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Maeve wants to cook something special for Adriana tonight.

Using food to show how sorry she is, her gratitude for her friend, and hopefully put them both in a good mood to talk.

So Maeve has spent hours choosing and painstakingly making a new recipe from scratch – a galette with a handmade pistachio paste.

She had made the pastry herself the night before, grateful for the distraction from her heartbreak.

The photograph accompanying the recipe had a galette with intricate pastry flowers as decoration so, despite having never worked with pastry before, Maeve had tried to make those too, snapping at herself when she messed some up.

Now, she opens the oven to check in on the pastry and sees the flowers have all lost the shape she’d worked so hard to painstakingly create. She starts tearing up at the sight of the burnt blobs.

She knows it’s ridiculous to cry over pastry, but Maeve feels like she can’t do anything right at the moment. She had just wanted to do something nice for her friend, but this feels like a bad omen for the evening.

On the table is a little bowl of homemade hummus with a platter of vegetables and breadsticks to dip.

Maeve’s stomach has been rumbling, but she has left it perfectly untouched for Adriana’s arrival.

She checks her phone again. Adriana is fifteen minutes late, now, which isn’t that unusual because time-keeping isn’t one of her strengths, but she’d normally at least message.

She checks Adriana on Find My Friends. She seems to be… at a bar round the corner from their training grounds. And unless the dot hasn’t updated, it seems like she’s still there and hasn’t even left.

Maeve feels her face flush and the tears welling again. She removes the pastry blobs entirely, throwing them in the bin.

By the time the doorbell goes, Maeve has tried to waft away the smell of charred pastry blobs.

Maeve tries not to be upset that her friend is thirty minutes late for the dinner she put a lot of effort into preparing for them, that she didn’t bring the pudding she promised, or that she smells of alcohol.

But it certainly doesn’t make her feel any better.

Maeve tries her best to act like everything is normal, but the two of them hover awkwardly in Maeve’s doorway.

‘Let me take your jacket,’ she offers. She would never normally formally request her friend’s jacket, for heaven’s sake.

Normally Adriana strides in and flops straight on the sofa, or helps herself to anything from Maeve’s fridge, or strips her bra off to be more comfortable.

Now Maeve feels like a butler, or a stranger, meeting a version of her oldest friend she doesn’t recognise.

‘Did you go somewhere for drinks after training?’ Maeve asks.

Maeve intends the question to sound casual, but then Adriana looks shifty and, clearly lying, snaps, ‘No?’

‘Oh,’ Maeve pauses, trying to give her friend the benefit of the doubt. ‘So what did you get up to after training today?’

Adriana looks round the room. ‘I just… went for… a walk.’

‘Okay,’ Maeve nods.

She wonders if she should be worried about Adriana lying about drinking – for a second her mind flashes with worries of her friend having an alcohol dependency, that that’s the big secret she hasn’t been telling her – knowing too that Adriana’s brother had struggled with drinking a few years ago, and Adriana had helped encourage him to attend his first AA meetings.

But, she thinks, with a sinking feeling, perhaps it’s more likely at the moment that her friend is lying to her about going for drinks with other members of the team because she knows Maeve wasn’t invited and she doesn’t want to make things more awkward than they already are.

She turns to the oven to hide her face. She feels like she’s back at secondary school, the girls bullying her by avoiding her, pretending she didn’t exist and they couldn’t hear her, not inviting her to any social events.

They would say loudly to each other in her earshot that they didn’t want a ‘dirty lesbian’ at their parties, even though now several of those girls are openly queer themselves.

She’s been carefully trying to keep the galette warm on a low heat in the oven. It’s now dried out, but she tries to zhuzh it a little with some more olive oil to make it edible. Maeve gestures to her to sit down and eat the hummus platter. Adriana sits but then, just gnaws at her thumb.

‘Did you want a drink?’ Maeve offers. ‘I have that rosé you like. Or white? Or–’

‘I’m actually all good, thanks,’ says Adriana. Well, at least it’s reassuring for Maeve’s ‘is Adriana a secret alcoholic’ theory, but it doesn’t help with the terrible atmosphere in the room, the strange silence between them hanging heavy in the air.

‘Music!’ Maeve suggests. ‘I’ll put some music on! Would you like to DJ?’

Adriana shakes her head. Maeve feels her disappointment start to overwhelm her. It’s bad enough to turn up late and lie about where she’s been but now can her friend not at least try to make some effort with her?

Maeve puts on a playlist Spotify suggests for her, ‘Dinner Party With Friends’, feeling silly when the jaunty pop starts playing.

Maeve says their food will be warm again in a minute, and Adriana thanks her politely, like she’s just her waiter.

They sit in silence, Adriana avoiding eye contact, drinking some water, checking her phone.

Normally Adriana is so good at setting people at ease, even strangers. Is Maeve really so awful that she’s being punished like this? By her oldest friend too? She thought she’d already apologised and they would be able to move on from her behaviour at the club the other night. This feels horrible.

Maeve makes an excuse for needing the loo, then looks at her reflection to give herself a pep talk.

Because it isn’t just Adriana, is it? It’s her too. She feels like a wounded animal, hurt by Kira seducing her so intensely and then dropping her, hurt by seeing Adriana with Jacob, hurt by Coach Hoffman and Jacob telling her that she’s not meeting the standards they expect..

She feels so overwhelmingly sure that she isn’t good enough. Not good enough for her friend, for Kira, for the team, for her mother, for anyone. She slaps her own cheek, trying to wake herself up from this pity party.

She goes back to the kitchen to serve up their food, cutting a careful triangle of galette each, with a fresh salad on the side, and brings it through to Adriana. The plates and crockery are all from a set which Adriana bought her years ago from a charity shop – all with pink cartoon cows on.

Adriana picks up a pink cow pattern fork, and spins it, gnawing her lip. Maeve wonders if she should have, what, bought different crockery?

Then the song changes, and ‘Murder on The Dance Floor’ starts playing.

The two of them glance up, unable to help catching each other’s eye. The song was always played as the final song at the Football Academy end of season ‘discos’, where they had all screamed over the chorus making it ‘Murder on “Zidane’s” Floor’ in homage to Zinedine.

It gets to the chorus now, and, unprompted, when it gets to that line, they both sing along, saying Zidane.

They laugh quietly with each other. The tension in the room dissipating enough to finally be with each other.

‘Hey,’ says Maeve quietly.

‘Hey,’ says Adriana. And Maeve realises that her friend looks as terrified as she is.

‘I’m so sorry,’ Maeve blurts out. ‘I don’t know exactly what I’ve done to upset you but I do know I have been a terrible friend recently. I’m– I haven’t been… I haven’t been doing so well.’

Adriana swallows, her eyes softening as she reaches over to take Maeve’s hand, but now Maeve is finally saying what she’s been holding back she can’t stop herself.

‘And I think I find it really hard to admit that, so I just sort of, withdrew. From you, from all of it. I have been so focused on this–’ she shakes her head again. ‘This captaincy obsession, and… tonight, you know Coach wanted to speak to me? With… With Jacob Astor?’

Maeve studies her friend’s face as she says Jacob’s name.

Adriana’s face flushes red, and she looks down at the galette she’s poking around her plate.

Maeve leaves a gap to see if Adriana wants to take the opportunity to talk about the nature of her relationship with Jacob, but she doesn’t.

Adriana just sucks on her empty fork. Maeve sighs, a little hurt she didn’t take the chance, but continues.

‘They… They said that I’m not meeting their standards. Said if I want any chance of being renamed captain, I need to improve immediately.’

Adriana’s head jolts up to her in surprise. Maeve knows her friend, she’s not that good an actor. Even though something is going on between her and Jacob, he’s clearly not told her about this.

‘But why ?’ Adriana gasps. ‘You’re one of our top players?’

Maeve sighs, bowing her head. ‘Because of Kira. Because of the way that she and I… Because I’m…’

Maeve’s throat feels so dry and like it’s tightening. Being punished by the team mingles with her heartbreak at Kira not wanting to see her anymore. ‘Kira hates me now, maybe she always did, and I’m meant to be okay with her but she is the one who…’

Maeve swallows down her tears, covering her face in her cow-print napkin.

Adriana goes and hugs her at last, and Maeve can’t stop a few tears spilling onto her friend’s shoulder.

But she pulls herself back together, hardly, not letting herself fully give way to the emotion.

While she’s trying to stem her tears, Adriana goes back to her seat and takes a long sip of water, watching her.

She seems to be choosing her words carefully.

‘Kira isn’t as untouchable as you think, you know,’ says Adriana. ‘I don’t know what was going on with you two. But whatever you said to her on that night out, or whatever it is you’ve been saying to her in your one-on-ones… She was really upset, Maeve. Really genuinely upset.’