“Our connection didn’t matter before, and it matters even less now.” She pressed herself into the wall behind her. “It’s the other things. Our lives, how the world has been to us. That’s the distance that’s too far for us to reach across. I mean, look at you. You’re one of the greatest athletes of our time. You’re on magazine covers, Rico! You’re on calendars. Grown women drool over you. Grown men weep when you score a goal. And I’ve barely left my restaurant in ten years.”

“This is about my work? About the way I look? You think I care about any of that? You see the way women look at me, but you don’t see the way I look at you? I can’t look away from you, Ash!” He leaned back into the front door, a desperate move.

The black of her irises was so wide and deep, so clear he could dive into it and disappear. “Your eyes . . . for twelve years your eyes have haunted me. The way they look at me, all the way into me, the way they make me feel like I’m home, finally. Sometimes when you look at me the way you do, I can’t move, I can’t breathe, I can’t feel myself as separate from you. How can you do this? Those years we spent together, how can you call them false?”

“I’m not. They weren’t. But you met me when you were grieving, when you weren’t yourself.” Her voice hitched as though she’d just figured out some big Eureka-moment truth. “Oh God, even now you’re vulnerable, in pain, grieving the loss of work you love.” She pressed a hand to her mouth. “That explains so much.”

He pushed his hands through his hair. He’d grown the bloody thing out because he’d been so lost after losing her that he hadn’t remembered to cut it. After his first big win for Sunderland the rubber band holding it back had broken and he’d shaken it out, and the action had become a post-win ritual, a talisman for the fans. “So what? So something in the universe knows to bring me to you when nothing else works. Isn’t that something? Only you, Ash. Why isn’t that enough?”