“Lia?” Cerys’ voice sounded on the other side of the door. “If you’re in there, open up.”
Surprise bloomed in Lia’s chest. She crossed to the door and pulled it open. “What are you doing here?”
“I thought you might need a friend.” Cerys was dishevelled—her shirt was on backwards, and she had on odd socks, suggesting she’d dressed in a hurry. She famously needed ten hours’ sleep every night to be at her best and had no doubt been in bed when the story had broken. “Your phone was off.”
“I needed a breather.” Lia crossed her arms across her chest, like she could hold herself together. But she knew that with Cerys’s sympathetic eyes on her face, she was seconds away from opening the floodgates. From sinking into all of the things she’d tried so hard to bury.
“It was Hannah, wasn’t it?”
Lia couldn’t manage a nod before the first of the tears fell.
In an instant, Cerys was on her, pulling Lia into a hug and closing the apartment door behind her.
“I’m sorry.” Lia buried her head in Cerys’s shoulder. “I know I should have told you in New York, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t want to talk about it. Think about it. Please don’t hate me.”
“Oh, baby.” Cerys held her tighter. “I could never hate you.”
Lia’s tears soaked into Cerys’s worn T-shirt, but she refused to let Lia go when she tried to move away. She held her close and let her sob. Cerys’s warmth comforted her, as did the thud of her friend’s heartbeat beneath her ear.
“What can I do?” Cerys said once Lia’s tears had dried and she’d dragged her over to the couch.
Lia wiped her cheeks with the sleeve of her sweatshirt before lolling her head back to stare at the ceiling. “I just want to forget all about it. Not that that’ll be easy now. Everyone will be talking about this at training tomorrow. Probably for the next week. And they’re all going to ask me about it. Maybe I should’ve kept my mouth shut, not told the board.”
“You did the right thing, Lia. Even if it doesn’t feel like it.”
“It’s not like I did it for the right reasons. I wanted to wipe that smug smile off Carol’s face.”
Cerys squeezed her leg. “It doesn’t matter why you did it. What matters is that she’ll never be able to do it again. And everyone knows how smarmy she is.”
“They didn’t even try to hide it. But it still took me weeks to see it. Weeks to realise why Hannah didn’t want to spend any time with me. Why she wouldn’t touch me. I thought there was something wrong with me.” Ever since stumbling across the evidence of Hannah’s infidelity, Lia had kept this all bottled inside. “And then I saw them together, and it all clicked.”
“No wonder you wanted to leave. I can’t believe you kept this all to yourself, Lia. It must’ve been so hard.”
With a shrug, Lia avoided Cerys’s concerned gaze. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. And that’s okay.” Cerys kept her voice soft. “If you need to take some time—”
“I don’t.” A break was unthinkable. “That is the opposite of what I need. I need to be busy. I need to play. And it’s not exactly affecting my game, is it?”
Cerys bit her bottom lip. “No, but it might not have hit you yet. Not really. And when it does…”
“I’ll be okay.”
Still, Cerys didn’t look convinced. “If you say so. For what it’s worth, I’ll try and keep the team off your back tomorrow. Shanice will help with that, too. Don’t worry about that as well as everything else.”
“Thanks, Cerys.” Lia rested her head on her shoulder. “You’re a good friend.”
“I know.”
Lia laughed. She felt better now that things were out in the open. And whatever happened over the next few days, she knew Cerys would have her back without question.
Chapter 8
The last Wednesday of the month was Albion’s official team bonding night.
Erin supposed she should be glad that it was only once a month—unless Shanice felt like they needed to spend more time together. But that tended to happen if things weren’t going well on the pitch. Luckily, they were. Albion had won their first three games, scoring eleven goals and conceding just one. Lia, to Erin’s disgust, had racked up six of those goals and was already the out-and-out leader in the race for the Golden Boot.
Though every game she was forced to watch from the sidelines made her ache, Erin was glad her team were at the top of the league.
