21. Cameron

Chapter 21

Cameron

“If you don’t respond, I’ll have no choice but to assume you’re in danger and break down the door,” I declare, my voice losing its humorous tone. I knock again, my ears straining to decode the troubled shuffling from behind the door. “Daphne?”

The door swings open, but instead of the usual burst of vibrant color and sunshine, her place is shrouded in unsettling darkness. The radiant smile I look forward to is absent, replaced by a quivering pout.

Red, swollen eyes meet mine, their usual sparkle dimmed.

Her hair is in a messy bun—a far cry from her usual styles—and she’s wearing an oversized tee with a salacious old lady knitting in a rocking chair above the words “I’m a Hooker” and a pair of sweats.

“Hey.” My voice cracks. I bend down to her eye level.

“Hi,” she murmurs, a shadow of her usual self. She moves further into her apartment, putting a distance between us that feels more final than it should.

“Duck, are you okay?”

“I’m not,” she says with a quaver in her voice.

“Can I come in?”

She scans my face as if deciding whether to let me in—not just into her apartment, but into whatever weight is crushing her mind right now. She steps aside. Her coffee table, typically a testament to her organized chaos, is now overrun with candy wrappers and half-eaten bags of chips. Empty glasses and mugs are scattered around the living room. Crumpled tissues litter her fuzzy rug.

“I’m handling the article,” I assure her.

She curls into a ball on the couch, her phone lighting up her face. “It’s not the article. It’s…” Her voice trails off, and my heart aches at her struggle. I’ve felt defeat on the field, but this feels different. “Just see for yourself.” She hands me her phone, showing her latest YouTube video. “It’s the comments.”

I scroll through the first few of thousands.

Lol. Never bring me back to this side of the internet again.

Why would Hastings be with someone like that

Mal Kelly did it better

THIS is the reason Lyndhurst’s keeper cost us the early matches????

Attention seeker

What is this therapy knitting nonsense

Are you signing up for Lust Island Season 9?

Sorry, you knit for a living? How is that even a thing?

Cameron obv likes them dumb

WHY DOES SHE USE SO MANY EXCLAMATION MARKS

Hear earlobes look like saucers

She looks like and talks like a child

Purple hair attention much

An insidious anger pulses in my temples.

I clutch her phone, memorizing the names and profile pictures behind the cruel abuse aimed at Daphne. I should have kept an eye on the situation. When Mal spewed lies about me, she was praised in the media. But when it’s Daphne, the sweetest soul I know, the world turns against her?

She knits for charity, for fuck’s sake.

My jaw clenches, and my fists ball up. Then realization crashes over me. I did this. I brought these vultures into her safe space. Guilt claws at my throat.

“I’m sorry,” I manage.

“It’s not like you wrote them.” She sighs.

“You can’t believe any of this nonsense. They’re all lies, you must know that.”

She grabs the phone from me, and her bloodshot eyes fall back on the screen. “I—hundreds of comments are pouring in on all my videos and posts. I’ve gained over ten thousand followers, and I don’t want any of them. I don’t want a single one of these strangers in my life. They crashed my website.”

My mind spins. When this happened to me, my agent turned off all the comments on my public pages. We cut off posting, apart from the contracted brand deals that were already lined up. That helped cut out so much of the noise. “Why don’t you turn off the comments or private your page until we get the article taken down?” I ask, desperate for a solution.

Her face scrunches up in disbelief. “Why don’t you stop playing football?”

“What?” I’ve obviously said the wrong thing, but I don’t know what to do in this situation. My instinct is to run, to numb, to block.

“This is my job, my life. Turn off the comments? Make my account private? Do you not understand that this is how I keep my community? It’s how I connect with people. I respond to every comment, every question about yarn and stitches and recommendations. But these comments, they’re all about me,” she breathes out, the words cutting through me like a knife. “They’re all about who I am…and who I’m not.”

I remember her telling me about being bullied online as a kid; this situation is probably bringing back all those painful memories.

People are ruthless.

I can’t really promise her that tomorrow this will blow over or that there won’t be more pictures.

“You’re right. I shouldn’t have even suggested that.” I reach for her, but she flinches. “These comments are fucking ridiculous. And they aren’t true. You are the sweetest, kindest, most wonderful person to ever exist.” Fix this, Cameron. Fix it. “What if you delete the app for a day? Or stay off your phone?”

Daphne shakes her head in a panic. “I don’t need a solution right now. I know I can delete the app. I can sit here and delete each and every comment before ten more sprout up. Do you not understand what’s hurting me? This is my safe space. Every time I opened my socials, I felt excited, I felt connected. Now I want to throw up. Even my emails are full of reporters asking me to confirm the relationship.”

“Look, I get that, I’ve been there. The best thing for us to do is lay low,” I tell her, trying to soothe her. “Until the article gets taken down.”

“My retreat is in four months! I can’t lay low.” She sighs. “The worst part is that I don’t even care about the article. When I saw it last night, I thought, Oh well, this rumor sucks , but I thought the comments would stay on the article, not filter to my personal pages. When I helped with the auction, no one even paid attention to my channels, but now this?”

“You didn’t do anything. This is my fault,” I confess.

“It’s so stupid, Cam. I feel like that eleven-year-old girl again, reliving everything that was said to me now multiplied through a megaphone,” she whispers. “I thought football was about community, about love and support.”

This game is my life, but its darker aspects are undeniable. Despite the fact that these hostile people are the minority, they always seem to make their voices heard. Now they’re screaming at Daphne.

“This will all blow over,” I say.

“What if I can’t do my retreat? What if a sponsor sees the hate and decides to pull the funding? My followers aren’t going to want anything to do with this, with me. I already put down the deposit and made the plans,” she stammers. “I—I worked so hard to put myself out there, to take a risk, and now…I knew this Yes Year was going to get me in trouble. I should’ve listened to my sister. I should’ve played things safe, not decided to leave my comfort zone.”

I need to make everything okay. I feel helpless—until my eyes catch on a pair of loose knitting needles on the coffee table.

I grab the needles and a spare ball of yarn next to them.

“Hey, hey, hey.” I drop to my knees. “Daphne,” I say, trying to get her attention as she looks past me.

“What is this?” She glances at the supplies in my hand.

“I need you to teach me how to knit,” I say.

“What?”

“It’s now or never.” I force a smile. She doesn’t seem to register it. “You said knitting is a good distraction. We can use a distraction, can’t we?”

“I can’t even think straight and—”

I close my palms over both of her hands, pulling her phone away. “If I don’t learn how to knit, I won’t know what to do with myself.”

She inhales, her face softening. “Okay.”

Over the next ten minutes, I struggle to grasp the basics of knitting. She’s patiently explained the long-tail cast-on method multiple times, but it feels like solving a Rubik’s Cube in the dark. Watching her knit with practiced ease is mesmerizing.

“Now you try.” Daphne hands it over to me. I attempt to mimic her, but my fingers are as useless as two pool noodles on land. “No, Cameron, you have to stab it, strangle it, and throw it off a cliff.”

I laugh at her serious tone. “I never knew knitting was so violent.” A half-smile flickers across her face, but it’s fleeting, a ghost of her usual warmth. “Can you just show me again?”

She wraps her small hands around mine, guiding me through the motions. I should be focused on learning, but all I can think about is the crease in her nose, the intensity in her eyes. Our faces hover dangerously close. I want to go back to last night, to finish what we started, to make her feel better in a way my words are failing to. But we can’t. Not now.

Just as her breath graces my jaw, she pulls away. “You’re doing good,” she says.

“It’s sweet of you to lie.”

“Thank you for knowing exactly how to help,” she says. “As for everything else, I’m going to contact my therapist and try to work through it.”

Surely there’s more I can do. “I’m heading back to California for Christmas. Do you want to fly back with me and get away from all this?”

“You think this bullying will last that long?”

I can’t promise her anything. “I really don’t know.”

“I already booked a flight home to spend time with my family.”

“I’m taking the family jet after my last game of the year. There’s always room for one more if you want to cancel your flight.” Her eyes don’t shine with adventure the way they have during her Yes Year activities.

“Oh no. Your games!” She winces. “I—I didn’t even think about those. The last thing I want is to end up in more tabloids.”

“That’s okay. You don’t need to come to them.” My voice is solid. I’m trying to maintain control, but inside, I’m crumbling. Of course, I want her there. Seeing her in the crowd on Saturday was the highlight of my game. But I know I can’t worry about her in the stands while trying to keep my head on the pitch.

Her lip quivers. “Maybe no more Yes Year stuff around London for a while? You know, to avoid being caught out in public again.” The finality of her statement cuts through me like a blade. “We can still be friends, though, right?”

Her words hurt. The thought of losing her, of her not being in my life, is unbearable. She’s been my anchor in the chaos of London. And the idea of us being just friends, after everything I’ve shared with her, after everything we’ve been through, is unthinkable.

“Whatever you want to call us, Daphne, is fine with me,” I say, my voice thick with restrained emotion.

She studies me for a moment. Her eyes flicker with an unspoken question, as if she’s considering reopening the door that led us to this couch last night.

A huge yawn overtakes her, and she looks so vulnerable, so heartbreakingly beautiful, that my chest tightens. “Do you—do you mind staying for a while? I really don’t want to be alone.”

“Of course, Duck. I’m right here,” I promise her, my voice low and gravelly with suppressed emotion. I don’t think she understands the gravity of what I’m saying.

I sit beside her on the couch, the space between us a chasm I desperately want to bridge. She leans her head on my shoulder, and I wrap my arm around her, pulling her close.

I’ll keep her safe.