Page 65 of Try Hard

“I’m sure you loved that,” she muttered darkly, her voice half hidden in a sip of tea.

I decided to rise above and ignore the comment. “So, yeah, it’s a little complicated, to say the least.”

“Trying to figure out that the woman you like likes you too while desperately hoping Sophie doesn’t want her?”

“Ugh.” I pressed my face into the top of Herc’s head. “I guess? It feels like I’m messing things up for Soph if I’m into Ophelia.”

“Youareinto her.”

“Thank you,” I deadpanned.

“You’re welcome,” she shot back with a smirk.

Where had my sweet, sympathetic mum gone? As if I hadn’t known this side of her all my life.

“But, what if Ophelia’s into Soph? I wouldn’t want to get in the way.”

“Fia was Sophie’s mentor,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t think she ever once entertained the idea of being with her.”

“Well, she’s not her mentor now.”

“True, but Sophie’s not the one she’s spending most of her time with. And it’s not like Sophie is difficult to find. You don’t have to know Fia well to know she’s a go-getter. If she wanted to see Sophie, she would.”

I chewed my lip, Herc’s soft scent filling my nose. I didn’t know if that was true in interpersonal relationships but, for everything else, it was. Ophelia knew what she wanted and she worked hard for it, never letting it go. She’d always been like that. So focused and dedicated. It was one of the reasons I’d been right when I told her our teachers loved having her in class.

“Besides,” Mum said, her voice a little more aloof, “it’s not like Sophie is hurting for prospects.”

“And I am?” I laughed.

She looked at me with narrowed eyes. “I think you’re hurting even less than she is, but you don’t want them. You want Fia.”

“Right,” I sighed. “Just got to hope she wants me too.”

“She’s going to watch rugby for you. The last time I saw her at one of your games, she seemed pretty smitten to me.”

I blinked rapidly, my brain spinning. “What? When did you see her at a game?”

Mum smiled in that mercurial way she sometimes did that told me she’d been keeping something from me for a long time. “One of your last matches in year thirteen, a couple of months before you headed off to university. Mr. Albenoch was chatting to us beforehand and Fia walked by with a friend. He stopped her and introduced us briefly because she was Sophie’s peer mentor. Embarrassed the poor girl by pointing out how much everyone would miss her and how much she’d helped Sophie.”

“So… you just watched her instead of my match?” I asked, feeling dizzy. I hadn’t known Ophelia attended any of the games. I’d seen her out in the yard sometimes in the mornings, loosely observing practice as she chatted with her friends and drank her mint hot chocolate, but I hadn’t thought she’d been interested. The fact that she watched me play was… revolutionary.

Mum laughed, clearly amused by the world-changing revelation I was experiencing. “No, I watched the game, but she was sitting in my line of sight—kind of—and I noticed how rapt her attention was when you were on the pitch.”

“And you never told me that?”

“I didn’t know it was relevant at the time,” she laughed, apparently unclear on just how vital that piece of information had been. “I just thought she was one of your first smitten fans. It was cute. I remember knowing that day that your time was coming, that the stands would one day be filled with people swooning over you exactly the way she was. And I was right.”

I let out a strangled breath. The latter part was sweet, and I could tell how much that moment had meant to her, how much she’d believed in me, even back then—hell, she’d been believing in me my whole life, no matter how many people told her women’s sports weren’t a career, or how I’d never get anywhere real with it, that she should have put me in ballet instead. But she’d always believed.

That, however, did not detract from the fact that she’d known Ophelia was there and, apparently, she’d been watching me like she was…smitten?

“Why didn’t you tell me when I called you crying about having missed my shot with her?” I asked, a little outraged.

She gave me a doubtful look. “How on earth would that have helped? You were distraught over the poor girl. Pointing out that you really had missed your shot because she’d had a little crush on you too wouldn’t have been productive.”

I froze, my mouth open to reply, when I realised she was right. I hadn’t had an easy way to contact Ophelia then. It would have been achievable but it would have come off as creepy and desperate. And we’d both moved on from Eddlesworth with our lives. I’d assumed she was happy and thriving at uni. She hadn’t needed to hear from some random girl from her secondary school.

“Argh,” I whined. “I cannot believe this.”