Table Of Contents
Other Books by Lola Keeley
Dedication
Introduction
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Acknowledgments
About Lola Keeley
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Other Books by Lola Keeley
Major Surgery
The Music and the Mirror
Dedication
For Lisa-Marie,
Two decades as bezzers; consider this me signing up for at least another two.
Introduction
This novel is set in the world of women’s professional tennis, but a few details have been changed along the way.
First of all, instead of the real-world overlap of the International Tennis Federation and the Women’s Tennis Association working together, the governing body for tennis in this book is simply the Global Tennis Association (GTA). Think of them as Big Tennis, and you’ll have the right idea.
As for real players, I’ve tried as far as possible to leave them out. Some of the fictional players are clearly influenced by careers you might recognise, though. The record Elin is attempting to beat is set at the number of slams Steffi Graf won in her career, which is twenty-two. Although Margaret Court won more (twenty-four), she didn’t win all of those in the Open era, and I wasn’t comfortable using a public and unapologetic homophobe as a point of reference. So please, if you can, forgive that slight fudging of the numbers.
Hopefully most of the terminology is explained or contextualised, but the main thing you need to know as a tennis newbie is that the grand slam tournaments are four held every year: Australian, French and US Opens, and Wimbledon. Winning these is amongst the very highest honours for pro players.
For most tournaments, the players are also seeded. The most on-form player coming into the tournament will be the number-one seed. The rest are ranked below that according to their recent record. Only a certain number are seeded, and the unseeded players can end up anywhere in the draw. The reasoning behind this is to spread the best players across the bracket, so that the very best don’t meet each other in the first couple of rounds. If they all played in the first couple of days and half of them went out, it would reduce excitement and viewing for the rest of the tournament. That’s why it’s a big deal if an unseeded player makes it further in the tournament—they’ve usually done it the hard way!
Chapter One
Fifteen thousand people made a lot of noise.
The simple fact of their existence made it so: breathing, hearts beating, the soft-squashed gasp a person made when sitting down too heavily, or the squeak of their rubber-soled shoes against the concrete floor. Plastic chairs groaned on their hinges, throats were cleared, and that was before a single conversation, from the mutters between close friends to the shouts from one corner of the space to another.
But on Centre Court at Wimbledon, when the umpire called for, “Quiet, please,” that was exactly what they got.
That quiet closed in around me, serving in the semi-final as the clock ticked over from afternoon to evening. The match had already been delayed by warm summer rain, the kind that appeared out of a faintly grey sky and soaked people to the bone without them realising. At the first drop, we had been postponed. Covers rolled out over the grass so quickly it seemed they were protecting from something far more dangerous than a little rainwater.
Then the roof closed, slow and mechanical like a spaceship in some clunky sci-fi show I’d watched growing up. With it sealed, with the weather shut out, everything sounded different. Echoes bounced in strange ways, and suddenly all those people at a safe remove seemed to be right on top of me.
I shook my head. Focus, Elin. What did a little change or two matter? I took a steadying breath and reminded myself that the tennis stayed the same.
The previous point had been decided with a furious rally, and I’d won when a last desperate lunge was backhanded into the net. I’d waited politely for my opponent to pick herself up and dust herself off. Her once-pristine white T-shirt, mostly sweated through like my own, bore green marks and sandy smears from where she’d hit the ground. I wiped at my own shirt in sympathy, ball for my next serve already in my hand.
I only had twenty-five seconds to make the serve, so I bounced the ball straight down at my feet. One. Two. The weight of it felt familiar against my palm, fresh from its precisely chilled can, in peak condition for being hammered against the ground just as hard as either one of us could hit it.
I closed my eyes for just a second and waited for the feeling to settle over me. Sure enough, it came rolling in just like the tide. I’d done this before, maybe a million times. I released the ball upwards, no blue sky above it that time, just the industrial surface of the closed roof. No matter, my other arm was already in motion, the movement as natural as breathing.
With the kiss of contact, my serve was unleashed. Not my hardest or fastest, but the women’s game wasn’t dominated by serve prowess in the same way as the men’s. I could have risked serving an ace, effectively a shot that no mortal player should have been able to return. Aiming exclusively for those could lead to double faults though, and so it was a calculated choice each time.
I could barely feel my racquet in my hand. It was an extension of my arm by now, no matter how many different ones passed through my bag and my palm every day, every week. The custom grip I’d been using since I was fourteen and still playing in the juniors was moulded to the exact bends of my fingers, and the
