Her eyes went flat. The flatness so stark it shone under the lights. “Why is that so wrong? Look at you, you ended up on the pitch eventually, didn’t you? I guess our legacies aren’t as easy for us to get away from as we want.”

“Except I actually love football. I wasn’t forced into it because it’s my legacy.”

She looked like he had hit her. He wanted to take his words back. He wanted to turn back time. He wanted to run for his life.

She’s just a girl I dated in high school.

And he was a bloody liar.

A bloody liar who was in so much trouble.

“You didn’t always love it,” she said so quietly he almost imagined it coming from inside his own head. How hard she had fought to bring him back to it. In the end her betrayal had done what her love hadn’t been able to.

“You’re right. I did lose my love for it for a while.”

“How did you find your way back to it?” she asked. It was a question with so many other questions rolled into it, he wasn’t sure how to answer.

In the end honesty felt like the best path. “When I tried to play in high school here, everything felt like a legacy, like every single thing I did on the pitch said something about my pai, and I just couldn’t do it. But when I found myself on the pitch after . . . after I went to England, I didn’t give myself a chance to think. At first everything was automatic. Coded into me since I could barely walk. Then I realized that it had never been just me on the pitch until then. My pai had always been there with me. I had so much to learn, so much to unlearn, and when I embraced that, suddenly, for the first time the game was mine.”

China walked in with her crew and Ashna blinked away the storm in her eyes at his words. They were led into the interview studio, where they proceeded to answer the usual barrage of questions. How special it was to be here. How special it was to form a bond with each other (a bond between strangers!). How food was nourishment not just for bodies but for souls, and so on and so forth. He filled the silence with sound bites. She did the monosyllables.

“When did you know cooking was your passion?” the interviewer asked her, and the layer of misery at her core rolled to the surface.

Her lips stretched, desperate for a smile. “I . . . I always . . .”

“I’m so glad she’s passionate about it, because I’ve always been terrified of the damn thing,” Rico drawled with a wink. “I mean, she literally had to walk me through the churro in baby steps. I still managed to mess it up.”