The Captain's Secret

She runs a recorder she has already tested three times. She runs a pitch she has been rehearsing since three in the morning. She runs a silver bracelet around her wrist until the metal digs in. And she runs, constantly and quietly, from a father twelve years dead who still finds her in rooms like this one. *You're not here to make friends.* The press room smells of stale coffee and the particular optimism that only exists in places where men throw themselves at each other for a living. Fluorescent lights hum overhead and cast everything in institutional yellow that makes even fresh paint look tired. Freya arrived forty minutes early, which means forty minutes of stalling. A season-long profile on the club. Behind the scrum cap. The human side of professional rugby. That is what she told her editor, and Margaret looked at her over the rhinestone-chained reading glasses and let her have it. What Freya does not say in the pitch meeting is that she already knows something about the captain that nobody in this building has printed. Callum Reid held his daughter for the first time in a hospital corridor, and the nurse handed her over like she was something breakable. He had not held anything smaller than a rugby ball in his adult life. Calloused hands, scarred, the tip of one finger missing to a training accident years before. What follows: a door he swore he would never open, a girl who knows considerably more than the adults think, the weight of one lie carried by three people, a man who would very much like to be king, a drive containing something she should never have been given, and a threat that arrives in the shadows rather than the post. *They're good biscuits.* *Damn right they are.* He will put walls around the two of them with his own hands if that is what it takes. But his daughter has been lied to enough by people who meant well, and the woman who came here to write about him has a recording that settles nothing and proves everything. Somebody is going to be told the truth in this book. Nobody is promised forgiveness for it afterwards.