We decide, quite logically, on a starting point. Manuel's information is useless – except for how it shrouds the mystery in more darkness than I had anticipated and has, in fact, spurred me on.

I bring her back to my apartment, though she somewhat leads the way seeing as she visits her mentor often enough to have the location memorised. I tell her about the box of letters, and how it is physically quite flimsy but somehow the heaviest thing in the world to me. Of course, her first question is about my failure to read them. My hesitance to answer, which mirrors exactly how I feel about the actual box, explains it all.

Hand-in-hand, we climb the flight of stairs to my door. Marta is out – her exact whereabouts were not revealed to me when she hurried past me this morning – and the apartment has been left in its usual state: her mess collected in heaps in the corners, only marginally getting past the hygiene rule. Clàudia is amused by it. This place is very different to the home she lives in.

"I've never been here before," she says as I fill up a glass of water for her, gesturing for her to make herself comfortable somewhere. She pushes a dirty plate to the side, leaning on the worktop.

"You can see why." I laugh. "It's not too bad. She cleans up." At her sceptical eyebrow raise, I add, "eventually."

"I have to meet Marta properly. She seems great."

The thought of that makes me shudder, though I am not entirely sure why. Clàudia drinks her water, gulping it down as if the walk was really a hike through the mountains, and I decide that I cannot stand looking at the kitchen any longer and lead her to my bedroom.

She laughs again, this time at how bare it is.

"We definitely cannot have sex on this," she says, plopping down onto the mattress with a giggle. The springs groan under her weight, and my sheets are beginning to pull off the edges already. "Looks like Patri will have to find some reasons to leave our apartment. Maybe she can walk her birds."

"Can you even walk birds?"

It is the most stupid thing I have ever heard.

She thinks about it for a moment. "I don't know, but she could try. It would give us the place to ourselves."

"You're planning activities that you haven't yet invited me to." She smirks, which is her way of asking. The blush that she annoyingly incites is her answer. "Alright, pack it in. Just moments ago you were raving about always wanting to have been a detective."

Reminded of the reason she is even here in the first place, she sits up straighter, eyes wide with excitement.

"Is that it?" she asks, nodding towards the box I had pushed to the edge of my room. I like to stare at it before I go to sleep, imagining that it holds the key to everything in the world. Or I am simply Pandora in a Greek myth, and I am going to unleash chaos. Perhaps either is welcome, because life would be boring without a little bit of drama (and that drama is not going to be about my sexuality anytime soon).

I gulp at the thought of having to try to lift the lid once more, slightly embarrassed that Clàudia will see such a pathetic display of mental strength. Slowly and with much apprehension, she gets off my bed, walking towards the box with a determination akin to crossing the finish line of an important race. A walking race.

She brings it to me, only letting go when she is certain I will not drop it. "You should open it, Talia," she says. Her reassurance is conveyed through the way she looks as if she wants to kiss me, and I am still unsure so she does it, too. My head whirls like a tornado, caught up in the feeling of her soft lips and the box in my hands and the fact that she is going to pull away any moment now and I will actually have to follow through with my decision to find my father.

I do want to find him, I'll admit. It just seems like it is going to take a lot of effort.

"I can't," I whisper against her lips.

She takes a step back, a hand supporting the box as though she is less confident about how secure it is in my grip.

I feel as though I am made of feathers.

"Yes, you can."

Clàudia removes her hand, and the box clatters to the floor, the lid falling off in the process.

It is filled with letters.

Bingo.

Both of us stand there in shock for a moment, taking in the goldmine beneath us.

The paper, a greyish white, practically gleams under the dying lightbulb of my bedroom, spreading out across my floor as though it is an irreplaceable rug. Each letter is decorated with specks of black – twenty-year-old sentences that may hold the answer to every question I have been told not to ask.

Quickly, Clàudia and I sink to the floor, careful not to trample over any of the precious information.

"I'll take this half. You read through those," Clàudia instructs, leading the investigation due to my shock, sliding the papers into two piles. The rush of emotion comes in waves, but I manage to blink back the tears spilling from the ocean well enough to see exactly what the letters are.

It's a whole bunch of bills. Water, electricity, gas: all of it. Notices for unmet deadlines and threats from banks and, worse, loan sharks. It was no secret to me that, growing up, we were poor. I mean, I learned to cook at nine-years-old because Mamá would work three jobs and I wanted her to have a moment to breathe. I played for the local team – the one that all my friends played for – and they made two allowances. The first being my gender, and the second being the fact that we couldn't afford the kit. I would switch shirts with whoever wasn't playing that day, and would tie my borrowed shorts as tight as they could yet still look like I was on my way to a basketball game.

Why Mamá has kept these letters becomes a mystery in itself. She used to scrunch them up for me and tell me to practise my technique, stating that the goal was between her legs. We'd spend the time she had with me doing that, usually after dinner. Every night, we would open one of the two windows in our apartment fully, overlooking the ruins of the temple, letting the light of it illuminate our dinner. It was like a balcony, she'd tell me, but more adventurous. We were small in a big world, but we were mighty. She liked to remind me of that.

"Talia?" I break myself out of the memories of my childhood, nodding at the sound of my name. "I don't know about yours, but these are all boring as fuck. Whoever this M. Ivorra was, he sure was an absolute idiot when it came to money."

The name is a stranger to my ears. I hold the letter in my hands closer to my face, eyes fixed on the first line.

Estimado Sr. Ivorra.

I let it float to the floor once again, snatching up another one.

Sr. M. Ivorra.

They all say the same thing. Written formally, in good Spanish.

Who the fuck is M. Ivorra and why is Mamá hoarding his letters?

All the hope I held, all the scenarios I had fantasised about, could not have prepared me for this crushing disappointment. I'd rather it be empty than full of fucking unpaid bills. "I've never heard of him," I sigh, deflating, wishing that time would swallow me up and regurgitate me five hours before I had made this decision. "I thought she was going to have a journal in here or something. You know, a way to get a glimpse into her life before she had me."

"Well."

I look up at her, wondering what has taken away the slight nonchalance her tone always carries.

"What?"

"There's an address." I scoff – all letters have those. It shouldn't be such a revelation for her. "No, no, Talia, look. This is... here." Her finger traces the print of the letter in her lap, outlining what she wants me to see. "This is, I don't know – a twenty-minute drive from where we are right now. More or less."

"Like, in Barcelona?" I check, not quite sure what she's getting at.

"Yes, in Barcelona!" She waves the paper in my face. "This is Mollet de Vallès. Or maybe Sabadell. It's on the boundary, but it's here. We can go check it out."

"You want to go to Mollet de Whatever or Sabadell and check it out? Some random guy's apartment that he never paid the bills for?" I'm not trying to be excruciatingly slow, but it is hard to wrap my head around it. It would be absurd to assume the first man we come across is my father, and to go off an initial and a last name from a now-creepy box of letters is not necessarily the most reliable lead.

Although, to Clàudia, who nods, the sturdiness of this possible adventure seems not to matter.

The gleam of her teeth as she bears me a grin are enticing, maybe hinting towards some kind of pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, or treasure where X is marked. "What's the worst that could happen?" I lose my grasp on reason, and let her convince me.

━━━━━━━

There is a lull in action, though it is only because I tell Cláudia to focus on the upcoming semi-final instead. I know that she would have preferred to have gone yesterday, but we are flying to London today and it is a big deal, really. She's back from injury. I wasn't going to let her forget that her actual job is to play football.

Fleur de Voss has made her return to the team, too. We are becoming friends, I'd like to think. She has a magnetic personality, which would attract more friends than she already has if it were not for Alexia's command over the other half of them. She likes to sit next to me. I initially save the seat for Salma, but Fleur looks offended at the prospect of her close friends wanting her attention and chooses to plonk herself in the empty seat with a groan about being tired or something else that is just as insignificant.

Ingrid, the Norwegian midfielder who is dating Mapi, blinks at the sight of us a few times, but she takes a seat next to the Swedish player on the team with a subtle middle finger in Fleur's direction.

It's too quiet with Fleur so intensely deep in though, and so I clear my throat as we taxi to the runway. "How is London?" I ask. I have followed her career since she debuted at Lyon. I wonder if she misses her old clubs. "It rains a lot, no? Every day?"

"Depends," she answers, amused by my conversational skills. If only she could understand a bit more Spanish. She'd probably beg me to shut up. I'm not a fan of silence.

"What is your favourite shop?"

"I don't have one."

I frown, because these are the questions we learnt at school and there are only a few times in life when they actually become useful. Like now, to wear down the minutes until we reach our destination. "Yes, you have one. What is your favourite shop?"

"Talia, I don't have one," she says again, much to my dismay.

"What is your–"

"IKEA."

"No," I reply, dissatisfied with that. It is not a normal opinion to have. "What is your true favourite shop?"

"IKEA."

"No, Fleur, what is your favourite shop?"

I try not to giggle at how frustrated she seems to become. I make a mental note of how to wind her up – in case I ever come up against her in the future and she reminds me, in the cruellest, most humiliating way possible (a nutmeg), of why she is one of the best footballers in the world.

"I told you that it was IKEA," she says. We haven't even taken off yet. "IKEA is great, Talia. You should go, I will take you."

"I already have the furniture." It is a disgustingly fat lie, but I am here for a month. "I need a bed, yes? I will buy on Amazon." I hope it comes off just as nonchalant as it would if we were speaking Spanish.

"I will take you to IKEA." Fleur's eyes scan the plane, flicking up and down the rows, lingering on the back of Alexia's blonde head for slightly too long before focusing on Salma and Vicky a few rows in front of us. They are watching some stupid movie that focuses way too much on men for me to care. "Why are you not sitting next to your friends?" asks Fleur curiously.

I grimace, remembering how dull the description that they read out to me was. And I cannot deny how cool it is to have Fleur de Voss sitting next to me. "I want to be the greatest, like you. So I am learning from you." I admire her greatly, in truth.

"Well, let me teach you something." I lean in, letting her whisper her secrets to me. "Go to IKEA and buy a bed."

Not expecting it, a bark of laughter escapes my throat. It garners a few looks, and a giggle from Cláudia. "You are too funny, Fleur," I tell her, but I am not sure she hears me because she is too busy glaring at Alexia.

"Yeah, whatever. We'll see who's playing a minute and who's not," she teases, focus still not entirely on our conversation.

I take the time to remind her of the situation. "I am here for a month, more or less." She chuckles and changes the subject to the Champions League (and football more generally as the flight drags on).

When we arrive at the hotel, I find that Jonatan has given me a room with Cláudia. Everyone else is too distracted by another terrible pairing to remember how we kissed in front of them all. It's not a secret that there is something going on, and Alexia Putellas is aware of that. She edges me into corners to get things out of me, so I have ended up avoiding her for the eight days I have been at the club.

Cláudia links our pinkies in the lift, though Patri does notice this and gags dramatically at the sight. With it being just us three, she is happy to pull me closer to her to rub it in her friend's face.

With minimal chatter about the letters and Sabadell and who 'M' could be due to my insistence to leave the topic in Barcelona and focus on tomorrow. I know I won't play, but she might.

There is nothing unnatural about the way Clàudia fills the space left on my mattress as though she has practised it many times. Facing away from each other, we stay in a tired silence, scrolling through our phones accompanied by the comfort that the other is there. She presses her hand into my own, eyes closed – an unspoken request. I turn over, letting my phone charge, and she buries herself into my body, fitting against me with ease. We fall asleep like this.

One of the beds in our hotel room is not slept in that night, but Jonatan does not need to know.

notes: 

i'm so tired omg 

thanks for reading!!!