the earth.

It's strange. Since we started dating, I’ve always known where she was. Even when I was away at training camp or she was visiting family in Cádiz, I always knew. And now for a whole year, nothing. It sits in my chest like a bruise that won't fade, dull and constant, the kind you forget about until something presses on it.

As we leave the house and move into the cars waiting outside, the morning sun is already brutal, bouncing off the white walls of the street and making me squint. The village is quiet at this hour. A dog barks somewhere. A woman hangs washing from a balcony above us and doesn't look down. The world is carrying on completely indifferent to the fact that today I lose her for good, on paper and in every way that counts.

I've always been confident in everything I've done. Getting into my dream team. Moving countries. Going down on one knee. Even standing at the altar and watching her walk towards me in white, certain I was the luckiest man alive. But divorcing her, that's something else entirely. I don't feel brave. I don't feel like the man who fought his way onto that pitch from nothing. I feel hollowed out, shaky in a way no amount of training has ever made me, and it makes me reach for a bottle just to steady my hands.

It does the job.

But it doesn't stop a man from knowing that the one woman he's ever loved has had her heart broken.

And that he was the one who broke it.

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ELENA