Chapter 5: The Unanswered Questions
The Manchester rain was a different kind of cold. It seeped into the bones, a persistent, damp chill that the heated floors and floor-to-ceiling windows of his new penthouse couldn’t entirely defeat. Erling stood before one such window, a weight in his hand. His phone. The screen glowed with a familiar, agonizing view: Juda’s Instagram profile.
User not found.
It had been like that for three weeks. The black hole where her online presence had been felt like a physical void. A month. It had been a month since the night in her apartment, a month since he’d walked out to the hum of a sleeping city, a month since the most seismic transfer window of his career had hurled them to opposite poles of the footballing world.
He was a Blue. She was a Madridista.
The public narrative was one of triumphant destiny. Privately, it felt like a fracture. They’d texted, of course. Stiff, careful messages orbiting the gigantic, unspoken thing between them.
Hope the settling in is ok. Manchester’s wet. J
Madrid is hot. Training pitch is insane. Miss our sessions. E
Sessions. He’d called what they did on the pitch ‘sessions’. It was cowardly. He knew it. He’d typed out a hundred different openers. About that night… or We need to talk about the lack of pastries… or the terrifyingly direct I woke up still inside you. He deleted every one. How did he start that conversation without it seeming weird? Without risking the one real connection he had? So he said nothing. The silence became a wall, brick by brick.
Meanwhile, Juda, in a sun-blasted Madrid apartment that felt too large, was trying to solve a biological mystery. The timeline was a cruel puzzle. The night with Erling was branded into her, but the chaos of her life then—the farewell parties, the travel, the disorientation of the pending move—left foggy edges. Had there been that brief, disastrous date with the Spanish tennis pro the week before? The one where she’d left early, annoyed? Could it have been…? No. Her body knew. It wasn’t a logical certainty, but a cellular one. Every time she thought of the potential father, her mind whispered his name. But the doubt, however faint, was a venomous seed. She couldn’t accuse the world’s most famous striker of impregnating her on a maybe.
Then, the fatigue became more than jet lag. The smell of the otherwise divine Spanish tortilla her chef prepared sent her sprinting to the marble bathroom. The club’s mandatory pre-season medical was inevitable.
The Madrid clinic was all cool, sterile efficiency. She sat on the crinkling paper of the examination table, the thin gown absurd against her athlete’s frame. The Spanish team doctor, a kind-faced woman, reviewed the initial bloodwork.
“Your HCG levels are quite elevated, Juda,” the doctor said, her tone neutral, professional.
Juda’s world narrowed to the woman’s lips. “What does that mean?”
“It typically indicates pregnancy. We’ll need an ultrasound to confirm, but the blood test is very reliable. Did you… suspect?”
The hum of the air conditioning became a roar. The scent of antiseptic wiped out all memory of spiced cologne. She saw the smear on her sheets. The empty bed. The abandoned pastry box. A domino chain of consequences falling in perfect, silent sequence.
“No,” Juda lied, her voice distant. “I didn’t.”
The ultrasound gel was shockingly warm. The grainy, black-and-white image on the monitor was abstract, a nebula of static. Then the doctor pointed, a small, pulsing flicker in the chaos. A rhythmic, impossibly fast whoosh-whoosh-whoosh filled the room.
“There’s your baby,” the doctor said softly. “Strong heartbeat. Measuring right at eight weeks.”
Eight weeks. The math was mercilessly exact. It lined up with painful precision. The mystery was solved. There was no other candidate.
The drive home was a blur. She stared at the printed ultrasound photo, a slip of paper that weighed more than any trophy. A person. A secret. Erling’s secret. Theirs.
Her agent was already yelling about branding opportunities in her ear, her phone buzzing incessantly with congratulatory messages about the Real Madrid signing. The noise was unbearable. The gap between her public triumph and her private reality was a canyon.
That evening, she made two decisions. The first, alone in her silent living room, was to keep it. The thought was not a dramatic epiphany, but a slow, settling certainty, like dust in a sunbeam. This was not a problem to be solved. It was a path to be walked.
The second was to disappear. She called her manager. “I need a personal leave. Indefinite. A physical strain, need time to recover,” she said, her tone leaving no room for debate.
Then, methodically, she opened each social media app. Instagram. Twitter. TikTok. She deactivated them all, one by one. The process felt like applying a tourniquet. The world’s chatter, the speculation about her sudden move to Madrid, the prying eyes—it was cut off. A silent, digital void. No leaks could be made about her pregnancy if there was no trail to follow.
She powered off her public phone, placing it in a drawer. She kept only a private, encrypted one, its contacts list terrifyingly short. She looked out at the Madrid night, her hand resting on her still-flat stomach. The city glittered, oblivious. She was utterly, profoundly alone with the ticking clock and the ghost of a man who had, for one reckless night, forgotten to be just her friend.
She was utterly, profoundly alone with the ticking clock and the ghost of a man who had, for one reckless night, forgotten to be just her friend.
The solitude didn’t last. Her body made sure of that. First, it was just the nausea, a constant rolling sea she learned to navigate with crackers and ginger tea. Then, a new, hard curve beneath her navel, a firmness her fingers traced with a scientist’s curiosity and a poet’s dread. By the fourth month, her tailored training wear wouldn’t zip. Her rapidly changing shape was a fact she could no longer rationalize to her physio as post-transfer bloat.
She scheduled the meeting in the club director’s office, a room smelling of leather and old money. “I’m pregnant,” she said, the words clean and sharp in the air. “I need time off.” The director, a former midfielder with eyes that missed nothing, leaned back in his chair. The silence stretched. Then he nodded, once. “Your spot is yours when you’re ready,” he said. “The club supports you. Just tell us what you need.” The relief was so violent it felt like nausea all over again.
Her apartment became her world. She ordered groceries online, did yoga on the balcony at dawn when no one could see, and watched her body transform into something foreign and powerful. She thought of Erling constantly. The phantom scent of his cologne on her sheets had long faded, replaced by the neutral smell of clean linen and the subtle, metallic scent of her new prenatal vitamins. She drafted a thousand texts. You’re going to be a father. She deleted them all. The connection felt severed, a cable cut by distance and her own terror of his reaction. What if he thought she was trapping him? What if he demanded a test, lawyers, a discreet payout? The imagined scenarios were more exhausting than the pregnancy itself.
The birth was twenty-seven hours of focused, animal effort. No one held her hand. In the final, roaring moment, there was only her breath and the voice of a Spanish midwife urging her on. Then, a sharp cry. A warm, wriggling weight on her chest. He had a shock of fine, dark hair and lungs that promised a formidable strike. She named him Leo. For no one but herself.
The first three months were a hazy cycle of milk and murmurs and his small, starfish hand clutching her finger. She felt split in two: one version a soft, consumed creature of the night, the other a coiled spring of muscle memory dreaming of grass and flight. She’d strap Leo to her chest and do slow, deep squats in the living room, his head lolling against her heartbeat. “We’re getting strong, little man,” she’d whisper, the words a promise.
Her return to Valdebebas training ground was staged like a military operation. A private entrance, a changed schedule. Her teammates knew, of course. Rumors had slithered through the squad, but the respect was absolute. Her first day back, the captain, a veteran defender with a scarred eyebrow, just tossed her a ball. “Show us if you’ve forgotten how, guapa,” she said, a challenge in her smile. Juda trapped the ball with a touch so quiet it was a secret, flicked it over an imaginary opponent, and volleyed it into a distant empty net.
It was like she hadn’t taken any time off at all. Her body remembered everything. The powerful drive from her thighs was still there, channeled now from carrying new weight. Her spatial awareness felt sharper, honed by months of anticipating a baby’s needs. She was still the powerhouse she was, but with a deeper, more patient kind of ferocity. The club’s physios monitored her with a blend of awe and professional pride. “Your core is terrifying,” one told her, shaking his head after a strength test.
She kept her private life a vault. No pictures, no hints, no mentions in post-match interviews. Leo was her sanctuary, his existence known only to a tight inner circle: her live-in nanny, her brother, and her manager. She absolutely loved the dichotomy. The roaring stadium was one universe; the quiet bedtime story in her guarded Madrid home was another, sweeter one. The support of her teammates, who asked no prying questions but simply covered for her in drills and celebrated her goals with genuine fervor, became the scaffolding of her new life.
She was scoring a brace against Barcelona when she saw him. In the VIP section, a blonde head towering above the rest. Erling. Their eyes met across sixty yards of manicured grass and screaming chaos. The world dissolved into a silent, humming tunnel. He looked utterly wrecked. Her feet kept moving, her body performing the dance, but her mind was back in a sun-drenched bedroom, feeling him wake up inside her. The whistle blew for halftime. She didn’t celebrate. She just walked toward the tunnel, her heart a frantic drum against her ribs, feeling his gaze like a physical touch on the back of her neck.