"I'm scared."

Alexia's Cupra is parked on the pavement adjacent to the building of her uncle's apartment. A few trickle inside the heavy door, glancing at us through the windshield with both curiosity and apprehension, and, once more, I grab the wrist of my captain – cousin – to prevent her from getting out.

"Talia."

"Alexia, I'm scared," I repeat, though that word doesn't seem to do what I am feeling justice. It bubbles on my tongue, fizzing as the meaning dies, and words I can't pronounce burst out of me silently, much like the erratic beating of my heart. "I want to pretend that it is just me. I am from Córdoba. I have a mother, but I have no siblings nor father, and I play football – for which club, I don't yet know, but Jorge Vilda has told me he wants me to start for my country. There are things about myself that I know to be true, and then there is this. I can't do this, Alexia. I can't."

But I don't say that.

Again, I say, "I'm scared."

Again, she sighs, "Talia, come on. It will be alright." I let my fingers stay curled around her wrist for a moment more, before her tendons protrude out of her skin and her arm tenses. "It'll be okay, amor."

Clàudia calls me that. I wish she were here.

I take in a deep, anxiety-filled breath. "Are you sure?" I question, but we are already out of the vehicle and stepping across the road.

"Yes, I am sure." She presses the buzzer on the outside of the door – one with the name M. Segura scribbled onto a white label beside it – and she is frowning by the time I work up the courage to tear my eyes from the pavement. "We are not monsters, petita. We'll not speak Catalan to you, either." I apologise, though I am not sure it is quite my fault. "Talia, if anything, just... They're your family. We're your family. We love you."

When I walk into the apartment of my mother's older brother, I realise that I have never experienced a love so instinctive and overwhelming.

They are, at least, subtle about staring at me. Dozens of pairs of eyes take in my choice of clothes, the way in which I have pulled my hair into a ponytail, and the hand of Alexia that is encasing mine as if to keep me from running away. The conversation becomes a low murmur, and I shift my weight with discomfort at the realisation that I have affected the happiness of what was once a much louder apartment.

"Alexia!" A shrill voice shatters the tension, and I am dragged to the kitchen. There, stands a short woman, with grey curls pinned back in a way she must have mastered over decades. Her hands, freckled and sunkissed, work with ease above a pan of paella, but she drops her tools the minute we are beside her, turning youthfully on her heels.

I've been told that I look like my mother. No one mentioned that my mother looks like her mother.

My grandmother steps forward with confidence, inspecting me without shame. Her eyes roam to my exposed stomach, to the evidence of my profession chiselled into my flesh. She seems to catch the fading red mark there, that I thought no one would see. Her eyebrows are raised when I make eye contact with her, and I can feel the flushing of my cheeks, but she only clears her throat and stares at the woman beside me, somewhat seething.

"So you can bring Tere's daughter – who we didn't know existed – but you can't bring your girlfriend?" Alexia shrinks under the harshness of the words, chosen to be spoken in a language that I understand to presumably embarrass her.

"She's not my girlfriend," replies Alexia, with gritted teeth and a jaw that is clenched so hard it might stay in that position forever. The smell of the food encapsulates us, and I am momentarily distracted by the pan sitting atop the stove, incredibly enticed by the food.

I do not know what to call her, but I label the old woman as Abuela until I am instructed otherwise. And Abuela raises her eyebrows, like I imagine most meddlesome senior citizens do. "You talk about her like she is. Why so shy, Alex?"

"I've told you this already. She doesn't want to date me," comes the explanation. Alexia's eyes shift from the piercing gaze of her – our – grandmother for a moment, and widen when she reminds herself of my presence. Her ears redden, and she becomes distant from the intimidating footballer the world is acquainted with. She is just... Alexia. Alex?

Abuela surges forwards, then, and her affection is remembered. She cups Alexia's face in her hands, placing a wet kiss to her blushing cheek with a squelch, and then pinches the flesh as if she has not turned red enough. "Who wouldn't want to date this cute, little face?" she coos at her, like the woman she is talking to has not won the Ballon d'Or twice.

"Obviously, her," Alexia grumbles, resigning to her fate. Then, she says something in Catalan that causes her – our – grandmother to refocus her attention on me again. This time, the woman's gaze softens, and she seems to take in my features with familiarity. I suppose she has a right to be familiar. I suppose she has seen echoes of my face in her daughter's, or, once upon a time, her own.

"Hola." I don't know why I say it the way I do; so shyly, so... out of place. It's a little too formal for the kitchen of my captain's uncle's apartment, which also happens to be my uncle's apartment. "Hola, I'm Talia."

"Talia?"

I give her a nervous smile. "Natalia."

"Segura." Alexia sighs again, as though this game is too boring and too painful for her. She conveniently forgets that no one here knew I existed last week.

"Natalia Elisabet Segura Sabaté," my captain interjects impatiently. "We call her Talia. Mamá is pleased to have the middle name. Talia is twenty-one."

"I know how old she is," replies our grandmother. "Talia, you look like your mother."

"I've been told." I laugh awkwardly.

She bites her lip in thought, and then suddenly flings her arms around me, pulling me into her and pressing a similar kiss on my cheek to the one she gave Alexia. "Welcome home. Where is your mother? I think we are long overdue for a conversation."

A few hours later, the air is thick with the aroma of spices, plates stacked on top of each other and scraped clean with love and the kind of hunger you reserve for age-old family recipes. The feeling is new. Really, really new.

I find that I quite like most of them.

I have more cousins than Alexia and Alba, but I am the youngest of them all. Some have their own children, though none of their ages have not yet reached double digits. There is a lot to catch up on, along with a hoard of names to learn, but my Tío Josep – whose home this is – sits with me on the balcony while he smokes a cigarette, allowing me a reprieve from the chaos inside and giving me his brutally honest opinion of his relatives.

He, like Abuela (that is what she has instructed me to call her), looks at the muscles of my abdomen, though they are significantly less defined after the mountain of rice I have just consumed. "You shouldn't smoke," he tells me as he hands me a lit cigarette of my own. "If Lex saw you, she'd give you an earful."

"I don't usually smoke." He does not seem convinced when I inhale the tobacco with ease, blowing out a little cloud of grey in a way that draws it away from us. "A lot of my friends do, though. But when we go out, this is not what we are smoking."

"Does your mother know this?" Josep's intrigue is subtler than most questions about the more important missing family member, but he seems to hesitate when labelling her as a parent, as if he does not quite believe it.

"My mother doesn't even know that I date women." A woman, to be more specific. "She's very religious, very Catholic. I don't know how she'd react. She would blame it on Barcelona or something. She hates this place."

I regret saying that, because the sentence splinters into shards and lodge themselves in his heart. "How Catholic?" Some of my new family members wear crosses around their necks, and, of course, I know that Alexia signs the cross before she steps onto the pitch, but it has become increasingly obvious that Mamá's piety did not originate from her childhood. "There is no place for homophobia in this family." He blows out a puff of smoke. "Lex made sure of that one. Not that she needed to."

I shrug. "I don't know if she's homophobic." I certainly hope not. "I have never heard her talk about it. She has never said anything wrong, but she is not painting rainbows on her face either. I should tell her, shouldn't I?"

"Well, don't you have a girlfriend?" They know who Clàudia Pina is, but only as Alexia's teammate and one of the players for Barcelona's revolutionary squad. "I mean, in this family it isn't uncommon to hide a relationship, but my daughter tells her mother everything. Sometimes I don't even find out. Alba and Alexia are the same. Girls should be able to talk to their mothers about whatever they wish."

My groan is not dramatic at all. "I think, now that I have found you guys, it seems wrong to hide who I am. I know that my mother pretended for so long – twenty years – and tried to forget this, but I have also been pretending for twenty years. It's so exhausting, Tío."

"I can imagine." He lets me lean into him, plucking my half-burnt down cigarette from between my thumb and index finger, flicking it over the metal fence of the balcony with a cheeky smirk. "Enough of that for you, princesa. Can't be the next Alexia Putellas with black lungs, can you?"

"Hey, you gave it to me."

"You could have said no. I was expecting you to say no."

I roll my eyes. "Then this will have to be our little secret. Don't tell Capi." Casting my glance over my shoulder, I catch sight of the happenings inside. They are crowded around the TV, watching Alba go against one of the children in a highly competitive game of Just Dance. After the dinner had finished and the bottle of champagne downed, such formality of being welcomed was dropped and everybody relaxed. They are all happy to see each other, regardless of how close together they live.

"You remind me so much of your mother," says Josep, with the same glimmer of hope in his eyes that every family has worn since my arrival. "You'll call her, right? I have so much to tell her."

A shout from Abuela summons me back into the heart of the gathering. She sniffs as I approach. "You've been smoking with Josep," she states drily, to nobody in particular. Like a deer in headlights, I stare at her with wide eyes, praying that most ears have fallen deaf to that. "Unbelievable." She huffs and shoots daggers at her eldest son. "Eli"– she is beside her –"tell your brother that he should not be jeopardising either of our girls' careers. We were lucky to be blessed with Alex's introvertedness. This one, not so much."

"I haven't been smoking anything," I deny in vain.

Eli frowns at me, too experienced to believe it. "Honey, if you are going to lie, lie well." She cups my cheek for a moment, and lets out a strained exhale. It longs for a guest that is not here. Someone whose appearance they would all prefer. "Mama, if you are going to make your speech, as you say you will, can you do it now? Otherwise, Lex will start to moan about needing to get some rest, and everyone will disperse too soon."

There is a loud clearing of the throat. The TV is muted. The crowd's attention turns to Abuela. Josep makes his way inside, winking at me before he pushes his pack of cigarettes behind a framed photograph of his children that is sitting atop the nearby mantel.

"I would like to say something. Josep spoke at dinner, and all of you have had your opportunity to interrogate our dear Talia." It is easy to guess what this is going to be about, made clear by the eyes that hone in on me immediately. I shuffle backwards from my place next to the two women, bashfully trying to escape the weight of the combined stare, but Eli's arm drapes over my shoulders and I am held in place. "Where do I even begin?"

With my father.

With Marc Ivorra.

That is where it starts. He is where this commences, though it sprouts out of torture and punishment. It springs from Abuela's earlier words when I had pried, prodding my question into a conversation with a surge of confident inquisitiveness: "that man deserves to be executed for what he did to my daughter." It begins in the apartment I visited with Clàudia, cued by phantom screams that I don't quite understand but can imagine a vague image of.

"Twenty-two years ago, we were one more." She looks at the children. Young children who have never known their parents' aunt. "We would have been one more today. Teresa, who never died but caused us to grieve her, is alive and well, my family. She prospers in Córdoba, and has raised a beautiful, talented, and hilariously Southern daughter. She may not be here with us right now, but I promise to you – to all of you – that your sister, your aunt, your great-aunt... She will come back, and her and Natalia Elisabet Segura Sabaté will never leave again." 

notes: 

tere's backstory destroys me every time i think about it so stay tuned x

alr i actually have nothing to say (for once) - how heartbreaking for us all 

thanks for reading!!!