No, no, it’s fine. Really, love. Ashley has a game after school anyway.

Oh come on, you’re not staying for that.

I am, I want to.

She gripped my shoulder and looked into my eyes as the afternoon bell rang. Don’t be a martyr, yeah? If you need to take a couple of days, just talk to Valeria.

After school, I found a quiet place in the bleachers on the back field. It was just a friendly match with the nearby Catholic school, not part of the regional tournament or anything, but I still tried to catch as many of Ashley’s games as I could. It was usually when I did my marking, and when I didn’t have marking, I brought a book. I got through all of Anna Karenina last season. I liked the cadences of a game: the shouting, the whistle trills, the colliding storm fronts of colour. I couldn’t care less about sports. It still confounded me that my daughter, who shared a part of my soul, somehow ended up a jock—and yet with none of the compensatory pleasures of being a lesbian.

I was pretty sure she saw me sitting in the stands, but she didn’t acknowledge me. She usually waved or stuck out her tongue. I wondered if word had reached her about my little episode in class. Surely she wouldn’t hold that against me. As the game went on, I really did get the sense that she was ignoring me. I began to get in my head about it. I was probably just exhausted and out of sorts. I stayed a little longer until I decided not to make her any more awkward by lingering around, looking so haggard, and I slipped out. I had never left a game of hers early before. As I walked to my car, I wasn’t sure if she would be hurt or relieved when she noticed, and I wasn’t sure which pained me more.

Paul and Ashley basically took opposite approaches to dealing with my ‘condition,’ as they started calling it. Paul became increasingly doting and protective, cooking meals, arranging medical appointments, buying noise-cancelling headphones. Ashley pulled right away. Her selective acknowledgement of my existence continued days after the game until the point where she began completely blanking me as she passed in the school halls. The first time she did it, it felt like she’d stabbed me with a steak knife. My behaviour in class and around the school was evidently becoming a topic of conversation, and she was punishing me. I began going to significant lengths to engineer my movements through the building to avoid encounters with her. It became completely untenable.