Chapter 1: The summer off
The silence in the penthouse was a physical thing, thick and heavy, broken only by the soft hum of the city twenty floors below. Juda stood at the floor-to-ceiling window, her forehead resting against the cool glass. The neon glow of the city painted sharp lines of blue and pink across her sharp features. In her hands, she absently traced the edge of her phone case. It was too quiet.
For ten months of the year, this space was filled with the chaotic, beautiful noise of a six-year-old boy—the thump of a football against the leather sofa, the earnest chatter about dinosaurs, the warm, sleepy weight of him against her shoulder after a nightmare. The off-season always felt like a limb had been removed.
The electronic chime of the door lock disengaging was soft, but she heard it. She didn’t turn.
“He’s asleep,” Erling’s voice came, a low rumble that vibrated through the spacious room. “Fought it for about twenty minutes. Something about needing to explain his new tactical formation to me one more time.”
A smile touched Juda’s lips, small and private. She finally turned. He was leaning against the archway to the foyer, his frame impossibly large against the clean lines of her home. Dressed in simple dark jeans and a grey hoodie, he looked less like a global icon and more like… just a dad. A very tired one. His blonde hair was escaping its tie, a few strands falling over his forehead.
“That’s your fault,” she said, her voice quieter than she intended. “You bought him that tactics board.”
“He’s got a better mind for it than most of my teammates.” Erling pushed off the wall and walked into the living room, his movements effortless. He stopped a few feet from her, his gaze sweeping over her face. “You okay?”
“It’s too quiet,” she admitted, crossing her arms. “I know the deal. Sixty-forty. I get him during my season, you get him during yours. It’s logical. It works.” She shrugged one shoulder, a gesture that felt helpless. “Doesn’t mean I like the handover day.”
“I know.” He didn’t offer empty platitudes. He never did. That was one of the things she’d always valued. The honesty between them, even when it was brutal, was a foundational stone. “His bag is by the door. His stuffed shark is in there. He tried to hide it under his pillow so he’d ‘forget’ it.”
The ache in her chest tightened. “Sneaky.”
“Takes after his mother,” Erling said, and the ghost of a smile played on his mouth.
The space between them hummed. It always did on these nights. The business of co-parenting was done—the schedule confirmed, the school projects discussed, the doctor’s notes handed over. What remained was the history, a live wire buried just beneath the polished concrete floor. They were experts at not touching it.
“You’re going to Spain?” he asked, moving to look out the window beside her, his shoulder not quite brushing hers.
“Yeah. Mum, Dad, Jobe. A villa near Marbella. Two weeks of sun and my mother trying to feed me until I burst.”
“Good. You look tired, Juda.”
“Pot, kettle.”
He acknowledged this with a slight dip of his head. “He’ll be fine. We’re going to the cabin in Norway. Lots of trees to kick a ball against. Lots of fish he won’t catch.”
“Send pictures.” She said it to the reflection in the glass.
“Always do.”
Another silence, this one stretching, pulled taut. She could feel the heat radiating from him, could smell his familiar scent—clean soap and something uniquely, essentially Erling. It was a scent that had once been as familiar as her own, a scent that still had the power to dismantle her composure piece by piece if she let it.
“I should go,” he said, not moving. “Early flight.”
“Right.”
He turned to face her fully then, and she had no choice but to meet his eyes. They were a calm, impossible blue. He looked at her the way he always did—like he was seeing every layer, the legendary Ballon d’Or winner, the fiercely private mother, the stubborn woman he’d once loved in a series of hotel rooms across Europe. The woman he maybe still loved. It was all there in his quiet gaze.
He didn’t try to hug her. They’d long since established that some lines were too dangerous to cross. Instead, he reached out and gently tapped the back of his knuckles against her arm, a brief, solid contact. “Enjoy the quiet. For a few days, at least.”
“You enjoy the noise.”
He gave her one last, long look, then turned and walked toward the door. She listened to the soft sounds of him shouldering their son’s duffel bag, the click of the latch, the final, hollow sigh as the door closed behind him.
The silence rushed back in, louder than before.
The Spanish sun was a forgiving brute. It warmed her bones, which still carried the deep-seated chill of a long English season. The villa was beautiful, all white stone and climbing bougainvillea, perched above a slice of the Mediterranean that glittered like shattered sapphire. Her parents were dozing on shaded loungers. Her brother Jobe was, predictably, not still for a moment.
“Come on, live a little!” Jobe called from the edge of the infinity pool, his phone held aloft on a gimbal. “The people demand content!”
“The ‘people’ can demand a therapist,” Juda muttered, but she was smiling. She was on a wide yoga mat on the patio, the tiles warm beneath her palms. She was wearing a simple black athletic bikini, functional, not fashionable. Her body was a tool, and maintenance was non-negotiable. The frog stretch was a deep, specific opener for her hips and groin—a crucial routine for any footballer, but essential for one who pushed her body against men who were, on average, thirty pounds heavier.
She settled into the position, focusing on the burn in her inner thighs, the pull in her hips. The world narrowed to breath and sensation. She heard Jobe chattering, his voice a cheerful, distant backdrop.
“...shout out to everyone tuning in! Yeah, family vacation. No, she’s ignoring me. Typical big sister behavior...”
Juda tuned him out. She closed her eyes, sinking deeper into the stretch, her knees splayed wide, her heels pressed together, her torso folded forward. It was a intensely vulnerable pose, but here, in the private villa with only family, it was just mechanics. Just maintenance.
She had no idea Jobe’s phone, on its wide-angle setting, had panned slowly across the stunning view, before coming to rest, for a solid fifteen seconds, with her squarely, clearly in the center of the frame.
The first notification was a Twitter mention. Then another. Then her Instagram DMs started pinging. Not the usual fanfare, but a rapid, building firecracker string of them. She was lying on a sun lounger, a book open on her chest, when her phone began to vibrate with an insistent, alarming frequency.
Frowning, she picked it up.
A headline from a sports gossip blog: “IS JUDA BELLINGHAM SENDING A SIGNAL?”
A screenshot, blurry but unmistakable. Her, in the black bikini, caught in the deep, contorted frog stretch. The angle from Jobe’s livestream made it look even more extreme. The comments below the screenshot were a torrent, a dam breaking.
“Okay wow. That’s… a lot.”
“Respect the athleticism but damn, that’s next level.”
“What is she even doing? That looks ridiculous.”
“Y’all are weird. She’s clearly just stretching. Footballers do this.”
“Since when does ‘stretching’ look like that? That’s for OnlyFans, not the pitch.”
“The caption is killing me: ‘Juda’s new penalty routine?’ LMAO.”
“Erling Haaland seeing this and booking the next flight to Spain.”
“Why is she doing that in public? Have some class.”
“She’s on a private patio with her family, you moron.”
“She knows exactly what she’s doing. Always so ‘perfect.’ This feels calculated.”
“The internet is gross. Leave her alone.”
“That’s the most flexible I’ve ever seen a human. Sorry, but it’s impressive.”
“This is going to be everywhere in an hour.”
Her blood ran cold, then hot. A familiar, metallic taste flooded her mouth—the taste of control, slipping away. She sat up, her book tumbling to the tiles. She could hear Jobe laughing in the pool, still oblivious. Her thumb scrolled, faster and faster, watching the conversation spiral, mutate, twist an utterly mundane moment of physical therapy into something sordid, something to be dissected, mocked, and lusted over.
The pristine, scandal-free reputation she had built with meticulous, years-long care was cracking wide open in real-time, over a fucking stretch. And in the quiet of her own panic, a single, terrifying thought crystallized.
Erling is going to see this.
The phone felt like a live grenade in her hand. The notifications kept coming, a relentless digital drumbeat against her palm. Jobe’s laughter from the pool cut off abruptly.
“Jude?” he called, his voice suddenly unsure. “My phone’s blowing up. What did I…?”
She couldn’t answer. She was already striding into the villa, the cool marble a shock against her sun-warmed feet. She locked herself in the pristine, silent master bathroom, leaning her back against the door as if to hold the world at bay. She opened the apps she hated.
It was worse than she’d imagined.
The clip wasn’t just circulating; it was being dismembered. Slowed down, zoomed in, set to provocative music. Screenshots of the most vulnerable moment—her body bent in that specific, profound stretch—were splashed across forums and timelines with captions that ranged from stupid to vicious.
FootballersLockerRoom (a private forum, screenshots leaked):
YoungWinger_10: BRO. BELLINGHAM. WHAT.
MidfieldMaestro_8: I’d get a red card on purpose.
GK1: Show that to my physio and tell him that’s why my groin’s strained.
VeteranCB_4: Knock it off. She’d still nutmeg you twice before you blinked. Show some respect.
YoungWinger_10: Respect is all I’m feeling! That’s the mother of my future kids right there.
Public Twitter was a stratified hellscape.
One thread was a forensic debate on the biomechanics of the pose, which was almost dignified. The rest was a sewer.
@FanGirl44: So Erling Haaland let THAT go for his current GF? The math isn’t mathing. #Upgrade
@TruthTellerXX: People praising Erling for “being a good dad” like he’s a saint. Nah. He saw that and knew he had to lock it down with a baby. Now I get it.
@HaalandHive: LEAVE ERLING AND HIS GIRLFRIEND OUT OF THIS! He moved on from that attention-seeker for a reason!
@FootyHistorian: The contemporary discourse around Juda Bellingham—a three-time Ballon d’Or winner—reduced to speculating about her ex-partner’s sexual motivations based on a stretching routine is a sociological tragedy. And deeply misogynistic.
@AnonymousTroll: She wants everyone to look. “Private” vacation but her brother is live? Please. She’s calculated. Always has been.
Juda’s breath hitched. That attention-seeker. Moved on. Let THAT go. The words blurred. It wasn’t about the stretch. It was about the narrative, a story she hadn’t written being forced into her hands. They were dissecting her relationship with Erling, their family, their quiet, carefully built peace. They were dragging the most precious part of her life—her son’s origin—through the mud with a crude, knowing wink. Now I get it.
A fresh, different shame washed over her, hot and cloying. Not for herself, but for him. For their boy. For the beautiful, private truth of them that was being twisted into something cheap and sensational.
Her phone buzzed. A call. Not Erling. Her agent, Margot. The ringtone was a klaxon.
She swiped to ignore.
It buzzed again immediately. A text from Margot: Don’t say a word. To anyone. We’re managing this.
Then, a second later, a new notification. This one, a direct message on Instagram. From an account she didn’t follow. A photo of a tabloid cover from two years ago, a grainy shot of her pregnant, holding a coffee, with a headline screaming “HAALAND’S SECRET BABY MAMA!” The user had drawn a crude arrow pointing to her stomach with the message: worth it.
She dropped the phone. It clattered on the marble, the screen facing up, still glowing with malice.
A soft knock on the door. “Juda?” It was her mother’s voice, gentle, worried. “Darling? Jobe told me. Open the door.”
Juda didn’t move. She stared at her reflection in the vast, mirror-lit wall. The greatest female footballer in history. A legend. Reduced to a meme, a debate, a punchline, a reason a man was being pitied or praised. The steel in her spine felt like it was bending.
In a quiet Norwegian forest, the light was a soft, perpetual gold. The only sounds were the river and the thud of a football against the side of a rustic wooden shed.
Erling was on his knees, his large hands carefully untangling a fishing lure from his son’s hair. “Hold still. Almost got it.”
“Papa, when can we fish?”
“Soon. After we—“
His own phone, lying on a tree stump, began to vibrate. Not a call. A rapid, successive string of message pings. Then another. And another. It was the sound of a world intruding.
He frowned, finishing with the lure. “You go get the rod. The red one.” The boy scampered off.
Erling picked up his phone. He had a group chat with some of his national team mates, mostly silent during the off-season. It now had 127 unread messages. He opened it.
The first image loaded.
It was Juda.
He knew the pose. He’d seen her do it a thousand times in physio rooms, on hotel room floors, in the corner of a gym. It was a part of her landscape, as normal as her braided hair. But seen here, out of context, framed by a holiday patio and a sparkling pool, it looked different. It was intimate. It was hers.
The messages scrolled up, fast.
Martin: Erling. My friend. What.
Arne: You never mentioned the secret weapon!
Kristoffer: Please tell me you have a video of her doing that in your living room.
Anders: That’s just disrespectful to post. Poor Jude.
Martin: Disrespectful? It’s a masterpiece. Erling, you absolute legend. How did you ever leave the house?
YoungerPlayer: SIR. I need training tips.From you. Specifically on how you… trained.
Erling’s jaw tightened. A slow, cold fury began to gather in his chest, a sensation far more dangerous than any on-pitch aggression. This was her. This was Juda. And they were talking about her like she was a clip in a highlights reel.
He exited the chat. He opened Twitter. It was a cascading waterfall of the same image, the same conversation, but louder, meaner, dumber. He saw the “how could he give that up” tweets. He saw the “now I know why he gave her a baby” comments. His vision tunneled, the green of the forest greying out at the edges.
The sheer, ugly violation of it coiled around his lungs. They were talking about his son. Their son. They were reducing the most profound thing in his life—the creation of a family with the most formidable person he’d ever known—to a crude punchline about a sex position.
The quiet love he carried, the protected history, the tender, complicated truth of them, was being stomped into the dirt by a million anonymous feet.
He didn’t think. He tapped Juda’s name in his contacts and put the phone to his ear. It rang once.Twice.
He could hear his own blood pounding.
She picked up. No greeting. Just a shallow breath, waiting.
“Juda.” His voice was low, a gravelly rumble that held the weight of the fury he was clamping down.
“You’ve seen it.” Her voice was flat. Hollow. That hollow sound was worse than any anger.
“I’ve seen it.” He paused, choosing words like stepping stones across a torrent. “Are you safe? Are you at the villa?”
“Yes. Locked in the bathroom.” A brittle, humorless laugh. “Classic.”
“Where’s Jobe?”
“Being lectured by Mum. He’s… he’s devastated, Erling. He didn’t mean…”
“I know.” He looked over at their son, now triumphantly holding the red fishing rod. He lowered his voice. “It doesn’t matter what he meant. It’s done.”
A beat of silence stretched, filled with the thousands of things screaming to be said. The shared humiliation. The protectiveness that threatened to crack his ribs.
“The things they’re saying,” she whispered, the steel in her voice finally showing a hairline fracture. “About… about why we had him.”
That was the crack that split the dam.
“Listen to me.” The command in his tone was absolute, the one he used on the pitch when everything was chaos. “They know nothing. They are nothing. Their words are dust.”
He heard her take a shuddering breath.
“I’m coming,” Erling said, the decision solidifying as the words left his mouth.
“What? No. You have him. You’re in Norway. It’s your time.”
“I’m bringing him with me.” He was already walking toward the cabin, his mind mapping flights, security, logistics. “We’re not letting them steal this. Our time. His holiday. We’re finishing it.”
“Erling—”
“They want a show?” he interrupted, the calm in his voice now deadly. “Fine. They’ll get a show. Of a family. On our terms.”
He ended the call, his gaze landing on his son’s curious face. The internet saw a scandal. Erling saw only the front line.