I hadn’t left my room the night before. After leaving the bathroom in the lobby, I’d locked my door and barricaded myself inside. When Freddie had pounded his fist on the other side and begged me to come talk to him, I’d stared at my wall and prayed he’d go away. I needed him to go back to Caroline and leave me alone. It would make it so much easier for me to squash my delusions. I needed him to cut me off cold turkey.
But he was messaging me constantly. Every time I looked down at my phone, I had a new text from him that I had to delete. Since he wasn’t going to leave me alone, I did the next best thing: I googled Caroline Montague incessantly. For hours, I sat on my bed—alternating between icing and heating my wrist—and scrolled through articles about the English socialite. There was no shortage of information about her. I read up on everything from her fifth birthday party (her family had thrown a lavish affair at her family’s country castle) to her sweet sixteen (in lieu of a party, she’d asked friends to donate gifts to the children’s hospital in London). Honestly, it would have felt very good to find some salacious gossip or a mug shot after a drunken night out on the town, but instead of skeletons in her closet, TMZ only reported that she was pleasant to everyone she encountered.
At first, I didn’t believe it. Every celebrity poses for feel-good photo-ops every now and then, but with Caroline, they didn’t seem staged. She didn’t even have her own social media accounts. The stories were spread from the people she met—the surprised children, elated to have gifts from Caroline on Christmas Eve, or an elderly woman who intimated that Caroline had helped her shop for groceries each Saturday morning for the past five years.
I forced myself to read every article there was about her, including one about her betrothal to Freddie. It’d been posted recently, only three weeks before Freddie’s arrival in Rio. The reporter highlighted the fact that the setup was a bit old-fashioned (even by British standards), but that “it was an earthly formality only meant to celebrate the match that had so clearly been made in heaven”.
I wanted to paint Caroline as the villain. It would have been so nice to hate her, but by the end of the night, I felt nothing nothing but confusion and sadness: confusion over why Freddie didn’t love Caroline—for god’s sake, after internet stalking her for a few hours, I was willing to toss my life aside and marry her myself—and sadness, because, at the end of this all, one of us was going to end up brokenhearted.
“Ready, Andie?”
I turned to find Lisa standing a few feet from the training table, looking fresh-faced and ready to get to work. Her black polo nearly matched the color of her eyes as she assessed my wrist. I’d been icing it for the last fifteen minutes, but it was time to start my training session for the day.
“No rest for the weary.”
She nodded. “Let’s have a look at it. Sit and scoot back.”
I followed her directions and propped myself up on the leather table. She came around the side so she could unwind the wrapping as gently as possible. The bruising was already more faded than the day before.
“Tell me when it starts to hurt,” she said, turning the wrist slowly counterclockwise. “I’m trying to get a feel for the mobility.”
She kept going, working my hand in different directions and applying varying amounts of pressure before I finally couldn’t take it.
“There.” I winced.
“Okay.” She nodded. “Your doctor sent over your x-rays. In his email he recommended that you sit out for the rest of the Olympic games…?”
Her black eyes darted up to me for confirmation, but I shook my head.
“Well that was his recommendation, but I have a different plan.”
She reached beneath the trainer’s table for a blue elastic band. “Is that so?”
She seemed amused, which was a first. From what I’d gathered during our training sessions, Lisa wasn’t someone who laughed easily.
“Yes. I know my body and I know how far I can push it.”
“So you think you can play in two days? Isn’t that when your next game is?”
I bit my lip, thinking over her question. I hadn’t been able to put any pressure on my wrist the day before, and it’d only improved slightly overnight.
“Okay, not that game,” I relented. “But definitely the final.”
“When’s the final?”
“Next week.”
She scoffed. “You’re asking for trouble.”
I leaned back. “So you’re not going to help?”
Her dark eyes met mine. “Oh no, I didn’t say that. If you’re willing to put in the time, then so am I. I’m not saying you’ll be ready for the final game, but together, we can try.”
I smiled. “All right. What first?”
She tossed the blue elastic band at me. “This thing. And rest assured, you aren’t going to like it.”