Past Disclaimers and Alibis
by mardia

Past Disclaimers and Alibis

mardia

Summary

Distantly, she hears footsteps approaching, and looks up in hope, praying that it’s the paramedics arriving–but it’s just Higgins, shockingly normal in his suit and tie, asking, “Rebecca, someone heard shouting–” and then he sees Rebecca crouched over Ted’s prone body and gasps, the file folder in his hand fluttering to the floor.

“Leslie,” Rebecca chokes out, “Ted’s collapsed, I need you to go downstairs and wait for the ambulance.”

“Yes, yes,” Higgins stutters, “But–”

“Go,” Rebecca orders, and Higgins stumbles over his own feet, rushing out of her office.

(Futurefic, set seven years after s1.)

Notes

None

Chapter 1

Given how much Rebecca is looking forward to seeing Ted stop in (and to get her hands on those biscuits) it's a measure of how terrible he looks that when he walks through the door to her office, the first thing that Rebecca blurts out is, "Good God, Ted, you look like shit."

Ted gives her a crooked half-smile. "Don't sugarcoat it for me now, boss." But even his smile can't distract from the sweat on his forehead, or the unnatural paleness of his face.

"You look like you're about to puke," Rebecca tells him, taking the small pink box of biscuits from his hand but not immediately digging in, instead watching him with concern.

He waves it off. "Not food poisoning, just a bad spell of heartburn. Took some antacids just now, they'll kick in soon."

Rebecca eyes him warily, but Ted doesn't seem worried at all. "If you're sure," she says. "Just sit down here on the couch, take a minute."

Ted waves the offer off, which is typical for him—Rebecca once saw him try to coach a Champions League match through a fever of 39C, it just figures that he wouldn't want to take it easy over some heartburn. "Nah, I'm fine, I just wanted to drop off your biscuits and see how that breakfast meeting with the minority owners went."

Rebecca sighs and bites into her biscuit, sighing with pleasure as the buttery shortbread melts on her tongue. "In a word, hideously. Half of them think the club will be ruined if we don't sell naming rights to the stadium, half think the club's traditions will be destroyed if we change the name from Nelson Road to, I don't know, Virgin Airlines or whatever. Not that I'd ever dream of selling the naming rights to Richard Branson, mind you."

Ted wrinkles his nose. "Virgin Stadium? Doesn't really give off the right image, does it."

Rebecca laughs, and does her best to ignore the way that Ted is rubbing at his sternum. He hates being fussed over, she knows, so she won't try. Better to keep him chatting with her in her office, and keep an eye on him that way.

"And it's not like technically, they could stop you if you did want to sell the naming rights, or force you to sell them if you didn't want to," Ted continues on. "You're still the majority owner. Seems like a lot of commotion over nothing."

Rebecca pulls a face. "It is and it isn't. The issue is that ever since Bex decided to 'take an interest' in the club," she punctuates this with a roll of her eyes, "—she's managed to whip up Rupert's old cronies into kicking and fussing over every little thing. And they aren't wrong to be concerned about how we'll pay for redeveloping the stadium. I just wish I didn't have to listen to their wittering in order to prevent them from leaking bullshit stories to the press."

Ted's nodding sympathetically, leaning against one of the chairs with his arm bracing his weight. "Want me to tag along next time you have a meeting?"

Rebecca smiles at him ruefully. "I really shouldn't take advantage of the fact that you have them eating all out of your hand," she says. The one thing that the minority owners can all agree on is their worship of Ted and their desperate fear that someday, the strange American coach that led Richmond to winning the Premier League title four years ago and has kept them consistently in the race for a Champions League spot ever since will decide to leave, either for another club or worse, for America.

Ted shrugs one shoulder. "Eh, you know I don't mind rubbing shoulders with them, especially if it's for a good cause."

"The only good cause would be to keep me from grinding my teeth into nubs," Rebecca retorts.

"Exactly," Ted says, and laughs—but the laughter is cut off with a grimace, as he presses his fist against his chest again.

"Ted?" Rebecca says after a moment, when his expression doesn't ease up. Ted's gaze flickers back up to her, and he tries to smile.

"It's nothing," he insists, but he's breathing heavier now, and Rebecca sees him flexing his free hand as though it hurts.

"Ted, just come and sit down for a moment," she tries, halfway rising up out of her seat, a prickle of worry running down her spine. If this is another panic attack, like the one she saw in Liverpool years ago...

But then Ted looks at her, wide-eyed, his face absolutely grey, and he utters faintly, "I think—I think I'm going," before toppling over onto his knees.

The next few moments feel like an eternity, even though Rebecca will later know they took no more than a few seconds—her shriek of alarm, rushing forward to catch Ted before he hits his head on the floor, unable to believe this is happening even as she cradles his head in her hands, Ted staring wordlessly up at her, his eyes filled with fear as he gasps for air.

“You’re fine, darling, it’s all fine,” Rebecca says inanely, even as she tears herself away just long enough to grab her phone and dial 999 with shaking fingers.

Everything after that takes on the unreal quality of a nightmare, from getting Ted into the recovery position, the 999 operator on the phone mechanically telling her to stay calm, to see if she can find Ted’s pulse, all the while listening to Ted’s ragged, shallow breathing.

“I can’t find it,” she says, voice rising with panic. “I can’t, he isn’t—”

“If he’s still breathing, his pulse is there, it’s likely just going too fast for you to feel it,” the operator says soothingly.

“Oh God,” Rebecca says, choking on the words. “Ted, darling, just look at me, it’s going to be just fine—”

Distantly, she hears footsteps approaching, and looks up in hope, praying that it’s the paramedics arriving—but it’s just Higgins, shockingly normal in his suit and tie, asking, “Rebecca, someone heard shouting—” and then he sees Rebecca crouched over Ted’s prone body and gasps, the file folder in his hand fluttering to the floor.

“Leslie,” Rebecca chokes out, “Ted’s collapsed, I need you to go downstairs and wait for the ambulance.”

“Yes, yes,” Higgins stutters, “But—”

“Go,” Rebecca orders, and Higgins stumbles over his own feet, rushing out of her office.

Rebecca squeezes her eyes shut, and through a blur of tears, looks down at Ted and brushes away the lock of hair that’s forever falling over his forehead. “It’s all right,” she lies. “Everything is going to be all right.”

*

Ted is unconscious in the ambulance.

As they barrel through London’s streets, Rebecca is counting every second it takes, every second that’s passed since Ted collapsed, from the moment he rubbed at his chest and—

There’s nothing for Rebecca to do. Her phone is buzzing relentlessly in her pocket but she can’t—well, she can’t. Instead, she listens to the sirens and holds Ted’s free hand in hers.

He’s always had such warm, steady hands. Firm and warm, without ever being too rough or cold or clammy—except they’re cold now, cold and clammy, with his fingernails turning blue. She starts to rub his hand between hers, not even deliberately, just…his hand is so cold.

He’d looked ill from the second he walked into her office. He’d looked so ill…and she hadn’t seen it, she hadn’t done anything, and now here they are, in the back of an ambulance with an oxygen mask over Ted’s face and the paramedics telling her he’s had a heart attack, that he was having the heart attack all the time that she was talking to him, idiotically watching him rub at his chest as he told her it was nothing but heartburn.

Rebecca closes her eyes and grits her teeth against a wave of nausea and fear. She hasn’t prayed since she was a child but she finds herself repeating an endless phrase of, please, oh please, to anyone and everyone in her head, God, the universe, Ted’s traitorous body.

Please, oh please, not this. Anything but this.

At last they’re at the hospital, and Rebecca watches helplessly as an army of people in scrubs and white coats wheel Ted off on the stretcher, and one of the nurses kindly but determinedly leads Rebecca away into a discreet alcove, Rebecca twisting back to look at Ted’s motionless form until he’s finally out of sight.

“Where are they taking him?” Rebecca demands.

“He’s going in for surgery now,” the nurse tells her, guiding Rebecca into sitting onto a cushioned chair. “We’re going to take the very best care with him, I can promise you that.”

“Will he—“ Rebecca chokes on the words, but forces them out. “Will he be right? Will he make it?”

The nurse hesitates before saying, “I can’t say. I can tell you that you did the right thing in getting him here so quickly. Can you tell me what was happening before he collapsed?”

Rebecca shakes her head, saying woodenly, “He came into my office and he looked awful, sweaty and pale. He said it was heartburn, that he took antacids and would feel better soon. We were talking, and he kept—kept rubbing his chest.” Tears are slipping down her cheeks, but she doesn’t bother to wipe them away. “He suddenly got worse and said, ‘I’m going,’ and then he just…dropped down to his knees.”

“I’m so sorry,” the nurse tells her, sympathetically. “Do you need a minute?”

“I need to know that my friend will be all right,” Rebecca tells her, hearing the edge to her own voice and not being able to care. “The surgeons, how good are they?”

“They’re very good,” the nurse responds, not looking as if she’s bothered at all by the question. Rebecca momentarily thinks of pressing harder, demanding that they get a second opinion, before realizing what a fool she’s being—trying to pick a fight with a nurse just to distract herself from how awful this all is. How pathetic.

“Do you know if he takes any medications?”

Rebecca falters. “I, I don’t know,” she says, weakly. “I don’t…we’ve never talked about…”

“That’s quite all right,” the nurse soothes, but it’s not, because Rebecca doesn’t know anything about his health, how can she, she’d thought Ted was in reasonably good health right up until he collapsed in her office with a major heart attack that could…he could…

Rebecca sets her teeth against the sob rising up in her throat, no matter how much it makes her jaw ache.

“Do you need—I mean, is there anything else that I—“

“No, no,” the nurse confirms. “You’ve already done the most important thing, getting him here.”

Rebecca flinches at that, but doesn’t argue. There’s no point, the woman is a professional doing her job. It’s not her job to absolve Rebecca of anything.

Once the nurse leaves, Rebecca inhales sharply and reaches into the pocket of her slacks to start making the calls she’s delayed until now. Her screen is filled with notifications of missed calls and unread texts, but Rebecca ignores them all to call Keeley first.

Keeley answers on the first ring, her voice high with panic. “Rebecca? Oh my God, what is happening, Leslie called and said that Ted collapsed? Where are you, are you with him? What’s happened—“

“I’m waiting at the A&E,” Rebecca says dully. “Ted had—it was a heart attack. He’s in surgery now.” She takes another breath, her voice cracking as she says, “It’s bad.”

She hears a quick indrawn breath, and then Keeley says, sounding strong and determined, “Okay. Okay. We’re all coming there, we’ll all be there right away, Rebecca, understand?”

“Yes,” Rebecca says. There’s a pane of glass nearby, and she stares at her reflection, at the mirrored image of an unfamiliar woman, expensive clothes, smeared eye makeup and a haunted expression. “I do.”

*

It’s Higgins that takes charge. He quietly arranges for them all to be put in a private waiting room, not just because of the sheer number of people from the club that have arrived, but because the news about Ted’s collapse will be leaked to the media, and they don’t need photographers catching them looking distraught in the public waiting area, disturbing not just them, but the patients and doctors and everyone else here.

So they’re in a clean, institutional-looking sort of room—the walls are painted a sort of soothing beige-yellow, there are general prints of landscapes and flowers and posters about vaccination and whatnot.

And in this professionally neutral room, a crowd of people that all love Ted Lasso sit together, praying that the worst doesn’t happen.

“I’ve reached all the players, told them to stay where they are for now,” Higgins says quietly to them all. “At least until we hear…more.”

“Has someone called his ex?” Roy asks, rubbing Keeley’s back as she sits, bowed, in her seat.

“No, I haven’t,” Rebecca says, glancing at Higgins to see if he’s taken charge of this the way he did with the players or with getting this room, but he helplessly shakes his head at her. “I didn’t want—she’s an ocean away, I didn’t want to worry her, not before Ted’s out of surgery at least.”

She glances at Beard, wondering if he’ll protest, but Beard isn’t moving or reacting at all—he hasn’t, really, not since he arrived. He just keeps sitting there, motionless, his ever-present cap drawn low over his eyes, hiding his face.

“We should call her,” Roy says. “If—she’ll want to know as soon as possible, prepare to tell Henry.”

Rebecca shies away from that, from Ted Lasso’s son being told—and because she can’t bear to think of it, she says, sharper than she means to, “Tell her what, we don’t know anything yet.”

Roy, to her frustration, doesn’t look cowed or irritated. He just looks at her with patience and says, “We know he’s had a heart attack and that it’s serious, that’s enough for her to know.”

“But surely, it can’t be that serious,” Colin protests, eyes wide and disbelieving. In that moment, he looks like the rookie player he once was, and not the assistant coach he’s become. “I mean, he’s in good health. He’s young—”

“He’s fifty years old,” Higgins says gently. “People younger than that get heart attacks every day.”

“He’s not that old,” Colin says stubbornly, and in his voice Rebecca can hear the panic that’s been racing through her all day. “He doesn’t smoke, or drink very much, he takes care of himself—”

“He doesn’t take care of himself,” Beard says, very quietly, but the rasp in his voice cuts through the room like a knife.

Keeley finally lifts her head up. Her eyes are red-rimmed, but her voice is remarkably calm as she asks, “Beard, what do you mean by that?”

“If there’s something we need to tell the doctors,” Rebecca begins, but Beard shakes his head sharply, still not looking at any of them.

“No, it’s too late to do anything about it now. But Ted, Ted’s not taking care of himself.” A muscle jumps in his jaw as he says, “His blood pressure’s shit, he’s not getting enough sleep, he’s been—“ Beard throws one anguished look at Rebecca, before turning away and confessing, “He’s been having panic attacks for a while, and he won’t see anyone about it, he’s just been relying on the emergency prescription of Xanax a doctor back in Kansas prescribed for him, last time he was visiting Henry. He is not taking care of himself, at all.”

There is a long, appalled silence as all of them take that in.

It’s poor Colin who’s left stammering, “But that’s not, I mean, we would’ve seen it if…he would have told us if…”

Beard snorts bitterly. “I know you guys think Americans are all too chatty and we share too much about our feelings,” this, from the most deliberately mysterious man Rebecca has ever met, “But Ted’s from the Midwest, okay? They’ve forgotten more about repression than the rest of us ever knew, and Ted—“ He cuts himself off, and lowers his head even more and says, so quietly that Rebecca strains to hear him, “Ted is really good at hiding the things he doesn’t want to talk about, and he’s even better at ignoring the things he doesn’t want to admit to.”

Higgins, sitting next to her at the table, gently reaches out and touches her hand; it’s only then that Rebecca realizes she’s tearing up, and she stares up at the ceiling as she tries, futilely, to blink the tears away.

“I was trying to get him to admit he needed some help,” Beard’s continuing now, voice thick with emotion, “Or to just take a break or something, I know we’re in October but the season’s early enough that, I don’t know, maybe he could take a long weekend or something. But he kept putting me off, and I just…I thought there’d be time to talk sense into him. I thought there would be more time.”

God. As Rebecca tries not to completely lose her composure at that last, horrifying sentence (I thought there would be more time) Higgins is saying stoutly, “Well, there’s going to be time now. Once Ted’s out of surgery, he’ll be needing to make major lifestyle changes, and I know all of us will be there to support and cheer him on, right?” He sends a look towards Keeley, who squares her shoulders and says, in as determined a voice as she can, “Right, absolutely.”

“Right,” Roy says firmly, and is echoed by a shell-shocked Colin, whose quiet murmur is barely audible.

Beard doesn’t speak, and neither does Rebecca.

A moment passes, and Higgins mutely reaches out and takes Rebecca’s hand in support, squeezing it gently.

Rebecca squeezes his hand back, and she doesn’t think of the last hand that she held, how the chill of it sank into her skin.

*

Two and a half hours later, a doctor finally arrives to tell them that the surgery was successful, and Ted is—

(alive, thank you God, oh thank you)

—in recovery, and they’ll be able to see him soon once he’s able to talk.

“So he’ll be okay?” Keeley asks tremulously, hand over her mouth as Roy holds her close.

The doctor nods. “We’ll need to keep him for observation, and obviously we’ll need to watch him for complications, but we’re hopeful he will make a full recovery.” He looks to Rebecca and says, “I understand you were the one that called 999 and brought him in?”

“I was just there,” Rebecca says quietly. “I didn’t do anything except call for the ambulance.” And nearly killed Ted by waiting so long, waiting too long, fuck’s sake, they have an army of physios downstairs, she should’ve marched Ted down immediately and—

But the doctor is nodding, and saying, “You saved his life today. With a heart attack of this magnitude, when the artery is totally blocked, there’s very little time to intervene. You did exactly the right thing in bringing him here so quickly.”

Rebecca can’t let this pass. “I should’ve seen it sooner,” she protests. “He was rubbing at his chest—“

“He told you it was heartburn,” Keeley interjects, looking at her with worry.

The doctor hesitates, and says, “A heart attack like this, while it’s likely he was experiencing symptoms for some time, it’s also, unfortunately, quite easy to mistake the symptoms for something else. Such as heartburn, or a panic attack—“ Beard flinches at that, “—or even something as simple as a pulled muscle. It won’t help any of you to think about the what-ifs. He made it here, and he made it through the surgery, and we’re quite optimistic about his chances. That’s what matters.”

“Of course,” Keeley says. “When can we see him?”

“Soon,” the doctor says reassuringly. “We’re just waiting for him to become more lucid as the anesthetic wears off.”

“That’ll give us enough time to make some phone calls,” Roy says, and he’s looking at Rebecca as he says it.

Higgins leans in closer and offers, “Rebecca, I could—”

“No,” Rebecca says sharply. “No, I’ll do it.” Higgins concedes, but not without giving her a long, sympathetic look that Rebecca turns away from.

*

Rebecca is utterly terrified when she goes into Ted’s hospital room. (A private room, thank God for Higgins discreetly arranging it somehow, because otherwise Rebecca would’ve had to, and she was not capable of discretion at the moment.)

She’s not afraid of what she’ll find, the doctors has prepared her (no oxygen mask, but there would be a tube in his nose, there would be IVs and a heart monitor, so on and so on) she’s just petrified that she’ll take one look at him in that hospital bed and burst into tears.

And when she walks in to find Ted lying there in that bed, pale and exhausted, his eyes sleepily blinking open to look at her—Rebecca does not break down, but it’s a near thing.

She tries to smile. “Hello, darling. How are you?”

A corner of his mouth lifts up in the faintest echo of a smile, and he wobbles his hand back and forth. “Been better.”

“I fucking bet,” Rebecca says, which earns her a quicksilver grin, there and gone in the blink of an eye.

Without second-guessing it, Rebecca settles herself on the edge of the bed. Ted lifts his hand towards her, and Rebecca immediately takes his hand in hers, their fingers automatically interlacing. His hand is cool but dry, and when she looks down, his fingernails are a healthy pink, no tinge of blue to be found.

She has a dozen inane reassurances on the tip of her tongue, and doesn’t say any of them. It's enough in this moment to sit here at his side, to look at him and be reassured he’s alive and safe, with dozens of competent professionals around to keep him that way.

So Rebecca sits there and watches Ted quietly, holding his hand, waiting as he works himself up to say whatever he’s about to say.

“I thought—I thought it was a panic attack,” Ted confesses quietly. “I thought if I could just calm down…”

“I know,” Rebecca soothes. “Ted, I know. It’s all right.” She tries to joke, “At no point did I suspect that you’d deliberately chosen to collapse in my office, believe me.”

Ted doesn’t smile at this. “I didn’t…I’m sorry, for scaring you like that, I didn’t mean—“

“Ted,” Rebecca interjects, cutting him off, “If I hear you apologize to me for your heart attack, I will actually scream, and given that I promised the doctors I would behave myself before they let me in here, let’s see if we can avoid that. Okay?”

“Okay,” Ted agrees. He grimaces a little, eyes flickering back to her as he says slowly, “The match tonight…”

“I don’t give a single solitary fuck about the match,” Rebecca says crisply. “We could lose by ten goals and I wouldn’t care.”

“Rebecca—“ Ted protests, but it’s futile.

“It’s one match, we’ll survive,” Rebecca says, reaching out to rub the crease between his eyebrows away. It’s funny, how her inhibitions about touching him have all melted away. Yesterday she wouldn’t have dreamed of casually touching him like this, today she’s touching him like she has a right to him, like—

Rebecca forcibly takes her hand away, clenching it into a fist in her lap.

If Ted thinks she’s acting strange, he gives no sign. He just blinks tiredly before saying, “I should…should call Michelle.”

Rebecca winces. “I called her earlier, once we knew—” Her voice catches, but she finishes, “Once you were out of surgery. She’s very worried about you, of course—do you feel up for talking to her?”

Ted nods, and so Rebecca girds herself and rings Michelle for the second time that day (although this call can’t possibly be as excruciating as the first one). She hands the phone to Ted, who wearily holds it up to his ear, but shakes his head once Rebecca moves to step away, mouthing, No, stay, and so Rebecca sits back down, and overhears Michelle’s soft “oh God, Ted—”

She looks away, but she can’t help but hear it all, Michelle trying so hard not to cry, Ted promising that he’s fine, it’s nothing to worry over, and Michelle clearly not believing a word of it (of course she doesn’t, the woman isn’t a fool, and Ted sounds absolutely wretched) and then they have to discuss breaking the news to Henry once he’s home from school (it’s only a little past ten in the morning in Kansas right now) and how soon Michelle, her wife, and Henry will be able to get to the UK.

Through it all, Ted keeps insisting he’s fine, there’s nothing to worry about, and after the third repetition of this, Rebecca finds herself gritting her teeth, her fingernails digging into the flesh of her palm as she tries to keep her composure.

But then Ted lifts the phone away from his ear and says, “Michelle wants to talk to you.”

Rebecca cautiously takes the phone, and Michelle doesn’t bother with saying hello, she just says in a choked voice, “He’s lying when he says he’s fine, isn’t he.”

Rebecca keeps her face turned away from Ted as she says, “Yes.”

Michelle takes a deep breath over the other end of the line, and says, more firmly now. “Okay. Look, just—I know I don’t have to ask this, but please, just—just keep an eye on him? Let me know the second that something changes, or goes wrong, or—”

“Of course,” Rebecca says immediately. “I’m not leaving his side.” She catches Ted’s eye accidentally at this and says, to him and to Michelle, “I’m not, they’ll have to drag me out of here kicking and screaming.”

“Well in that case, my money’s on you,” Ted murmurs, and in Rebecca’s ear Michelle is laughing weakly.

Rebecca does have to step out of the room when everyone else comes in to visit Ted, one by one, and the one that takes the longest is Beard, and when he comes out, his eyes are wet.

“Coach Beard—“ Rebecca starts, not knowing what to say, but he waves her off.

“Gotta get ready for the match,” he says grimly, and walks off without another word. Rebecca grimaces—she’d talked with Higgins earlier about whether they could even cancel the match, or postpone, and it’s simply impossible to do. Somehow, the team will have to go and play tonight, and while Rebecca was being perfectly honest in saying that she didn’t give a single shit if they lost by ten goals, she does wish that she could spare them that burden.

But finally everyone else is gone, to manage the team, manage the press, to manage everything, while Rebecca stays with Ted.

Of course, when she comes back into the room, Ted promptly says, “You don’t have to stay.”

Rebecca gives this nonsense the consideration it deserves. “Yes, I fucking do, and don’t think you can sweet-talk me into leaving, Theodore John Lasso.”

His mouth turns up in a crooked smile and he says, “You’ve just been waiting for the perfect moment to drop my full name right on my head, haven’t you?”

Rebecca shrugs a little. “One takes the opportunities one is given,” she tells him, dragging a chair up right by his bedside. “Besides, this is my chance to beat Nora’s score at Style Battle,” she says, pulling out her phone.

She actually doesn’t play very much of the game on her phone at all, her attention taken up with keeping an eye on Ted, answering the text messages she’s been avoiding all day, and stealthily continuing to look up information on heart attacks, her heart sinking with each new fact she finds.

She should have seen it coming.

Rebecca’s gaze drifts away from the NHS website to look at Ted, only to find him watching her, his brown eyes tired but alert. “What is it?” she asks.

He shakes his head a little. “Just wanted to look at you.”

Her throat hurting with unshed tears, Rebecca gives in to temptation and reaches out to stroke his hair. “God, Ted,” she says, her voice choked. “If you ever do that to me again, I will disembowel you.”

“Mm, not planning to,” he promises. His eyes close in exhaustion as he mumbles, “God, it hurt. I didn’t think anything could hurt that much, not and still survive it.”

“But you did,” Rebecca whispers, her fingers still carding through his soft hair. “You did make it.”

“Hmm,” Ted agrees softly, eyes still closed. “Yeah.”

He falls asleep quickly after that, and Rebecca does her best not to disturb him. She keeps an anxious eye on the heart monitor at all times, but it looks (at least from her frantic Googling) stable enough, and surely someone would rush in if he started taking a turn for the worst.

She even has to take some calls, mostly from the minority owners—Alistair Crane alone has called her five times today, and she could wish the old devil would take a long walk off a short pier, except that he sounds genuinely worried about Ted when she gets him on the phone, and he’s always been a favorite of Ted’s.

“Christ above,” Alistair says, his Scottish burr thicker than usual, “How the fuck does this happen? He’s too young for a fucking heart attack!”

“He’s fifty, Alistair,” Rebecca points out.

“Who gives a shit? I’m pushing eighty, all of you are infants so far as I’m concerned,” Alistair immediately retorts. “They’ve got decent people looking after him? We can bring in specialists. Or get him moved to Royal Brompton, that’s the top place in London for cardiology—”

Rebecca is tempted, but says, “I don’t want him disturbed just yet. The ambulance ride was petrifying enough and that was only five minutes, I can’t imagine transporting him across London just now.”

Alistair grumbles but concedes, asking next, “His family been told?”

“Called them earlier,” Rebecca says.

“Hmph. They have difficulties getting over here, let me know, we can get the family jet round there and bring them over.”

Rebecca smiles a little, imagining Alistair traveling over to Wichita, Kansas and personally ferrying Michelle and Henry over in his private jet. “I will, thank you, Alistair.”

They hang up a few minutes later, Rebecca already knowing that by tomorrow Alistair will be here, shoving his weight about and demanding they fly in the top specialists in the world to consult on Ted’s case. And when she thinks about it like that, Rebecca is actually looking forward to it. Even Ted won’t be able to talk Alistair out of making a fuss, the man’s famously as stubborn as a mule.

The afternoon trickles into the evening, Rebecca making phone calls, answering texts, easing the ache in her back from this uncomfortable chair by pacing around in the small private room. Doctors and nurses come in from time to time, checking Ted’s vitals, asking Ted how he feels when he’s awake, speaking quietly to Rebecca when he’s dozing (and he’s mostly dozing).

At seven o’clock exactly, Rebecca does not turn the television in the room onto the Richmond-Aston Villa match, instead choosing to focus on Ted’s sleeping, serene face, and the five romance novels she’s just downloaded onto her phone at random. She needs absolute nonsense to distract her now, and it works as best as it can, even with the match updates popping up on her phone.

Richmond, much as Rebecca would’ve expected under the circumstances, lose 3-1, with Jamie Tartt getting a consolation goal in injury time.

Ted’s in deep slumber at this point, so, very cautiously, Rebecca does turn on the television to Sky Sports, keeping the volume off entirely. They have the highlights of the game up, the team looking somber in warmups, the fans lifting a hastily-made GET WELL SOON, GAFFER banner that waves along with the usual flags.

She ignores the closed captioning down at the bottom—she has no time for the pundits on a good day, let alone on a nightmarish day like this—but then they cut to the post-match press conference, and Christ, it’s poor Beard out there in the press room, blinking out into the sea of cameras and microphones, his usual owlish expression overcast with pure misery, even with his cap dragged low over his eyes.

She texts Keeley, saying, Poor Beard looks like he’s on the verge of collapse out there.

Keeley, bless her, responds immediately. I know but there was no one else to do it. Colin’s been crying on and off all day, Roy’s in such a state that he’ll start punching the first reporter to even ask a question, and Beard was named caretaker manager for the match. And the fucking league wouldn’t let us skip the post-match media duties, I checked. >:(

Rebecca winces. I should’ve pushed harder on canceling the match. To hell with the fines from the league.

It would’ve been impossible, babe, Keeley responds. But I’ve never hated being at a football match until today. Not even when I was dating that one Celtic player, and he convinced me that the Rangers-Celtic derby would be a good time. HAH.

Not even the reference to Keeley’s checkered dating history can bring a smile to Rebecca’s face.

How’s Ted? Keeley asks.

Rebecca’s gaze automatically shifts to Ted, even as she’s typing out, As good as he can be, considering. He’s sleeping now. Doctors say he’ll have to be here for five days, at least.

God. We’ll have to sit on him to make him stay in bed that long.

Rebecca grimaces, and types out, her fingers pressing so hard into the screen that she has to go back and erase three typos, I will personally tie him to the goddamn bed if he tries to leave before the doctors clear him to go.

I’ll help, I’m VERY good with knots. I’d tell you about where and how I learned, but now’s not the time.

As Rebecca’s composing her reply, Ted stirs a little. “Becca?” he mumbles softly.

Her heart leaping, Rebecca immediately reaches out to take his hand. “I’m here, Ted.”

His hand closes around hers, and Rebecca could cry at how warm it is, finally finally finally. “We win the match?”

For half a beat, Rebecca considers lying, but says instead, “Lost three to one. No injuries, no red cards, I don’t care.” She rubs her thumb along his knuckles, adding, “Everyone sends their love. Alistair Crane’s threatening to fly your family over in his private jet first thing tomorrow.”

“Hmm. Good ol’ Crane.” Ted cracks an eye open and surveys her before saying, “Suppose there’s no point in telling you that you don’t need to be here right now.”

“I will personally beat you with my handbag should you even try,” Rebecca tells him.

Ted’s eye closes again. “Hmm. I know how much you carry in that purse, I’m not riskin’ it.”

“Good man,” Rebecca says very softly, and continues to hold his hand as he falls asleep.

Chapter 2

Notes

Yes, the fancasting for Alistair Crane is Brian Cox. And yes, the character's name is a reference to the US soap opera Passions, because it made me giggle.

If Rebecca was able to think of anything beyond Ted, she probably would’ve expected the overblown media attention to Ted’s health crisis. The British media are fucking immoral vultures at the best of times, and Ted, from practically the moment he landed on the shores of the UK, has been a target for more attention than your usual football manager, and when he only went and won the fucking Premier League with Richmond, he became an out-and-out celebrity on a level that few managers ever achieve.

So yes, Rebecca likely should have seen it all coming—the headlines, the bulletins on Sky Sports and the BBC, the pack of photographers stationed outside the hospital, shouting at everyone that walks in, everyone that is remotely connected to Ted or to AFC Richmond.

She’d left the hospital early in the morning to shower and grab some new clothes—she’d meant to go home for sleep, but had ended up dozing in that horrible hospital chair to wake up with a stiff back and a crick in her neck. So after a hot shower to work through the worst of the aches, a quick change into a cozy jumper and her favorite pair of jeans, cramming her laptop and her phone charger into a briefcase, Rebecca calls for her driver and heads back to the hospital.

She puts on her sunglasses and her Airpods before exiting the car, music blasting in her ears as she steps out, but it doesn’t matter—the noise and the flashing cameras cuts through all her defenses anyway.

She has to stop and duck into a corner once she’s past the hospital doors, just to catch her breath, give her racing heart a chance to slow down. Inhale for four counts, hold for four counts, exhale for four counts. Repeat. Repeat.

Once she’s composed herself, Rebecca quickly makes her way to Ted’s room, where she finds him awake and joking cheerfully with the nurse that’s come to take his breakfast tray. She’s sure that the nurse has her rounds to get to, and yet the nurse looks utterly enthralled by Ted’s cheerful story of first coming upon the British version of Shredded Wheat his first week in London, and having absolutely no idea how to eat it.

His smile is as wide and as charming as ever, it’s everything else (the hospital bed and gown, the IV still in his arm, the pallor of his skin) that leaves Rebecca disquieted.

Ted is the first to catch sight of her, and the knot in Rebecca’s stomach eases just a little, at his alert gaze resting on her, his smile growing just that little bit bigger. “Hey there, boss.”

“Don’t let me interrupt,” Rebecca says.

“No, no, we were just finishing up,” the nurse says, smiling at them both. She takes Ted’s breakfast tray with her as she leaves; Rebecca eyes the half-eaten meal with worry, but reminds herself that Ted is already in hospital, and surely the nurse would say something if Ted wasn’t eating enough, if his lack of appetite was a problem.

And still, Rebecca finds herself saying, “We can bring something else for you to eat, if the hospital food isn’t good. Well, it’s hospital food, it’s disgusting, I’m going to have someone bring takeaway from that cafe you like—”

“Rebecca,” Ted mildly interjects, “The hospital food’s fine. I’m just not that hungry this morning. Stop your worryin’, Mandalorian.”

Rebecca eyes him up at that, but Ted just looks back at her placidly, and so there’s nothing for Rebecca to do but grumble and concede—for now, at least.

Instead she starts setting up her little workstation, and Ted watches this in silence for a moment, forehead creasing before he asks, slowly, “Boss, are you going to be working here all day?”

“Obviously,” Rebecca says.

“Don’t you have a whole office to work in?”

“I prefer this working environment,” Rebecca says serenely, and when Ted opens his mouth to no doubt protest, Rebecca levels him with her best glare and says, “Theodore.”

Ted shudders dramatically and says, “It’s incredible how much you’re channeling my great-aunt Peggy right now.”

Truthfully, Rebecca doesn’t actually get much work done, because not before long, Ted’s hospital room becomes a hive of activity, between the flowers being delivered and the Richmond players (current and former) showing up to visit their gaffer. Before long, the sanitized hospital room has more flowers in it than Kew Gardens, and there’s always two or three footballers in the room with them, hugging Ted gently, sitting by his side as they ask how he is, if he needs anything, that they hope he’ll be back soon.

Isaac, Sam and Jamie are the ones that stay the longest by far. Sam is perfectly at ease, sitting by the bed and showing Ted photos of his twin baby girls (he has a dozen new photos every time Rebecca sees them, and she’s delighted to see each one). Isaac’s quieter, but he still reassures Ted that the team’s going to be fine, no one’s too upset over the loss, that they’re all thinking of him and that the team will come together behind Beard and Roy, no need for Ted to worry.

Jamie, poor thing, is far less easy, visibly worried at how ill Ted looks, his eyes darting around the room as he stands awkwardly to one side, hands shoved in his pockets. At one point, while Sam, Isaac and Ted are talking about the charity event that Sam’s wife and Isaac’s partner are organizing, Jamie moves over to Rebecca’s chair, leans in and asks, pitching his voice low, “How is he, for real?”

“Hard to say,” Rebecca admits. “I know he’s in good hands, but it’s Ted. He’d tell you he was fine even if he’d just had a leg sawed off.”

Jamie pulls a face. “They know when he’ll be released?”

“Not for four more days, at the least,” Rebecca says. “But even then it’ll likely be a while before they’ll clear him to go back to work. He had a heart attack, it’s not—it’s not the sort of thing you come back from right away.”

“Yeah,” Jamie says quietly, glancing at Ted. “Yeah, that makes sense.”

What also makes sense is Rebecca having to run out to the hallway to join the call where Higgins divulges that Beard doesn’t actually want to be caretaker manager of the team, and that they think it’s a good idea to make Roy the caretaker manager.

“Roy?” Rebecca spits out in disbelief, lowering her voice only when she sees a doctor looking curiously at her. “But you hate dealing with the press. And, forgive me, but dealing with the press is a major part of being a Premier League manager.”

Roy grunts, but says with clear reluctance, “I could...learn to be better.”

“Honestly, I don’t think the press will be a problem,” Higgins jumps in. “Frankly, Ted’s bought us enough goodwill with the press over the years that we have leeway now, not to mention the situation is such that—well, I’m sure no one will give Roy a hard time.”

“So long as he doesn’t actually punch anyone,” Rebecca says, still dubious.

“It can’t be me,” Beard cuts in, his voice quiet, but still clear as a bell. “I’m sorry, I just—I can’t fill Ted’s shoes on this team.”

There’s a moment of silence, Rebecca flashing back to last night, seeing Beard’s heartbroken face in that press conference, his vulnerability exposed on camera for everyone to see.

“Okay,” Rebecca says at last. “Roy, you will need to go through media training—no, I mean it,” she insists, as Roy growls at the thought. “We don’t need a media firestorm on top of everything else that’s happening right now.”

“Fine,” Roy concedes, because he’s stubborn but he does actually want the best for the team, even if that means having to learn to keep his temper and hold his tongue in front of the British footballing press.

“Should we, I don’t know, release a statement?” Rebecca asks.

“I’ve got one already being worked up by the publicists, we’ll release it later today,” Higgins says, reassuring. “And, Rebecca—”

“Yes?” Rebecca prods, not liking the hesitation in Higgins’ voice.

“I’m sorry, I know this is awful timing, but you do have the meeting with the minority owners scheduled for tomorrow—”

“Cancel it,” Rebecca says. “I’m not sitting with any of those idiots and tolerating their nonsensical bleating, not this week of all weeks.”

"I'm...not sure that's the best idea," Higgins says slowly. "Given the, ah, general upheaval that's happening with Ted's absence from the club, the minority owners will have to be handled very carefully—"

"We've been handling them carefully and it's gotten us absolutely nowhere," Rebecca says bluntly. "The only thing we've accomplished is indulging Bex Mannion's delusions of grandeur and I, for one, am done indulging her."

Of course, the first person Rebecca sees when she heads back to Ted’s room is Bex Mannion, looking angelic in a white blouse and pencil skirt, blithely smiling at Ted as she gently placed a potted orchid down in the one remaining spot on a nearby table. (They’ve already had to clear flowers out once today, and Rebecca’s expecting it to be an ongoing issue.)

“Rebecca,” Bex says, straightening up and flashing that perfectly pleasant smile of hers. “How good to see you, I should have realized you’d be here.”

Over the last few years, Rebecca has gained a hard-won equanimity when it comes to dealing with Bex, either on her own, or when she’s on Rupert’s arm. Time and distance from Rupert has helped, and there’s only so much either of them can do to bother her at this point—Richmond is Rebecca’s, and her success and the club’s success are beyond question.

And yet.

Rebecca gives a quick smile that feels like a grimace on her face, and says, “Bex. I didn’t realize you’d be stopping by.”

“Well, I had to check on our manager, of course,” Bex says, smiling at Ted, and Rebecca twitches a little. Our manager. Fuck’s sake.

Ted’s gaze flicks towards her, but he says, as smooth as he always is when he’s papering over the cracks on Rebecca’s behalf, “Well, I appreciate that, Bex, I do. Just like I appreciate that orchid.”

“Flowers,” Rebecca says lightly. “How original.”

Bex smiles tightly at her, while Ted quickly says, “Well, it’s better than what I tried to get Beard to sneak in for me. Somehow I don’t think Dr. Bhamra would appreciate me eating a steak at this time.”

“You didn’t,” Rebecca says immediately, outraged for an entirely different reason now, and she’s only partly mollified when Ted winks at her and says, “No, but you believed it for a second there, didn’t you?”

“God, you wretch,” Rebecca grumbles, but the tension is eased as she settles back into what she already thinks of as her chair, which is what Ted’s goal was in the first place.

At least, that’s until Bex settles into a chair of her own, as if she’s actually going to stick around. Rebecca stares at her in disbelief, as Bex folds her hands in her lap and asks solicitously, “What have the doctors been saying?”

“They’re saying he had a heart attack,” Rebecca says shortly.

FInally there’s a crack in Bex’s demeanor, as she rolls her eyes like a teenager to Rebecca and says, impatient, “Obviously I’m asking what they’re saying when it comes to Ted’s recovery. How long will he be out?”

“We don’t know yet,” Rebecca says. “They want to keep him here for several more days, see how he improves.” Rebecca’s half-afraid that Ted will put his usual bravado on it, crack a joke about how he’ll be out in the technical area in a week’s time, even if he has to show up with a hospital gown and an IV—but he’s quiet, letting Rebecca take the lead. “We just have to wait and see,” Rebecca finishes.

Bex nods knowingly. “Of course, of course.” She looks to Ted and says gently, reaching out to squeeze his hand, “I’m so glad you’re all right, Ted, truly. Don’t feel any rush to come back before you’re ready.”

Ted’s mouth twists a little, but he says, with all apparent sincerity, “Oh, I’ll take it easy, don’t you worry.”

“You’ll take it easy if I have to tie you to that bed and make you,” Rebecca warns, and Ted’s answering smile feels like it’s meant for her specifically.

*

Dr. Bhamra stops by soon after Bex finally exits, a portly South Asian man with glasses and a kind demeanor. Rebecca likes him immediately (even as she’s making notes to dig up his resume and credentials) and when he asks if Ted’s comfortable with Rebecca sticking around for their consultation, Rebecca relaxes when Ted says immediately, “Oh, no, it’s fine, Rebecca can stay.”

“Very good, very good,” Dr. Bhamra says affably, and takes a seat. “Obviously, your surgery was successful, but your recovery itself is going to take more time. I’m part of your cardiac rehabilitation team, you’ll be working with me, your nurses, a dietitian, a physiotherapist and an exercise therapist. What I’d like to do first is just get a picture of your usual routines, where you were at before you had the heart attack.”

Ted’s mouth twists a little, and he admits, “Well, I clearly wasn’t doing as well as I thought I was doing. But yeah, let’s get this consultation started.”

“What does your typical diet look like?” Dr. Bhamra asks. “Do you cook for yourself, or do you tend to eat out more?”

Ted wrinkles his nose. “Don’t have the time to cook as much as I’d like.”

“But you’re a fantastic cook,” Rebecca says without thinking, and holds up a hand in apology when Dr. Bhamra looks at her over his glasses. “Sorry, I’ll stay quiet.”

“No, no,” Dr. Bhamra says. “It’s always good to get perspective from the family and loved ones, as much as from the patient.”

Reassured, Rebecca settles back into her seat, taking notes of her own on her laptop. The reassurance doesn’t last long, as under Dr. Bhamra’s gentle questions, Ted admits that his breakfast in the morning mostly consists of coffee and protein bars, that when he does eat lunch it’s usually something from the club’s kitchens, and then that most nights he just has dinner at the local pub. “Real pity y’all don’t have barbecue over here—”

“We have barbecue,” Rebecca protests, and Ted looks at her and repeats, pointedly, “As I was saying, it’s a real pity y’all don’t have actual barbecue over here, but I’ve learned to appreciate fish and chips and all the other classic British food y’all got.”

Dr. Bhamra chuckles, but he’s jotting something down in his notebook. “So a lot of pub fare, I see. And alcohol, how many drinks would you say you have on average?”

Rebecca wants to think the brief pause Ted takes is just her imagination. “Like, per week, or…”

“Per night,” Dr. Bhamra says.

“Okay. I’d say...one to two, maybe?”

“Mhm,” Dr. Bhamra says. “And exercise? How active would you say you are?”

“He walks everywhere,” Rebecca offers. “Five years and he still refuses to learn to drive in England.”

“Me behind the wheel on the left side of the road is something you don’t ever want to see,” Ted replies, grinning. “But no, I like to walk, uh…keeping up with the boys at training has me in a sweat, I’ll tell you that.”

“Mhm,” Dr. Bhamra says, jotting more things down. “I don’t envy you trying to keep up with professional footballers.”

“They keep me on my toes, that’s for sure,” Ted agrees.

“Now, I know this might be a ridiculous question, given the work you do,” Dr. Bhamra offers, gesturing with his pen, “But how much stress would you say you’re feeling, in a typical week?”

Ted laughs outright at this, incredulous. “I mean, it depends. Are we playing a Champions League match that week? Or is it a local derby? Or a match that means the difference between staying in the top four or playing in the Europa League or no European football at all?”

Dr. Bhamra smiles, but says, “So, stressful then.”

“I wouldn’t be doing the job right if I wasn’t stressed,” Ted says calmly. Rebecca’s stomach lurches as Ted nods in her direction and adds, “She’s not paying me millions a year just to chill out and take each match as it comes, you know?”

“Ted,” Rebecca protests before she can stop herself, and Ted turns to her, concern appearing on his face, for her, as he says apologetically, “No, hey, Rebecca, you know I don’t mean it like—”

His hand is outstretched towards her, palm up, and Rebecca can’t resist, she takes it even as she reassures him, “No, it’s fine, I know what you mean.” She squeezes his hand even as she turns to Dr. Bhamra and explains, “Ted’s very dedicated to his job. That means a lot of time spent reviewing matches, handling training, the media, coordinating with our academy to make sure we’re promoting our youth players, not to mention dealing with the scouts and agents about transfers—”

Her mouth is going a little dry as she speaks, realizing all over again just how wrapped up Ted is in Richmond, how much of the club revolves around him. How much work has been placed on his shoulders these last few years, without Rebecca ever quite recognizing it, just happy to have Ted there to lean on, depend on—

She swallows and tries to smile. “Ted’s dedication to the club is...beyond question.”

Her stomach twists at the gratified look on Ted’s face, his obvious pleasure at hearing that.

“I see,” Dr. Bhamra says.

“But obviously we understand that changes need to be made,” Rebecca blurts out. “Major lifestyle changes, work changes. And we all support that, one hundred percent.”

Dr. Bhamra nods, kindly, but says, “There will be time for us to talk about what changes need to be made, don’t worry. Ted, I know you’re already on medication to handle your blood pressure—”

“Along with every other fifty-year-old,” Ted jokes.

“But we’ll likely be prescribing blood thinners as well, just to prevent any blood clots from forming.” Dr. Bhamra clicks his pen and closes his notebook, smiling at them both as he makes his goodbyes, cracking gentle jokes with Ted and shaking Rebecca’s hand before he leaves.

Rebecca watches him go, and turns to find Ted watching her, his expression calm but oddly unreadable. Hoping he can’t see her unease (but knowing he can) Rebecca smiles and says, “Excuse me, I’ve just got to make a quick phone call to Keeley. The press, you know.”

“Sure,” Ted says, and Rebecca hastily leaves the room, not to make a phone call to Keeley, but to quickly chase Dr. Bhamra down the hallway, her heels clicking on the tiles.

“Sorry, sorry,” Rebecca says, as Dr. Bhamra pauses to wait for her, an inquisitive expression on his face. “I just...I just wanted to say, about Ted, the heart attack, he…”

She falters, but Dr. Bhamra’s expression is kind, and she says, “He thought it was a panic attack. He’s had...so he just thought it was another panic attack, and that’s why he ignored it until, well, until he couldn’t.”

“Has he had panic attacks before?” Dr. Bhamra asks mildly.

Rebecca nods. “He’s, um. We just found out he’s been managing them with some Xanax prescription from the States, I hadn’t realized things were that bad, but—”

“Sorry,” Dr. Bhamra says, holding up a hand. “What Xanax prescription? That’s not in his medical records.”

“Oh,” Rebecca says, dumbly.

Dr. Bhamra quickly reassures her, saying, “Well, I’m glad we have that information now, it’ll be of great help when dealing with his recovery. Mental health is just as crucial as physical health when it comes to a patient’s well-being.” He pauses before saying, “And I’m glad that you told me. I mean what I said—it’s important for us to have a full picture of Ted’s health.”

“All right,” Rebecca says, dimly aware that she’s wringing her hands and not sure how to stop. “Well—thank you.”

*

Rebecca tracks down something approaching a meal in the hospital’s commissary, idly stabbing her salad while she reluctantly goes through the articles and news Keeley’s been sending to her email.

She ends up clicking on one of the articles Keeley sent, the one where she’s added a note of this one is really nice about Ted <3

The article is from Lara Adebayo at the Guardian (Rebecca’s always enjoyed her writing, while trusting her as much as she trusts any journalist, which is to say not at all), and it details the outpouring of concern and support on social media the minute that Ted’s heart attack hit the news.

But perhaps the reaction should have been expected, after all. Richmond have long been a favorite of the neutrals, gaining widespread admiration not just for their miraculous Premier League title win in the 2022-2023 season, but for the way in which they seemingly embodied so many virtues long thought gone in the age of oil-rich oligarchs and English clubs being used as PR statecraft for autocratic countries with dubious human rights records. A club where players’ loyalties to their club and its fanbase still are paramount (see Jamie Tartt refusing to leave Richmond for supposedly greener pastures such as Chelsea or Manchester United) where the club places a premium on blooding and nurturing young talent, where it truly seems linked to the local community and to the fans.

This is not to say that other clubs don’t share these virtues, or that Richmond is an organization without fault. But often it seemed that way, as though somehow this American interloper had managed to tap into every supposed English virtue of football and bring it into being in this club, with its polite and friendly players, a manager whose charm is somehow even more potent in person than it is on camera, and a club that managed to win time and time again, even with a fraction of the budget and resources of its nearest rivals. And they didn’t just win, they didn’t just compete, they made it look easy. They made it look fun.

Rebecca closes her eyes, the memories of dozens of matches flitting through her mind—their first match back in the Premiership, the first time they beat Manchester City, the game that won them the league title, the first FA Cup Final that they won, the first Champions League match Richmond had ever played in their history, all those successes, all those triumphs—did she start taking it for granted, these last few years? Did she look at the miracles Ted performed and consider them all nothing more than her due?

“Here you fucking are,” someone says, sounding both very exasperated and very Scottish, and Rebecca knows who it is before she even looks up and sees Alistair Crane walking towards her table, several books under his arm and an annoyed look on his face. “Been walking all over this damned hospital looking for you.” He looks at her salad and pulls a face, saying, “Jesus, Rebecca, are you actually eating that? You’ll get fucking salmonella, everyone knows hospital food’s dangerous as hell. They’ve got infections here that aren’t even worth thinking about.”

“Tactful as ever, Alistair,” Rebecca says with a sigh, noticing the junior doctor who’s eyeing them both up warily. With their luck, that’ll end up as a front page headline on the Daily Mail: AFC Richmond Owners Insult NHS Hospitals. “Wait, why are you looking for me, aren’t you here to visit Ted?”

“Of course I’m here to see Ted,” Alistair says, scoffing at her. “Need to get the dirt from you first though, don’t I?” For half a second, Rebecca can almost forget their surroundings, the reason that they’re here, and just look at Alistair’s grizzled face and well-tailored suit and think that they’re having another business meeting about the club.

But they’re not in a Michelin-starred restaurant, they’re in the commissary of an NHS hospital, and the fluorescent lighting sets the wrinkles on Alistair’s face into harsh relief, dulls the shine of his white hair and neatly-kept goatee.

“What do you want to know?” Rebecca says.

Alistair looks at her, and asks grimly, “How bad is it?”

“It was a massive heart attack, Alistair,” Rebecca says to him. “Of course it’s fucking bad. Not that you’d be able to tell, from how Ted’s acting.” She swallows and looks down at her phone, clicking a button so that the screen goes black, the words disappearing before her eyes. “This has been coming for a while, and none of us saw it.”

Alistair doesn’t speak for a second, and Rebecca thinks that if she hears a word from him about the team, about their position in the league, about the Champions League match that’s coming up in two weeks—forget how many witnesses there are around them, forget how soon this will be front page news and blasted all over Sky Sports, she will actually start shrieking like a banshee and never stop.

But Alistair surprises her. “Right then, so it’s our job to go and fucking fix it now, isn’t it, Welton?” he offers up, and when she gapes at him, just glowers down at her until she nods and says blankly, “Right, yes, of course.”

“Of course I’m right,” Alistair says. “Now show me where his blasted room is already, I’m getting a cramp carrying these wretched books.”

“Why did you bring the books?” Rebecca asks as they make their way out of the commissary. “And what books are those?”

“They’re for Ted, obviously,” Alistair says grumpily. “Can’t fucking bring him a nice bottle of Scotch or a box of cigars—” his usual presents, Rebecca remembers, he hands them out to everyone regardless of religion or smoking habits or teetotalism, “And I’ll be damned before I hand him one of those fucking tablets you lot are forever carrying with you, a book should have pages that you can turn, it should have heft to it—”

Having heard Alistair give a variation of this speech before, Rebecca is both amused and unsurprised. “What books did you pick for him?”

“Hmm? Oh, I got Persuasion, cliched though Austen is at this point—”

“Don’t let Ted hear you say that—”

“—at least it’s not Pride and Prejudice, and the man could use a old favorite around while he’s cooped up in this hellhole—”

“Don’t call the hospital a hellhole where people can hear you either—”

“I’ll do as I please, thank you, and there’s some le Carre because that’s fucking obvious, and I brought Val McDermid because the woman’s a national fucking treasure—”

“Bit grim, isn’t it?” Rebecca says, glancing at the copy of A Darker Domain that Alistair’s got tucked under his arm, and the ensuing argument that comes from that lasts them all the way right up to the doorway of Ted’s room, where both of them fall silent at the sound of Ted talking on the phone, agitated, his accent thicker than normal.

“Henry, Henry, it’s all right, listen, if you and your mom can’t come right away, it’s not—son, come on—” A pause, and then Ted starts speaking again, more coldly this time. “Well, if you say Jennifer can’t come, then that’s it, I suppose. Yes, I’m fine.” A brief pause. “Doctors say I’m doing fine, Michelle, I don’t know what you want to hear from me.”

Rebecca’s stomach twists, and she leans her weight back on her heels as though to back away, except that when she tugs on Alistair’s arm he looks at her as though she’s gone daft.

“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll talk to you both soon. Mmhm. You too.” Then finally there’s nothing but silence, and Alistair and Rebecca stare at each other until just enough time has passed that it’s hopefully plausible that Ted will believe they didn’t overhear any of that excruciating conversation between him and his ex-wife.

Rebecca holds her breath as she knocks before entering, saying lightly as she walks in, “You have a visitor, and I would like to apologize in advance for the truly depressing catalog of books he’s brought with him.”

If she hadn’t been there to hear that conversation, she wouldn’t have thought anything was wrong (aside from the obvious reason why Ted’s in the hospital to begin with). Ted breaks out into a beaming smile the minute that he sees them, drawling out, “Well, hello there, sir, you didn’t have to stop by like this but I sure appreciate it.”

“Of course I fucking did, don’t be ridiculous,” Alistair retorts, setting the books down on the table before leaning in to clap Ted gently on the shoulder. “How are you, lad?”

“Oh, I’m doing okay,” Ted promises, and Rebecca glances down to where he’s still holding his phone tightly in one hand.

“They taking care of you here?” Alistair prods, and Ted nods reassuringly.

“Yes, sir, nationalized medicine has turned out to be a delight,” he says dryly, and Alistair cackles.

“You’re fucking welcome, you Yankee,” he says, before growing serious. “Ted, listen—I mentioned this to Rebecca earlier, but I want you to know, I can have the jet ready and out there to Wichita in the snap of my fingers, all right? We can have your lad and his mother here in the blink of an eye.”

Rebecca takes a breath, not sure if this is the right approach given what they’ve just heard—but Ted looks between the two of them, sighs a little, and says, “So y’all heard everything over that phone call, huh?”

“What phone call?” Rebecca tries, opening her eyes wide as she tries to sound as innocent as possible.

Ted just looks at her, and says calmly, “Rebecca, sweetheart, I don’t know how you think you’re ever going to be sneaky when you’re walking around on tile floors in those heels, I can hear you coming down the hallway five minutes before you’re at my door.”

Rebecca grimaces, glaring down at her feet—she knew she should’ve put on the trainers today, fucking hell.

“So,” Alistair says, settling himself in a chair, clapping his hands on his knees, “What’s the issue, then?”

Something in the no-nonsense way he approaches it makes it seem less impossible for Ted to answer, as Ted sighs and says slowly, lips pursed, “Henry’s struggling because...well, not just with me being here and all, but because there’s...gonna be a delay before he can come and visit.”

“Why a delay?” Rebecca asks, confused. “Surely his teachers would understand him being away from school.”

“It’s not about his school,” Ted says, shaking his head. “Jennifer—that’s Michelle’s wife—she’s got a big court case that’s wrapping up, can’t get the time off work to fly over here, not just yet.”

“Okay,” Alistair says slowly. “But why can’t Michelle and Henry come over here first, and then Jennifer can come over once her big trial’s over and done with?”

Ted takes a big breath through his nose. “Michelle doesn’t feel comfortable coming over here without her wife as support,” he says, very evenly. “And she doesn’t want to send Henry flying over on a transatlantic flight on his own, so—there’s a delay.”

Rebecca opens her mouth, catches Alistair’s warning eye, and shuts her mouth on the first five things that want to spill out of her mouth, all starting with some variation on that is totally fucking ridiculous and let me get on the phone to Michelle, I’ll make her see reason and I don’t care how long it takes me.

Alistair hums to himself then says, thoughtfully, “You’ve always gotten along well with Michelle, I thought. Far better than I have with any of my ex-wives, anyway.” Rebecca snorts a little at that, and Alistair grins cheekily at her for a moment. “I know, I know, not hard to manage, given my track record.”

“We do a good job co-parenting Henry,” Ted says, which is not exactly an answer to Alistair’s question…except for how it is, Rebecca realizes slowly. “But you know, divorce is hard. And to be fair to her, I think me being here in the hospital’s thrown her for a loop.”

“Yes, but you’re the one in the hospital,” Rebecca says, unable to help herself. “And you’re Henry’s father, you—” Ted looks at her, not impatiently, but with such a weary look to his eyes that Rebecca finds herself choking on her words again, helpless to do anything but seethe about how unfair all of this is, that Ted of all people should be—

“Well,” Alistair says briskly, “The jet’s waiting for them whenever they’re ready to come over. And let me tell you something, Theodore, if you don’t take advantage of my generosity, I will be very fucking offended, do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir,” Ted says obediently, a reluctant smile coming to his lips.

“Good lad,” Alistair says, satisfied that he’s been heard and will be obeyed. “Now, since my usual go-tos of cigars and Scotch are apparently verboten so long as you’re in this festering trap—there aren’t any witnesses around so I’ll call it what I like, Rebecca—I’ve brought you some actual physical books so you don’t go raving mad from boredom.”

“I see that,” Ted says, smiling as he cranes his neck to read the spines. “What have you got there?”

“Books that’ll send you straight into a depression,” Rebecca tells him, and Alistair waves a hand at her dismissively as he blithely enthuses about his selections, Rebecca interjecting dry asides whenever she can, both of them playing it up in the hopes that it’ll make Ted laugh, cheer him up even a little.

And it works. Ted’s laughing at their antics, his smile bright enough to almost distract from the still-present pallor to his cheeks, the stubble on his face that hasn’t been shaved yet because the nurses are concerned with far more important things, the fact that he’s here in this hospital bed at all—his smile is bright enough for Rebecca to almost forget all of that.

But then she looks at Ted’s hand, still curved around his phone, the IV taped to the back of it, and it’s impossible for her to forget.

Chapter 3

“Remind me again,” Rebecca says in a grim voice, stabbing at her smoothie with a straw.

Obediently and supportively, Keeley says for the second time that morning, “You cannot call Ted’s ex-wife to shout at her about getting Henry on a plane.”

“Right, right,” Rebecca says, before lifting her head. “Remind me again about why I can’t do that?”

“Rebecca,” Keeley says, and Rebecca groans, pushing her smoothie away.

“I know, I know—it’s just going to make things harder for Ted.”

“Yeah, but it’s not your place to get in between them on this,” Keeley says firmly, before adding under her breath, “No matter how satisfying it would feel.” Rebecca looks up at this, and Keeley quickly adds, pointing at her, “That is not an excuse, Rebecca.”

Slumping in her seat, Rebecca buries her face in her hands and groans. “I know, I know. I just...I just want to fix something, and it’s driving me mad that I can’t.”

“I know, babe,” Keeley says sympathetically, reaching out across the desk to squeeze her hand. “I know, but it’s going to get better, okay? It will.”

Rebecca squeezes Keeley’s hand again, then smiles ruefully. “Almost feels like old times, having you around in my office early in the morning.”

“I know, I love it,” Keeley says, smiling back at her. “Not that I don’t love being my own boss—”

“Or running one of the top PR firms in London,” Rebecca interjects, and Keeley’s cheeks turn pink with pleasure, as though it’s the first time she’s heard that and not the hundredth.

“—but I do miss running around this place on the regular,” Keeley finishes, glancing around Rebecca’s office. Rebecca smiles back and tries, very hard, not to let her gaze dart to the couch, to the place on the floor where Ted, where he—

There’s a faint rattling, and Rebecca looks down to realize that she’s mindlessly tapping her fingernails on the surface of her desk. “I’m going to need to redecorate in here,” she says, half to herself. “I can’t—how can I work here if every time I look at the couch I just see—” She cuts herself off, shaking her head, and Keeley immediately reaches out to squeeze her hands, in comfort and in worry.

“Babe,” she says, so soft and so kind, God, it still feels impossible some days that people like Keeley and Ted really exist in the world. “How are you—really, how are you?”

“I’m fine,” Rebecca tries. Keeley’s face is sympathetically disbelieving, and Rebecca shrugs helplessly. “I’m as fine as I can be, with Ted still in hospital and me having to waste my time with this ridiculous meeting—”

“It’ll keep the minority owners happy,” Keeley says, in a perfect imitation of Higgins.

“Fuck the minority owners,” Rebecca grumbles. “Except for Alistair, he brought Ted books, he can stick around.”

“The sooner you get this done and get them on their way, the sooner you can visit Ted,” Keeley offers up next, and that is honestly the best motivation Rebecca’s going to get for this meeting.

Even so, it’s utterly horrendous. It starts with air kisses and firm handshakes, everyone asking her in hushed tones “how is Ted, really,” in between talking about their latest trips to the south of France or Thailand or where the fuck ever. And of course Bex is right on time, smiling at everyone and wearing a Chanel suit, hair falling in glossy waves over her tweed jacket, and Rebecca can feel the headache building behind her temples already, before the meeting’s even officially started yet.

Higgins, bless him, keeps things ticking for as long as he can, reviewing the club’s financial health, what the expected revenues will be for the rest of the year and going forward, so on and so forth.

And then it turns back to the same bullshit.

“I’d like to discuss the stadium redevelopment, please,” Bex says.

“Of course you fucking would,” Alistair grumbles under his breath, but subsides at a glance from Rebecca.

“It is not a ridiculous thing to ask how we expect to pay for it,” one of the other minority owners, Christian Paisley-Wolfe, interjects. He’s one of Bex’s little minions, and his 3.7% share in the club means he expects to be listened to.

“We have gone through this,” Rebecca says, with as much patience as she can manage. “The loan we’ve secured—”

“Could hamstring the club’s abilities in the transfer market for years to come,” Bex interrupts, and Rebecca raises an eyebrow at her coldly. “It’s what happened to Arsenal when they built the Emirates, it’s what happened to Tottenham when they moved from White Hart Lane—”

“They were building entirely new stadiums, not redeveloping the old one,” Rebecca says, with impatience. “And another thing, if you think we’re going to be outspending the likes of City or Chelsea in the transfer market, ever, I’ve got a fucking bridge I’d like to sell you.” Higgins shifts in his seat, and Rebecca gathers her composure around her once more. “Richmond stays competitive not by flinging money about, but by searching out emerging talents globally, nurturing our academy—”

“Snatching generational talent right out from Chelsea’s noses,” Alistair says with satisfaction, referring to Taylor Komoh, a loanee from Chelsea who’d elected not to return to his parent club once his loan was up, and forced through the move to Richmond instead. Rumor has it he’d gloated right to the faces of the Chelsea owners at some art auction three weeks after the transfer had gone through.

“Yes, but can that model survive?” Dakshesh Varadkar (4.2% share in the club) asks, forehead furrowed. “Forgive me, but it seems as though our business model is predicated in large part upon having and keeping Ted Lasso as our manager. He’s a major draw for young talent—Taylor Komoh is a great example of that—a consistent media draw, particularly in the US, and never mind the winning mentality he’s brought to the club—”

“What’s your point?” Rebecca asks, standing up very straight in her seat.

Dakshesh takes a breath and says, “If Coach Lasso has to go on extended leave or, forgive me, resign for health reasons—”

“It hasn’t even been a week, you fucking ghoul,” Alistair snaps out, outraged. “Show some goddamn respect.”

Dakshesh swells up with indignation. “How dare you talk to me in such a manner—”

The meeting devolves rather quickly from there. There’s shouting and swearing, and much pointing of the fingers, and the end of it is that everything stays exactly the same as it was at the beginning of the meeting, because every inch of this was a waste of Rebecca’s fucking time and energy and patience.

Bex is one of the last to leave, hesitating before stepping over to Rebecca and saying in a low voice, “I hope you don’t think—”

“Think what?” Rebecca asks, rubbing at her temples, not bothering to look up. “That you’re trying to undermine me at every turn? That you’ve turned every one of these meetings into a pointless soap opera? That I have wasted an entire morning on this bullshit where there are far more important—” She cuts herself off, and looks at Bex with her hardest stare. “I think,” Rebecca says, each word precise, “That you are a thorn in my side, and I don’t feel like pretending otherwise. Not today. Now, is there anything else?”

Bex looks rather pale, but says, with a tolerable attempt at poise and control, “No. Not for now, at least.”

“Good,” Rebecca spits out, and turns in her seat until Bex finally leaves, and Rebecca is left alone in the conference room with Higgins and Alistair. Rebecca holds up a hand when Higgins is about to speak, saying, “I know, I know, there will be an article in the Sun within a week, it wasn’t the smart play, I know all of it, I don’t care.”

Higgins looks at her with sympathy and says, “You’ve kept your patience with her for far longer than anyone could expect you to, Rebecca.”

Rebecca lets out a sigh, then looks to Alistair, who looks back at her, arms folded over his stomach, totally unrepentant. “Do you want me to apologize for sticking the boot in with Varadkar and that whining pustule Paisley-Wolfe?”

“Not really,” Rebecca admits, smiling. “Thank you for intervening. At least the cursing was a welcome change from the usual nonsense.”

Alistair waves it off. “Please. Like I’m going to go back to the hospital, look Ted Lasso in the face, and tell him I didn’t back you against all those vultures.” He looks at Rebecca for a moment, and says quietly, “Word is Paisley-Wolfe is thinking about selling his shares.”

“To Bex?” Rebecca asks, and when Alistair nods, sighs even more deeply. “What an unsurprisingly wretched development. Of course she’s got to sink her claws just a little bit deeper.”

“Can we cut her off at the pass?” Higgins asks. “Perhaps if you offered to purchase his shares—”

“No, Christian’s been one of Rupert’s cronies for decades,” Rebecca says. “Word has it that he’s a little cash-strapped as well, bad investments, and that ancient Northumberland manor is hardly cheap to keep up.” She’s quiet for a moment, thinking of the likely champagne toast with Rupert that Bex is sure to have tonight, then shakes her head. “It doesn’t matter. I’m going back to the hospital to see Ted.”

“I’ll come by later,” Higgins promises.

“Ask him how he’s liking the McDermid,” Alistair says, and Rebecca gives him a little salute.

“Will do,” she promises.

*

For a moment, when Rebecca is walking towards the open door to Ted's hospital room and hears the sound of Ted laughing, all the stress and frustration from her morning goes away.

Then she hears the sound of another person in the room with Ted, realizes who it is, and that momentary calm is immediately drowned out by disbelief and growing indignation.

Hardly breathing, her back stiff, Rebecca walks into the room to find Trent fucking Crimm sitting in her usual chair by Ted's bed, as though he has any right to be here at all.

It's a small (very small) comfort to see Trent's smile fade as he realizes she's come in.

"Hey, Rebecca," Ted says easily, as though one of the most unscrupulous vultures in the British press isn't sitting next to his bed.

Rebecca can feel her temples throbbing, and without preamble, she looks at Trent and says, "Whatever Ted's said to you today is off the record."

A muscle ticks in Trent's jaw, but he replies smoothly, "You know that only works if it's said at the beginning of an interview and not the end of one, Ms. Welton."

"And it's moot anyway, since this isn't an interview at all," Ted interjects. "Trent just came in to say hey and see how I was doing." He looks at Trent and says very mildly, in an echo of the teacher he once planned to be before coaching became his career, "Stop trying to bait her."

Trent dips his head in acknowledgement and says to Rebecca, "It's true, I was just visiting to pass on good wishes from myself and the rest of the press room."

"Not looking for material for a new book, then?" Rebecca asks, acid-sweet. "What a refreshing change." As Trent's expression goes stiff, Rebecca pointedly moves out of the doorway and says, "Don't let us keep you."

Trent doesn't move at first, and part of Rebecca actually wants the confrontation—but then he turns to Ted, with that faint and infuriating smile of his, and says, "Seems I've been given my marching orders. It's good to see you, Ted."

"Take care, Trent," Ted replies.

Rebecca doesn't move until Trent goes, exiting with a faintly mocking, "Ms. Welton". Once he has gone, she pointedly shuts the door behind him, spitting out, "The absolute nerve of the man. I've a mind to complain to his editors."

"Rebecca," Ted says, and the patience in his voice is, perversely, making Rebecca want to pick a fight with somebody. Preferably the asshole who just walked out of the room. "Trent wasn't trying to interview me. First thing that came out of his mouth when he walked in was a promise that the whole visit was off the record, and that I could kick him out if I wanted."

Rebecca tries to hold it in, she really does, but the words burst out of her anyway. "I don't know how you can stand to be in the same room with him."

Ted looks a little tired as he replies, "He was just doing his job, Rebecca."

Rebecca bites at the inside of her cheek to stop herself from replying, because she doesn't want to go down this same road, repeat the same argument they've been having in one form or another for years, because it never goes anywhere.

Four years ago, in the wake of Richmond winning the Premier League title, Trent Crimm had written an in-depth book all about the club's unlikely rise under Ted's coaching. For background, he'd gone to Ted's hometown of Baxter Springs, Kansas, where he'd ferreted out Ted's entire backstory—including the suicide of Ted's father. And then he'd put it all in his book, for the entire world to read.

Rebecca immediately had her lawyers slap the book with injunctions to stop it being published, but Ted, of all people, had been the one to call her off. He'd pointed out that nothing Trent had written was untrue, and the injunction wasn't worth poisoning Richmond's relationship with the press.

Maybe so. Rebecca would have considered it worth it just to keep from seeing Ted's face when the tabloids splashed his family's pain and tragedy across the front pages of all their newspapers. She'd hated every minute of that awful time, especially the moment when she’d learned from the front page of the goddamn Daily Mail that Ted was the living image of his father, right down to the dimpled smile.

Four years on, and every time Rebecca sees Trent Crimm all she can think of are those awful weeks, the helpless anger Rebecca carried for Ted, because he refused to feel it himself.

“You know you don't need to protect me from Trent, right?" Ted asks her gently as Rebecca sits in the chair Trent just vacated, dragging it a little closer to Ted’s bedside as she does.

"Don't be absurd, of course I do," Rebecca retorts. "Which of these flowers came from him, I want to make sure it goes straight into the nearest skip."

“Becca.”

He doesn’t shorten her name like that very often. Good thing too, because she melts every time that he does.

Rebecca takes a deep breath. “I know no one has benefited more from your forgiving nature than me,” she says, and continues as Ted’s eyes go wide and he opens his mouth to interrupt, “But asking me to emulate your forgiveness, to someone that hurt you, is asking rather a lot. Do you expect me to welcome Nate Shelley with a smile, if that little twat ever got up the nerve to show his face here?”

"It does seem rather unlikely, I'll admit," Ted concedes. "Rebecca—hey." He holds out his hand, and helplessly, Rebecca reaches out to take it, something in her unwinding as Ted's strong fingers gently squeeze around hers. "You were worked up even before you came in here and saw Trent. What's going on?"

"How on earth could you know that?" Rebecca asks, and Ted grins.

"The way you were stomping down the hallway in those heels," he says cheekily, before adding, "Also Higgins texted me with a play-by-play of the owners' meeting y'all had this morning."

Rebecca exhales. "That little informant," she grumbles, but without heat. "Yes, the meeting was this morning, and yes, it was absolutely wretched."

Ted lifts his eyebrows, and Rebecca gives in and gives him the blow-by-blow account of the meeting, although she refrains from mentioning how his own health and long-term prospects were at the heart of the latest row. Instead she does her best to imitate Alistair's Scottish burr and his truly inspired swearing, a warm glow of pride growing inside of her as Ted laughs heartily at her so-so impression.

But then Dr. Bhamra comes in, and Rebecca immediately brings out her notebook again and starts taking notes, as they review Ted's health (improving) and the steps he'll need to take once he's released from the hospital later this week (numerous). As Rebecca scribbles away, listening to Dr. Bhamra talk about the changes in diet and exercise, the follow up appointments, the new medications and their potential risks and side effects, a cold ribbon of worry winds around her chest, thinking of Ted alone in his flat to handle this all on his own, blithely reassuring all of his friends that everything's fine, no need to fuss, and meanwhile—

"Should we hire a nurse to look after him?" Rebecca asks.

"Absolutely not," Ted says before Dr. Bhamra can reply. As both of them raise their eyebrows, he flushes a little bit and says, abashed, "Well, I just don't think that's necessary, but I appreciate the thought, Rebecca, thank you."

"A live-in nurse is probably unnecessary," Dr. Bhamra agrees, "Though I do urge you to work closely with your cardiac rehabilitation team..." He continues on, and Rebecca keeps taking notes, but meanwhile there's a thought turning over and over in the back of her mind, coalescing into a plan.

Finally, once Dr. Bhamra leaves, Ted gives her a questioning look. "Everything good, Robin Hood?"

"Yes," Rebecca says automatically, then checks herself. "It's just…I think you should move into my place, once you're released from hospital."

She's hoping it'll sound less mad when she says it out loud, but from the way Ted's eyes are going wide, that seems to have been a foolish hope. "You think I should what now?"

"Move in," Rebecca says. "It's not like I don't have the room, Ted, I live in a mansion. I even have a gym. And a pool. You'd be able to get in your exercise in peace without worrying about the paparazzi catching you coming and going—" Rebecca realizes that he could point out, with reason, that the paparazzi catching him leaving her house would be a far bigger story, and hurriedly goes on, "And it's not like I don't have a giant kitchen for you to bake and cook in. I can even set you up on a separate floor if you're worried about running into me too often, you'll barely see me if that's what you're worried about—"

"Rebecca, Rebecca," Ted cuts in, and Rebecca finally pauses to take a breath. "That's mighty generous of you, but—you know you don't need to keep an eye on me, I'll be fine." Rebecca's face must give away what she thinks of that, as Ted adds, "I mean, I can still crash with Beard for a while, if you're worried about me being on my own—"

"Beard'll be gone all the time managing the team, that won't do at all," Rebecca retorts. Ted still doesn't look persuaded by her (irrefutable) logic, and Rebecca's stomach twists as she realizes she hasn't convinced him yet, that he still might insist on handling all this on his own, that he’ll be completely alone in that poky flat—

"Please," Rebecca hears herself say out loud. "I'll go absolutely mad with worry if you don't."

Ted's expression shifts, opens, those lovely clear brown eyes searching her face for a long moment before he says, sounding surprised at himself, "Okay."

"Really?" Rebecca blurts out, nearly as surprised as he is.

"Yeah," Ted says, still looking startled. "I mean, unless you're having second thoughts about keeping me around as a roommate, I'm not kidding about staying with Beard—"

"Nope, too late, you've agreed, no takebacks now," Rebecca says quickly, and Ted starts to laugh.

"No getting out of a deal with you, huh?"

"You're still here, aren't you?" Rebecca points out, and the corner of Ted's mouth curves up in a slow, lopsided smile.

"Yeah. Suppose I am at that."

*

Rebecca leaves late in the evening, after enjoying a delightful meal (of mediocre hospital food) with Ted, Roy, Keeley, Beard and Higgins, aside from when she kept having to redirect Roy from discussing the upcoming Champions League match with Ted, and the possible tactics for Richmond they’ll take.

She’s the last to leave, Ted insisting that she has to go home at a reasonable hour, and Rebecca eventually consents, squeezing his shoulder before she leaves.

Rebecca heads out to meet her driver in the carpark (less chances of running into paparazzi that way) and Rebecca is preoccupied thinking of how Ted’s face had a healthier color to it today, what she’ll want to do to the house to help Ted settle in once he’s released (should she buy him kitchen utensils and appliances, or bring his own things from his flat?) that she doesn’t actually notice Nate Shelley, newly-minted coach of West Ham, until she practically runs over him.

Of all the fucking coincidences. As though she’s conjured him up when she mentioned his name earlier, it is Nate Shelley, in one of the suits that always seem pretentious on him (or they do now she recognizes what a twat he is) stepping out of his own car, tugging at the cuffs to his sleeves nervously.

He’s carrying a bouquet of flowers, bright and cheerful and totally incongruous against the charcoal grey of his suit.

Rebecca just stares at him, ignoring her own car and driver waiting for her, until Nate looks over and sees her, jumping a little with surprise. For a fraction of a second, Rebecca can almost see the nervous kitman who would stutter any time she was in a room, who responded to Ted’s open-handed generosity with gratitude rather than treachery.

Then his face closes over, and Rebecca turns away and gets into her waiting car.

She watches carefully through the tinted windows, and is unsurprised when Nate chooses to get back into his own car, rather than entering the hospital to visit—whoever he was planning to visit.

*

Rebecca is up ridiculously early the next morning. In her defense, there’s quite a lot to do if her house is going to be ready for Ted to move in, starting with asking Ted if he’s comfortable hiring movers to pack up his things, or if she should do it herself. Maybe with some help from Keeley, God knows the woman loves a project.

She heads over to the hospital earlier than usual, reviewing the list of recommended dietitians for Ted, and when she hears a soft, American-accented voice asking, “Ms. Welton, ma’am,” it takes her a moment to look in the direction of who’s speaking to her, and once she sees who it is, her phone slips out of her nerveless fingers.

Voice nearly strangled from the shock, Rebecca gasps out, “Henry? Henry Lasso?”

Because it is Henry, Ted’s son Henry who is somehow standing in front of her, looking nervous and exhausted, a backpack slung over his thin shoulders, another carry-on bag on the floor by his feet, just a few feet away from the receptionist desk, here in this hospital, in London—

“Yeah, it’s me,” Henry says, his back perfectly straight, shoulders squaring as Rebecca looks at him. “I’d like to see my dad, please.”

Rebecca honestly cannot remember the last time she was at such a loss for words. “Of course, but, I don’t understand, is your mum here with you? We would’ve sent a car to pick you up from the airport—”

Henry’s shoulders somehow get even tenser. “My mother’s not here with me, ma’am.” The words genuinely don’t compute for Rebecca, does he mean that his mother dropped him off here before going to their hotel, that certainly doesn’t seem like Michelle at all…

But then realization sinks in. “You mean…Henry, did you come to London by yourself?”

Henry looks both apprehensive and grimly determined, the set to his jaw reminding Rebecca of nothing so much as seeing Ted’s face after that hideous Champions League match at Inter Milan, when he was preparing himself to go into the gauntlet of that press conference—it’s the same expression to the life, that grim awareness that everything about this task was going to be awful, and it was going to be accomplished anyway, come hell or high water. “Yes, Ms. Welton, I did.”

Rebecca asks slowly, “Henry, does your mother know you’re here?”

Henry’s chin lifts. “She might’ve found out by now. I told her I was spending the weekend at a friend’s house, but I really just flew out here.” He takes a deep breath and says next, “I know you gotta call her, I understand that, but please, I’ve been on a plane for over twelve hours, and I just really—I really wanna see my dad, please.”

Rebecca feels a burst of horror that it’s the tiny catch in Henry’s voice, the white-knuckled grip he has on the strap of his backpack, that finally brings her to her senses. “Oh my God, of course—here, God, let me take that bag, we’ll go see him straight away.”

Henry just about crumples with relief, surrendering his duffel bag to her without any protest. Rebecca hefts it up—it’s surprisingly heavy—and lets her free hand rest lightly on Henry’s shoulder as she says, guiding him in the direction of Ted’s hospital room, “Listen, we can work everything else out later, but I want you to know, your dad’s doing a lot better, okay? They are taking the absolute best care of him here, and he—” Rebecca takes a deep breath, and then says, “He is going to be so happy to see you, Henry, he really is.”

Henry looks up at her for a long moment, then nods carefully. “Thank you. Ma’am.”

Rebecca says, through the lump in her throat, “Please, call me Rebecca.” Once they’re at the door to Ted’s private room, Rebecca carefully opens it, calling out as she steps in, just in front of Henry, “Ted, darling, are you awake?”

She has a half-hearted fear that he’s still asleep, and the shock of waking up to find his son here will send his heartrate through the roof and set him back in his recovery somehow, but thank God, Ted’s awake and alert, sitting up in his hospital bed and saying, “Now you know you don’t have to show up here first thing in the morning, Rebecca—” He stops speaking at the look on her face.

“I have a visitor here to see you,” Rebecca says very softly, and stands aside to give Henry room to walk in.

She’ll never forget the look on Ted’s face, open-mouthed and completely stupefied, as though he simply cannot believe the evidence of his own eyes. “Henry?”

“Dad,” Henry says, voice wobbling, and rushes over into his father’s arms. His shoulders are shaking, and Rebecca can just barely hear his muffled sobs.

“Oh my, oh my God,” Ted murmurs, but he’s clutching his son in a fierce hug, his face turned into Henry’s mussed hair, saying soothingly, “Oh, buddy, it’s all right. I’m okay, it’s okay, I promise you. I’m all good.” He drops a kiss on his son’s head, squeezing his eyes shut as he says, his voice breaking, “Jesus God, it’s so good to see you, I’m so happy to see you.”

Her own eyes stinging, Rebecca carefully sets Henry’s bag down by the empty chair, where she sits down on legs that do not feel entirely steady. Part of her wants to leave them alone, let them have their reunion in peace together, but there’s only so much Ted can do from this hospital bed and Rebecca wants—she wants to be useful. She wants to do something.

“I wanted to see you,” Henry mumbles, pulling back only far enough to knuckle at his red, tear-stained face with his hand. “I wanted to be here and I didn’t want to have to wait for Mom or Jennifer’s stupid case to be over.”

Ted’s stroking Henry’s hair, saying distractedly, “Of course, buddy, I—” But Rebecca sees the minute that Henry’s words sink in, and Ted asks, bewildered, “Henry, isn’t your mom here with you?”

“No,” Henry mumbles, eyes downcast.

“Did she—” Rebecca can see Ted’s mind working, the knowledge that Michelle would have been very unlikely to send Henry on his own across the Atlantic, and that she absolutely wouldn’t have done so without letting all of them know first. “Henry, does your mom know you’re here right now?”

Henry looks mutinous, but doesn’t offer up the same defiant answer he gave Rebecca just a moment ago. “No, she doesn’t. I used my savings and my Christmas money to buy a ticket, and I told Mom and Jennifer that I was spending the night at a friend’s house so they wouldn’t get suspicious. Then I got an Uber to the airport.”

Ted’s jaw hangs open. “Holy mother of God,” he breathes out.

“I don’t care if I’m in trouble,” Henry says in a rush. “I had to come to London, I didn’t wanna wait anymore and I’m staying, I don’t care what Mom says.”

Speechless, Ted helplessly scrubs at his hair with his free hand until it resembles a bird’s nest.

As he’s at a loss for words, Rebecca feels the need to delicately interject, “Henry, when you say staying, do you mean—”

Sensing an ally, Henry turns to her and says, determination written all over his face, the same determination that got him all the way to fucking England on his own, “I mean I wanna stay here in London with my dad for good.”

“Oh God, okay, we gotta take this way, way back,” Ted says immediately, and Rebecca pulls back in her seat, unable to stop herself from thinking, but what if that could actually happen?

Ted, like the responsible father he is, is trying to talk Henry down from cheerfully imploding not only his living situation but the carefully crafted custody agreement hammered out between him and Michelle, and Henry, bless him, has an answer to every one of Ted’s points.

“Son, of course I want you here, but you have a whole life back in Kansas—”

“People move all the time,” Henry says. “It’s not like they don’t have schools in England. Plus, somebody’s got to take care of you.”

Ted’s expression crumples, and he says, “Buddy, I love you, but you’re the kid, it’s not your job to take care of me. I can’t imagine how much all of this scared you, but that’s just not—”

“Let’s take a breath,” Rebecca says, interjecting herself in as gently as she can manage. “Before we go any further, I think we need to call Henry’s mum, let her know where he is.”

Henry looks alarmed, but Ted agrees, rubbing a soothing hand along his son’s back and shoulders, “Yeah, yeah, you’re right.”

“And whatever else happens, I think it’s reasonable to say Henry won’t be leaving London for a few days,” Rebecca continues, calmly. “He can stay with me at my house, assuming both you and Michelle are okay with it—Henry, did you pack some clothes?” Henry nods quickly, his alarmed expression fading to one of cautious hope. “Perfect, so he’s all set.”

Ted is looking at her with raised eyebrows and a creased forehead, clearly unconvinced—but also willing to be convinced—and Rebecca lowers her voice and says, “Ted. One step at a time, all right?”

Ted looks at her, then looks at Henry and says slowly, “All right. Henry, for as long as you’re staying with Ms. Welton, I want you to be respectful, all right? You listen to her the way you’d listen to me, you understand?”

Henry nods fervently.

Ted takes a deep breath. “Okay. Rebecca, can you take Henry to get some food? I’m going to call his mom, let her know Henry’s safe and where he is.” His mouth twists a little, as he concedes, “Should be a real interesting conversation.”

*

“Holy shit, Rebecca!” are the first words that come out of Keeley’s mouth as she approaches them in the commissary.

Henry’s doing a really good job of keeping his eyes open (it’s not even four AM in Kansas yet, the poor thing is absolutely knackered) but at this, he laughs, propping his chin up on his hand in a way that is so reminiscent of Ted that it makes Rebecca’s stomach twist.

“Yes, Keeley, it is…definitely a delightful surprise that Henry is here in London,” Rebecca says very tactfully. Henry gives her a look like he knows what she’s not saying, but he holds out his hand and says, in his polite way, “Nice to see you again, Ms. Jones.”

“Oh please, call me Keeley,” Keeley says with her wide smile. She frowns at the orange juice that Henry’s drinking and says, “Oh sweetheart, that’s going to do nothing to push you through your jet lag, we need to get you some espresso, stat.”

“Keeley, he’s twelve, he can’t have coffee,” Rebecca says, then frowns, turning to Henry. “Wait, can you?”

Henry nods quickly. “I totally can,” he promises. At Rebecca’s skeptical look, Henry grins a little, and says, “I mean, I already flew by myself all the way to London, I think I can handle some coffee, right?”

Rebecca sighs, but has to smile back. “All right.”

As Henry quickly goes off to fix himself a coffee, Keeley lowers her voice and says, “Okay, not that Henry isn’t adorable and not that I’m not happy he’s here, but what the fuck, Rebecca? He flew here? By himself? Without his mum’s permission?”

“Yes, yes, and yes,” Rebecca says, rubbing at her forehead. “Ted’s calling Michelle now, they’re going to have to work something out—it’s not like there’s a magic portal to Kansas we can take him through, Michelle’ll just have to understand that he’s going to have to stay here for a few days, minimum—”

“Wait, what do you mean, minimum,” Keeley says slowly, because Keeley is very sharp, and after all these years of friendship, can spot every single one of Rebecca’s tells.

Rebecca pauses, then says, “Henry…might have said that he wants to stay in London, and not return to Kansas. And I think that is an idea that has some merit.”

Keeley’s eyes grow huge. “Rebecca—”

“I know there’s a custody arrangement, I’m not saying it would be a piece of cake, I’m just saying it could happen!” Rebecca insists. “It’s not like I don’t have the room at my place.”

“Wait, your place?” Keeley asks, bewildered, and Rebecca realizes she forgot to tell Keeley about her arrangement with Ted.

“Ted’s agreed to stay at my house,” she explains. “While he recuperates, I think it’s important to have someone keep an eye on him. And if Henry’s staying here, I can just put him up at my house too, at least until Ted’s fully back on his feet.”

It’s a perfectly reasonable plan, there is no cause for Keeley to be staring at her like that, mouth open and a crease between her eyebrows, as though rapid calculations are going on in her head. “Rebecca, that…” Keeley stops and says, “Babes, that is a lot to take on suddenly. I know you want to help Ted, we all do, but are you sure—”

“Yes,” Rebecca says, quiet but heartfelt. “Yes, Keeley, I’m sure.” She swallows and says next, “You should have seen Ted’s face when Henry came in. It was like…like I was watching him become whole right in front of me.”

“Babes,” Keeley says, but Henry’s approaching them now, a coffee cup in his hand and his nose wrinkling, asking, “This is what people drink all the time at Starbucks? Really?”

“Yes, I know, it’s totally bizarre,” Rebecca says, turning to meet Henry with a smile on her face. Henry takes a cautious sip of the coffee and makes another face, and Rebecca’s about to suggest they add more sugar and milk, or that Henry try some tea instead, but Rebecca’s phone is buzzing suddenly and when she looks, it’s Michelle’s name on the screen.

Oh, Lord. Rebecca holds up a finger and answers, “Michelle, hello.” Keeley’s eyes grow huge and Henry looks like he wants to be absolutely anywhere in the world but here right now.

When Michelle speaks, she sounds absolutely exhausted. “Ted says you’ll be having Henry stay with you until I can get there?”

“Yes, I’m happy to have him—”

“I can’t get a flight out until Tuesday afternoon, Kansas time, which means I’ll be arriving….midday Thursday for you? God, I can’t figure out time zones right now.” Michelle sighs heavily and says, “Rebecca, Ted says that Henry was with you getting some food, is he there now?”

“Yes,” Rebecca confirms.

“Okay. I’d like to talk to my son, please.”

“Of course,” Rebecca says, and pulls the phone away from her ear, saying to Henry, “Henry, your mum wants to—”

But Henry’s shaking his head, his mouth tight. “No, thank you.”

Rebecca takes a breath. “Henry…”

Henry shakes his head firmly, his jaw set. Stomach twisting, Rebecca starts saying into the phone, “Michelle, Henry—”

“No, I heard him,” Michelle says, her voice distant. In the background, Rebecca can hear Michelle’s wife saying softly, honey, don’t push right now. “I…okay. Okay, I’ll be there Thursday afternoon, I’ll text you the details.”

“I’ll book you a hotel,” Rebecca says quietly. Michelle begins to protest, but Rebecca says, “Please, it’s the least I can do.”

And, if she’s going to help Henry stay in London with Ted, the sooner she starts pouring oil on these troubled waters, the better.

Once the phone call with Michelle ends, Henry—with a dark flush to his cheeks—mumbles, “I probably should get back to my dad.”

Rebecca glances at Keeley, who, bless her, immediately starts chatting about jet lag and all the tricks and tools she’s used to overcome it, and Henry’s old enough (having turned twelve at some point when Rebecca wasn’t looking) to know they’re trying to distract him, but he’s a good boy and rolls with it anyway, gamely saying that while he’s not drinking any more of “this coffee crap” he is willing to try doing some jumping jacks to get the blood flowing.

“Probably should wait until we’re not in a cafeteria though,” he adds slyly, and when Keeley and Rebecca burst out laughing, his answering dimpled smile is an exact replica of his father’s.

*

"So," Rebecca says to Ted, later that afternoon, "How did the conversation with Michelle really go?"

Henry has gone off with Beard for lunch, Beard having met the situation with his usual unflappability, which leaves Rebecca room to discuss their next steps freely.

Ted lifts a shoulder, looking more drained than before. "Well. It could have been worse." The tone of his voice indicates it couldn't have been much worse, and Rebecca grimaces.

"She doesn't blame you for this, does she?"

Ted blinks in surprise. "No, no, not like that," he reassures her. "Just, well, she's upset about all of this. Me in the hospital, Henry running off to another country...she's feeling the stress, that's all."

Rebecca takes a breath, choosing her next words with care. "I always thought you and Michelle had an amicable relationship—well, as amicable as it can be in a divorce."

Ted's watching her closely. "We do." He grimaces a little, correcting himself. "Well. We did."

He doesn't elaborate, and Rebecca leans in a little closer. "Ted," she says, "If I'm going to help you, I need to understand what's happening."

Ted's eyelashes dip low, as he thinks that over. Rebecca doesn't press, just waits him out, and she's vindicated when he sighs deeply and begins, haltingly, "It's not...we're on the same page with Henry. Or we have been until this week. And it's not about Jennifer, Jennifer's great, there's no issue there." Ted bites at his mouth, obviously working out what he's going to say as he's saying it. "It's just that...well, it's the same thing it was during our marriage. Michelle wants things I can't give her."

Rebecca keeps her expression and voice free of judgment. "What does she want?"

Ted's quiet for a moment, staring down at his hands. "She wants to be friends."

That is not what Rebecca's been expecting to hear. "She..."

"After she got together with Jennifer, after she came out," Ted says, with an effort, as if each word is costing him something to say out loud. "Michelle approached me the summer I was visiting. Her family was...they weren't being very supportive, and she wanted to thank me, for not making it harder. Then she...she started to tell me how her whole life, she was struggling to fit in, to make herself into what she thought she had to be, feel what she thought she should feel. She'd spent so long forcing herself into a box and now she was happy in her skin for the first time in her life." Ted's mouth twists. "I was happy for her. I was," he insists, as though Rebecca had argued with him. "It's just, hearing from your ex that fifteen years of marriage was a lie she needed to escape from..."

"That's a hard thing to hear," Rebecca says gently, and Ted looks up at her, his expression pleading for sympathy—as though he would even need to ask for it.

"Yeah, it was. It was, and I just—it had been four years since the divorce, and I know it's petty and small of me, but I just kept thinking, how much more hurt am I supposed to take and keep a smile on my face?"

Oh, Ted.

Ted lets out another sigh. "So, I decided to keep on being petty. I pulled back. When she asks about how I'm doing, or mentions watching the team's latest match, I just...turn the conversation back to Henry. I shut her out, and I keep shutting her out. We're coparents now and that's all. She hasn't...she hasn't called me out on it, but I know she's hurt and confused..."

"You're allowed to have boundaries," Rebecca murmurs, unable to keep silent. "You're not required to—to endlessly give everything of yourself to a relationship that's not healthy, to someone that you're not even married to anymore." Her voice gains strength as she adds, "And if Michelle can't realize that, then—" She cuts herself off when she notices Ted watching her, flushing. "What?"

"Nothing. It's just nice, having someone defend me like that," Ted says, his eyes soft. "Glad I have you in my corner, boss."

Rebecca's flush gets even worse. "Well. Likewise." She clears her throat. "So Michelle's feeling awkward and rebuffed, which would explain why she wanted Jennifer around for support when she comes to the UK...I assume you're getting along better with Michelle's wife than with Michelle these days?" she asks next, and Ted nods. "Okay. Okay, I can work with this."

"You can?" Ted asks doubtfully.

"Of course," Rebecca says. "Your relationship with Michelle is understandably awkward, but it's not hostile. Henry’s unauthorized flight to London is a bit complicated—“

“A bit complicated?” Ted repeats. “Rebecca, he lied to his mom, ran away to a whole other country—“

“Well if you put it like that of course it sounds terrible,” Rebecca retorts. “But I think we should focus on the positives.”

Ted looks at her like she’s gone mad. “The positives?”

“He got all the way to London on his own,” Rebecca says, holding her hands out. “I know he broke some rules getting here—”

“Some rules?”

“But he’s shown a great deal of resourcefulness and determination, and I think that this sort of initiative should be applauded.” While Ted continues to gape at her, Rebecca adds next, “And, should he stay here for longer, some time abroad could be quite beneficial—”

Ted’s expression shifts, because it’s Ted, who knows her to the bone, and he immediately picks up on what she’s just barely begun to hint at. “Rebecca.”

This was always going to be the biggest hurdle to get over, but Rebecca won’t let herself falter now. “Ted. If you honestly want me to shut up and stay out of it, I will.” Well, she would try, which is practically the same thing. “But I would be negligent in my duty as your friend if I didn’t ask. Do you want Henry to come and live with you in London?”

Ted doesn’t say anything at first. He just looks at her, and then turns his face away, closing his eyes as he admits, “I want it more than anything in the whole world, Rebecca. You can’t know—of course I do.” There’s a wealth of pain and longing in the words, an old wound that never healed, and Rebecca’s stomach clenches at hearing it, seeing it.

But that’s not productive. So instead Rebecca reaches out and takes Ted’s hand in hers, and when he finally looks at her again, she makes sure to smile.

“So let’s make it happen, then.”

*

Despite having an increasingly detailed plan of attack for the next week, Rebecca is admittedly more than a little nervous as she travels with Henry back to her house. She's familiar with Henry from his previous visits to see Ted, but all of them have taken place with either one or both of his parents nearby, that's nowhere near the same thing as having Henry stay with her for, at minimum, likely four to five days—longer, if this plan of hers works out.

"So," Rebecca says brightly as they move through the London streets. "Is there anything in particular you'd like to do over the next few days?"

Henry shrugs. "Don't really feel like sightseeing," he admits. "Just want to spend time with my dad, if that's okay."

"Of course it is," Rebecca reassures him.

Henry frowns a little, asking, “Ms. Welton—”

“Rebecca,” she corrects, smiling a little.

Henry gives her an abashed smile, and repeats, “Rebecca…how’s my dad doing, for real?”

“He’s doing well, I promise you,” Rebecca tells him gently, quelling a momentary urge to touch his shoulder. “He’s improved so much even in the last few days, he has more energy, his color is better…”

But Henry doesn’t look comforted by this, only more alarmed. “You mean he looked worse than this before?”

Oh, dear. Rebecca hesitates, but there’s no point in lying, not when Henry will almost certainly see through it and it’ll only harm her relationship with him in the long run. “I won’t lie, it was a…very serious heart attack that your dad had,” she says carefully. “He was in pretty rough shape. But he’s strong, and the doctors believe he’ll make a full recovery, just so long as he takes care of himself.”

“He’s not very good at that,” Henry admits in a low voice. “I heard…I heard my mom talking to Jennifer, and on the phone to Uncle Beard, and…I don’t know. Seems like he doesn’t take very good care of himself, is all.”

Her chest aching, Rebecca swallows and says, “Well, that’s why he’ll be staying with me for a while. So I can make sure he’s taking care of himself.” She looks down at her hands and says, very casually, “It’d be nice to have your help with that, as a matter of fact—between the two of us, I’m sure we can get him eating healthily in no time. Deal?”

“Deal,” Henry agrees, his face brightening.

Rebecca hasn’t considered how her house must look to others in a while, but Henry’s open-mouthed shock as she lets him in through the front door, then gives him a tour, is both charming and an eye-opener in and of itself. When they get to the pool and gym in the basement, he turns to her with wide eyes and asks, “Are you sure this isn’t a palace? Because I know y’all have a lot of palaces in England, Mom has me touring one every time we visit here, and I feel like this is big enough to count as a palace.”

Rebecca laughs. “I promise you, there would be a lot more footmen if it was.” She gestures at the pool, adding, “Obviously you can use this any time you like, but I think it’ll be good for your dad too, the doctors want him to start exercising regularly, and I think this is a safe space for him to do it, where we can keep an eye on him.”

Henry’s nodding in all seriousness. “Having a spotter during workouts is important,” he says wisely.

He’s equally impressed by the piano, and takes one look at the kitchen and says, “Dad’s gonna love cooking in there,” which gives Rebecca a warm feeling to hear—she’s thought so as well, but it’s nice to get confirmation.

After a little bit of thinking, Rebecca has Henry set up in the guest room she usually reserves for Nora, which is on a separate floor from her own bedroom as well as the room she’s tentatively marking out as Ted’s, which is next to her own—she wants to be close to Ted, in case of an emergency, and she thinks Henry, on the verge of becoming a teenager, will appreciate the extra privacy.

He does, if the way his face lights up as he looks at the room and the adjoining bath is any indication, but once Rebecca helps him unpack—making careful mental notes of what he’ll need, should he stay longer—he hesitates, standing in the middle of the room. “Are you sure it’s okay? Having me stay here with you?” Henry asks at last, looking very young and unsure of himself.

“Of course it is,” Rebecca says stoutly, placing her hands on his shoulders. “Henry, I’ve just given you the tour, you know full well I have the room to spare,” she teases, and Henry gives her a quick lopsided grin for that. “And even if I didn’t—you’re Ted’s kid. You’re welcome in my home for as long as you’re here.”

There’s something in the long, wide-eyed look that Henry gives her at that, as though he’s getting the measure of her, but then his face crumples, and he gives her a quick hug, there and gone almost before Rebecca has the chance to hug him back. “Thanks,” he mumbles, and turns away, clearly embarrassed.

Rebecca brushes his shoulder one last time, and gives him some space. “I’ll let you settle in. If you want to come downstairs and watch some TV with me, feel free. Or just let me know if there’s anything you need, okay?”

Cheeks still flushed, Henry nods. “I’m good,” he promises, and so with one last smile and look, Rebecca leaves him to it, gently shutting the door behind her.

She lets out a long, slow breath as she walks down the stairs. There’s still so much to do, so much left still to accomplish, and that’s before Ted is even released from the hospital, but for the first time in the last few days, Rebecca feels like she might be getting a handle on things at last.

Chapter 4

“You still sure about this?” Ted asks, looking up at her with a rueful smile on his face.

“Absolutely,” Rebecca says, meaning every word. She squeezes his hand and admits, lowering her voice, “And I won’t lie, it’ll be nice to have a buffer between Henry and Michelle at the house.”

Ted grimaces. “Yeah, things have been, uh, interesting during their visits.” He shakes his head a little, and says, “Although I suppose it’s too late for you to turn back now…Beard says you’ve moved my entire pantry over to your place.”

“Yes, if you don’t agree to come with me now, I’ll hold all of your appliances hostage, including that stand mixer you love so much,” Rebecca says, deadpan, and is rewarded with a delighted grin from Ted.

He looks good, she reassures herself. It’s a relief to see him in regular clothes again rather than the hospital gowns, to have him sitting on the edge of the bed rather than lying in it, to know that he’s being discharged today and he’ll be coming home with her, where she can look after him properly.

There’s another round of instructions and warnings from the doctors and the nurses, more pamphlets to be given and medications to be filled, but at last, at last Ted’s carefully easing himself into the backseat of Rebecca’s car, and then the driver’s starting the engine and they’re off.

As they’re leaving the carpark, Rebecca sighs, something unwinding inside of her. “Ted, do me a favor,” she says, leaning her head against the seat, looking at his profile. “Don’t ever come here again, okay?”

Ted turns to look at her, dimples peeking out. “What if I’m just visiting someone?” he teases.

Rebecca shakes her head. “No. You’ll just have to call. Have flowers and grapes delivered instead.”

Ted chuckles, and without thinking, Rebecca reaches out to take his hand, the same gesture she’s made a dozen times over in the past week, except now Ted’s in the backseat of her car instead of a hospital bed, and it’s…it feels different, somehow, even if the weight and warmth of his hand in hers is exactly the same.

But Ted doesn’t seem to think there’s anything strange in it, he squeezes her hand and doesn’t let go, and Rebecca manages to act normal throughout the short drive back to her house, discussing the gym and pool where Ted can start his rehab—”Gently,” she warns, and Ted immediately comes back with, “Oh, so I shouldn’t start training for a triathlon right away?”

But when the car stops in front of her house, Ted takes a minute before he moves to get out of the car. Rebecca hesitates as she climbs out, looking back at him and asking gently, “Ted?”

Ted blinks, seemingly coming back to himself. “Yeah, I’m here,” he promises, and gets out of the car.

Once they’re in through the front door, Rebecca hears the already-familiar clattering of Henry’s footsteps as he hurries down the stairs, and then Henry calls out joyfully, “Dad!” and he’s leaping into Ted’s outstretched arms.

“Hey buddy,” Ted says, wrapping Henry up in a fierce hug. He drops a kiss on top of Henry’s head, like he has every day since Henry arrived in London. “Where’s your mom?”

“Here,” Michelle says, appearing almost noiselessly from the direction of the kitchen. She’s smiling as she sees Ted, and it’s perhaps Rebecca’s imagination that there’s some strain to the smile.

Be kind, Rebecca reminds herself. Of course Michelle’s under a lot of strain now.

Henry stays glued to his father’s side as Michelle steps forward to quickly embrace Ted, dropping a kiss on his cheek. Rebecca sets her teeth against the urge to overanalyze every minute detail of their interactions, whether Michelle hesitated before going in for the kiss on the cheek, if Ted’s expression flickered for a moment when she did.

Not helpful, not helpful, not helpful.

“I was just going to show Ted his room,” Rebecca offers up.

“Sounds great,” Michelle says. “I was making lunch, I thought we could all have a meal together.”

“That sounds lovely,” Rebecca agrees.

“Thank you, Michelle, I sure appreciate that,” Ted says warmly.

The tension in Michelle’s shoulders eases, if only by a fraction, and her eyes get misty. “It’s good to see you out of that hospital bed,” she tells Ted, and disappears into the kitchen before he can reply.

Ted looks for a second as though he wants to follow her, but Rebecca lightly puts a hand on her arm. “Give her a second.” Ted bobs his head in agreement, and Rebecca asks, “Do you want to see where you’ll be staying?”

“Lead the way, Fay Wray,” Ted says.

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Ted’s breathing so heavily before they’ve even reached the top of the stairs, how slowly he has to take it, but it’s like a punch to her gut. By the time they’re actually at his door, Ted’s leaning hard against Rebecca’s arm and Henry, hovering by his father’s shoulder, has gone so pale that his freckles stand out in stark relief.

“Just a few more steps,” Rebecca’s murmuring on auto-pilot, and Ted just nods, too winded to speak. Henry, bless him, rushes forward to open the door and once they’re safely inside, Ted immediately sinks down onto the edge of the bed, promising, his face flushed, “I’m all right, really.”

Rebecca would believe it more if he didn’t need to gasp for air between each word.

“Of course you are,” Rebecca says, and it’s an effort to keep her voice light, unconcerned. “We might think about having you eat your meals up here, however, at least for the first day or so.”

Ted’s head jerks up at that. “We most certainly do not,” he says, even though his breathing still isn’t at all steady.

“I think it’s a good idea,” Henry says quickly, his voice a little higher than normal still, and if his color is returning to normal, his eyes are still wide and panicked.

Rebecca gives Ted a meaningful look, and continues brightly, “You see? We’ll all eat up here for lunch today, like a sort of…indoor picnic.”

“In a bedroom?” Ted asks in disbelief, but then he looks at Henry, pauses, and says, “All right, yeah. We can…we can try that.”

Rebecca gives them both her brightest smile, and asks Henry to go and tell his mom of the slight change in plans. As they listen to him thundering down the stairs, Rebecca lets the smile fade, and goes to sit next to Ted.

“Here,” she says, opening the drawer from the nearby dresser, and quickly fitting a pulse oximeter onto Ted’s index finger. Ted blinks at her, then asks, “What, you have these just stashed around the place?”

“Yes,” Rebecca says. “I also carry one in my purse now.” Satisfied with the reading, Rebecca slips it back off his hand and sets it back in the drawer. “I wanted to get a blood pressure cuff too, but Keeley swore it’d be overkill. I still think we could…”

She finally catches sight of Ted’s expression, and sighs. “It would be overkill, wouldn’t it?”

“Just a little bit,” Ted says kindly. He looks to the open door where Henry had just left, and Rebecca can read his expression as though it’s a page from an open book.

“No one’s expecting you to immediately bounce back,” she tells him.

Ted lifts a shoulder. “Just hits different, your kid looking at you like he’s afraid you’ll drop dead at any moment.” Before Rebecca can reply to that, though with what, she has no idea, Ted shakes his head and says, “Never mind. I’m just grateful he’s here at all.”

Rebecca keeps quiet, reaching out to squeeze his hand. Ted smiles at her crookedly and squeezes her hand back, the warm pressure of it reassuring.

*

Lunch actually goes better than it has any right to. Michelle’s to thank for that, her smile bright and open throughout, even in the face of Ted’s withdrawal and Henry’s wariness. Henry sits on the bed next to his dad, with Michelle and Rebecca balancing their plates on their laps as they sit in the chairs hastily dragged into the room.

Over the plates of brown rice, grilled chicken, and steamed vegetables, Rebecca and Michelle keep the conversation flowing as best as they can, Michelle asking thoughtful questions about the state of the club, sympathizing about the team’s recent loss to Real Madrid in the Champions League.

“It’s disappointing, but we’re still in a good position to advance from the group,” Rebecca says. “I could’ve lived without seeing Dani Rojas scoring a goal against us, but that’s how it goes when you’re facing a former player of yours—they always seem to score against you.”

“Nice seeing the reunion between him and the other fellas, though,” Ted says. “Bunch of them went out to dinner afterwards, sent me some photos.”

“Dani said some very nice things about you in the press after the match too,” Michelle says, adding next, “At least I’m pretty sure he did, I did have to hit Google Translate for some of it.”

“I didn’t know you watched the match,” Ted says, poking at a piece of broccoli.

Michelle looks at him, her voice level as she says, “I follow the team, Ted, you know that.” Before the awkwardness can get worse, Michelle visibly chooses to let it go, smiling as she adds, “Though I will admit, getting up with Henry at 6:30 in the morning for your early games is a struggle sometimes.”

“I have to set two alarms,” Henry offers up.

“Well, Richmond appreciates your dedication,” Rebecca says, lifting her glass of water in a toast.

It’s satisfying to see that Ted’s cleaned his plate; he gives Michelle a smile as he thanks her for making lunch and says, “I figure I could make dinner tonight if—”

“No, you won’t,” Rebecca says immediately, and Ted leans back against the headboard, looking a little affronted.

“Of course I will,” he says. “You’re already putting me up here indefinitely, I can’t be lying around like some invalid and let y’all do all the work around here.”

Now it’s Rebecca’s turn to be affronted. Trust Ted Lasso to try and do housework the same day he gets released from the hospital. “You absolutely can lie here like an invalid, in fact I expect you to do just that.” As Ted opens his mouth to protest, Rebecca continues on smoothly, “I see no reason why we can’t have dinner up here together tonight.”

“Rebecca, I just spent a week in a hospital bed—”

“My point exactly,” Rebecca cuts in, and Ted’s eyes narrow a little at that.

“And I’m not looking to spend another week in bed, especially when I don’t need to,” he retorts.

“Hmm,” Rebecca says, taking a long sip of her water. She’s about to go into explicit detail about how she fully expects Ted to stay upstairs for dinner tonight, and likely for tomorrow as well, but then catches Michelle’s deliberately blank expression and refrains. For the moment. “We can work that out later. But I will be making dinner tonight. What does everyone think of pasta?”

“I like pasta,” Henry offers quickly, looking between her and his dad. “I can help make it…if that’s okay?” he asks, turning to Rebecca.

“Of course,” Rebecca says with a smile. “Truthfully I hate prepping the ingredients when I cook, so any assistance is much appreciated, trust me.”

Henry smiles and says, “Cool. We can use that brown rice pasta we picked up, right?”

“I wasn’t thinking of using anything else,” Rebecca says, and out of the corner of her eye, she swears she can see Ted wrinkle his nose, but when she looks at him directly, he’s smiling and saying brightly, “Buddy, that sounds great to me.”

*

Michelle and Henry go on a walk after lunch, and when they come back, Henry is scowling and Michelle looks exhausted. Henry immediately disappears, saying that he wants to see his dad, and when Michelle sinks into an armchair, Rebecca asks sympathetically, “Would you like some tea?”

“Oh,” Michelle says, looking mildly surprised. “I…yeah, actually, that would be great.”

They retreat to the kitchen where Rebecca starts filling up the kettle, over her shoulder she says, “How is Henry?”

“He’s fine,” Michelle starts, then laughs a little. “I don’t know why I’m saying that, it’s not true at all. He’s pissed at me, and he’s worried about his dad, and he keeps swearing he’s not going back to Kansas and I don’t even know where to begin with that—” She cuts herself off and says, “And I can’t imagine you were expecting to be responsible for a twelve-year-old boy out of the blue.”

“I will admit it was a surprise to run into him at the hospital,” Rebecca says, smiling ruefully. “But it’s not a hardship to have Henry here, truly. He’s a lovely kid, I’ve enjoyed his company.” She keeps her smile as she adds, “And it’s done wonders for Ted, having his son here with him.”

Michelle’s expression flickers, but she doesn’t respond to that. Instead she asks, folding her hands together on the kitchen island, “How is Ted doing? Really doing, I mean.”

“He’s doing well,” Rebecca says, pitching her voice to be as reassuring and as forthright as she can make it. “His doctors agree that he should make a full recovery, just so long as he follows the rehab plan, and I promise you he is absolutely going to, even if I have to crack the whip over his head myself.”

“You’ve talked to his doctors?” Michelle asks, an odd note in her voice.

“Yes,” Rebecca says, then—thinking she understands why Michelle is taken aback—rushes to add, “Only with Ted’s permission, of course, I wasn’t sneaking around behind his back.” She doesn’t bother with considering what she would have done if Ted hadn’t given his permission, the point is that he did, and therefore Rebecca isn’t going utterly mad with worrying over what she doesn’t know, or trying to bribe NHS doctors into violating Ted’s right to privacy.

“Huh,” Michelle says, obscurely.

“I won’t pretend his recovery is going to be easy,” Rebecca admits. “He’ll have to be on some of these new medications for the rest of his life, there will need to be major lifestyle changes…but he is going to get better, Michelle. I’m sure of it.”

“Of course he will,” Michelle says, and the stout belief in her voice is honestly quite validating. She pauses, looking down at her hands, before saying next, “I’m glad he has a support system out here. Honestly I was…I was almost prepared to see if he’d be willing to come back to Kansas, just to recover, I didn’t…I didn’t trust that he’d be taking care of himself the way he needed to, and I didn’t know if there was anyone here who he would even let take care of him, but…here you are.”

Rebecca feels every inch of her back stiffen at the very suggestion of Ted moving to Kansas, but that tension starts to ease—if only somewhat—at Michelle’s acknowledgement that Ted is better off here, with Rebecca, and with everyone else here who cares about him.

"I'd look after him whether he wanted to let me or not," Rebecca says. "After the scare I had—-" To her horror, her voice catches; Rebecca has to swallow twice before she can control herself enough to say, "I'm taking his recovery quite seriously, is what I meant."

"I know you are," Michelle agrees, her voice gentle and kind. She's such an obviously kind woman; what a well-matched pair she and Ted must have been, once upon a time.

*

Michelle leaves after dinner, taking Rebecca up on her offer of a car to get back to her hotel. Rebecca offers to leave Henry and Ted to their own devices for the evening, give them some father-and-son time on their own, but both of them insist she stick around with them and watch one of those never-ending superhero films. Henry is horrified to discover she hasn't kept up with the last few releases, and very carefully gives her the needed backstory so she can follow along.

It's a lovely evening, and that has nothing to do with the film she's watching and everything to do with the people Rebecca is watching it with. The plot of the film washes over her, and what lingers in her mind instead is the sight of Ted's bare feet on the bed, Henry tucked up against his side as they laugh together at one of the hero's quips right before she fights another CGI alien, Rebecca turning to watch them from her spot at the edge of the bed as much as she’s watching the screen in front of her.

Henry yawns through the credits, and Ted gently shepherds his son into agreeing to go to sleep. “Don’t forget to brush and floss, now,” he warns, and Henry rolls his eyes as he sing-songs, “Yes, Dad. Night, Rebecca,” he adds over his shoulder, and Rebecca smiles. “Goodnight, Henry.”

As Henry exits, Rebecca says, not without some regret, “Should probably head off to bed myself, let you get your rest.”

But Ted sits up a little, saying quickly, “Oh, hey, no—the night’s still young, you don’t have to run off just yet.” He looks a little abashed at his eagerness, but says, “Not like there’s a nurse around to chase you off because visiting hours are over.”

“No, I suppose not,” Rebecca agrees thoughtfully. “Another film? Something without CGI monsters, please.”

Ted gives her a crooked smile. “You know, I think I’ve got just the thing.” He pauses, looking at Rebecca, and adds, cautiously, “You know—if you need some back support, you can just lean up by this headboard like I’m doing.”

“Okay,” Rebecca says, after a brief pause. She’s been in and out of his room all day, had two meals with him, moved him and his son into her house, for Christ’s sake, and yet somehow this is what feels shockingly intimate, sitting next to him on the bed, side by side, their legs stretched out together.

Rebecca manages to tear her eyes away from Ted’s exposed ankles—looking oddly delicate below the cuffs of his sweatpants—and fix her gaze forward as the opening credits to The Philadelphia Story roll across the screen.

“Not that this movie isn’t a classic,” Ted whispers as they watch Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn spar on screen, “But I gotta say, every time I watch I keep hoping—”

“That she ends up with Jimmy Stewart instead?” Rebecca finishes, a smile curling on her lips. “I do the same thing.” She turns just in time to catch Ted’s pleased grin, how joyful he is that they agree on such a small thing.

“Right? I’m just saying, Jimmy’s the only one in this movie that seems to like her, as a person—”

“And their chemistry is just incredible,” Rebecca breathes out. “The scene later, when they’re dancing in the moonlight—every time I just want to shout at her to ditch the ex-husband and the wretched fiance, and go elope with that charming reporter.”

“Cary Grant’s not a bad consolation prize though,” Ted concedes.

“Hmm,” Rebecca says, not arguing, but adds, “I like him better in Bringing Up Baby.”

“Well, we’ll just have to watch that one sometime,” Ted offers, gently leaning in against her for a moment, and Rebecca shivers happily.

“I’m holding you to that, Lasso. Especially now I know where you live,” she teases, and Ted’s chuckles are the best thing she’s heard in hours.

He starts flagging by the time that Katharine and Jimmy are waltzing drunkenly in the moonlight, though, eyes falling closed despite his obvious efforts to stay awake, and when Rebecca catches him fretfully rubbing at his eyes for the second time, she hits pause with the remote and says, “Ted, you look exhausted. For heaven’s sake, get some rest—”

Ted shakes his head. “No, no, I don’t want to go to sleep yet.”

Rebecca frowns. “You want to be sleep-deprived?”

“I want—” Ted checks himself, shaking his head. “Never mind, it’s silly.”

“We’ve spent the last hour rooting for an eighty year-old film to magically change its ending, it can’t be any sillier than that,” Rebecca replies, and when Ted’s mouth unhappily twists, Rebecca turns to face him more fully, reaching out to touch his hand as she presses, “Ted…please tell me.”

Ted’s throat works, and for a moment, she’s genuinely afraid he won’t tell her, that he’ll plaster a smile over it and brave out whatever’s wrong on his own, and she’s already opening her mouth to argue…but then Ted closes his eyes, and admits, “In the hospital…there were people monitoring me every second, you know? All those machines, the nurses and doctors ready to fly in the second something went wrong. So I knew…I knew all I had to do was lie there, and do what they told me, and I…it would be okay.”

Rebecca holds herself still, waiting, Ted’s warm hand beneath her fingertips, and when Ted finally turns to face her, his eyes are wet and his expression is agonized. “The only reason I’m alive right now is because you were there when I collapsed,” he says, each word rough and raw, jagged and awful in Rebecca’s ears. “It was nothing but sheer luck that I thought of dropping off your biscuits then, and I’m grateful, I am, I just…I keep thinking the luck’s gonna run out.” He’s quiet, then says softly, as if it hurts to say out loud, “I keep thinking I’m going to have another heart attack when I’m asleep, but there won’t be anyone to catch it this time.”

“Ted,” Rebecca croaks out, and it’s not until Ted is turning to her with a stricken face that she realizes why her eyes are stinging.

“Sweetheart, no, don’t—” Ted says quickly, reaching out, and the thought that he is trying to comfort her about the very real possibility of him dying in his sleep is just—

“No, no,” Rebecca says, shaking her head, even as Ted’s gently rubbing her shoulders. “No, it’s fine, I can—” She stops, looking at him, and says slowly, “I can just stay here for tonight.”

It’s all so incredibly clear to her, but Ted is obviously baffled. “You…honey, I wasn’t asking you to monitor me, that’s not your job, there’s no way I’m letting you sleep all night in that chair—”

“Of course not, I’ll be sleeping in the bed with you,” Rebecca replies, without thinking, and Ted halts in his tracks, mouth hanging open. Worried he’ll turn her down, Rebecca barrels on, because it worked in convincing him to move in, it worked in convincing him to have Henry stay here, it can work for this too. “Look, I could hire a full-time nurse instead but this is far easier, plus let’s be honest, you wouldn’t let me hire the nurse even if I tried—”

“Rebecca—”

“And honestly, if I can stop you from dying on me once, I can damn well manage it again,” Rebecca winds up stubbornly, glaring at him, her face hot and her heartbeat loud in her ears.

Ted opens his mouth, pauses and closes it, before finally saying, “I feel like I should have an argument for that, but I honestly can’t think of one.”

“Because I’m right and you know it,” Rebecca says, lifting her chin up.

The crease between Ted’s eyebrows isn’t fading, as he says with real worry, “You don’t have to coddle me, you know that, right?”

“No,” Rebecca agrees evenly. “But I do intend to keep you safe and healthy, so it’s either this or I’m hiring a nurse to stand guard over you while you sleep.” At Ted’s choked, incredulous laughter, Rebecca demands, “Do you really think I wouldn’t do it?”

“Oh God, I know you would,” Ted groans, rubbing a hand over his face. “Either that or buy your own damn heart monitors and hook me up to them every night.” He jerks his head up suddenly in alarm, saying quickly, “That was not a suggestion!”

“So we’ve agreed then,” Rebecca says. “The easiest and simplest solution is for me to stay here tonight.”

“Oh, holy Hannah,” Ted mutters, rubbing at his eyes, but that isn’t a no.

For all of Rebecca’s stubbornness and bravado, it still takes an effort for her to re-enter Ted’s bedroom in her pajamas, her face scrubbed bare of makeup and shining from her nighttime moisturizer. Ted’s already under the sheets, sitting up against the pillow, hands folded neatly in his lap as he looks nervously at her. .

“There a side of the bed you prefer?” Ted asks, and Rebecca shakes her head.

“Either one will do.” She holds up her phone, adding, "I've set an alarm for the morning at nine, but if that'll disturb you—"

"No, no," Ted says quickly. "No, that's just fine." He pauses before blurting out, "I might snore."

"That's just fine," Rebecca says, deliberately echoing him.

Now that alarms and sides of the bed have been negotiated in full, there's nothing left but for Rebecca to actually get in the bed. She quickly circles around and climbs in, face hot despite her best attempts to keep her cool, Ted turning off the bedside lamp with a click that sounds decisive in the sudden darkness.

Rebecca is usually a side sleeper, but tonight she's lying flat on her back like a corpse—-should she turn towards him, the better to monitor his breathing? Away from him, to give him privacy? But turning away doesn't make sense, they're already well past privacy, they went past it the minute he agreed to let her talk to his doctors, never mind how she had him and his son move into her house—

Carefully, so carefully, Rebecca twists around to her side. As her eyes adjust to the darkness, she can make out the vague form of Ted's back and shoulders—he's also a side-sleeper, it seems.

She thinks they're just going to lie here in silence until one or both of them fall asleep, but Ted says suddenly, "Can you believe it's just been a week since...since all this started?"

"God, I can't," Rebecca says with conviction. She can barely remember what she was preoccupied with before last Friday—sponsorship deals? Wrangling the minority owners? Anticipating a visit from her mother? Everything has been blotted out by that awful morning, how close she came to losing this man, to having her relationship with him become something to speak of in the past tense.

Her chest aching, Rebecca unthinkingly reaches out and lets her fingertips brush along his back, feeling the worn, soft fabric of his t-shirt and the solid planes of his back beneath it. Beneath her palm, she can feel it as Ted takes a sudden, sharp breath.

In the dark, with nowhere to rush to, it’s easy to say it. “I’ve been so scared this whole week,” Rebecca admits, her voice choked. “I’ve been running around like a lunatic, making all these wild plans, because if I stop, I’ll just…God, I don’t even know.”

She wants to clutch at the fabric of his shirt; it takes an effort to open her hand wide, stretch her fingers across the broad expanse of his shoulder. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she says softly to him. “Don’t go anywhere, okay?”

“You saved me,” Ted murmurs, his voice low and so sweet, so sweet to her ears. “Think that means you’re stuck with me now.”

She can hear the smile in his voice, and tension she didn’t realize she was carrying unwinds in her, leaving her limp with relief. “Good,” she sighs, and it’s not much longer before she’s falling asleep like that, her hand just curving around his shoulder, her body only a few inches away from his.

*

Michelle arrives right as Rebecca and Henry are assembling ingredients for the egg white omelets for brunch the next morning, Rebecca having urged Ted into lounging in bed rather than trying to get up and assist with cooking. If that means she has to work out how to cook with fucking egg whites for the first time in her life, so be it: Henry is adorably enthusiastic about assisting, and it’s a welcome distraction from remembering how she’d woken up this morning, with practically her entire body pressed against Ted’s, her arm casually thrown over his waist, invading every inch of his personal space.

God. Even as she’s making small talk with Michelle, Rebecca’s cheeks are heating up again at the thought of it, the mortification of realizing that Ted was fully awake, the guilty pleasure of having him so close, warm and solid and smelling absurdly wonderful, even at nine am in the morning. As she’d tried to disentangle herself with some measure of dignity, Ted had twisted around to look at her, and something about seeing him like that, sleepily disheveled, morning stubble on his handsome face as he blinked up at her, all while lying next to her in bed was just—

Well. It was too fucking much.

“You guys sure about these egg white omelets?” Michelle asks doubtfully, peering at the mixing bowl where Henry, with more enthusiasm than finesse, has been attempting to separate the whites from the yolk.

“Dad’s gotta start eating healthier,” Henry says stubbornly. “All his doctors say so. His regular diet sucks.”

“It does suck,” Rebecca agrees. “The man has been living off coffee, protein bars, and pub food for years.”

Michelle looks startled. “Seriously?” she asks, and when Rebecca nods, her mouth firms and she says, “Okay, then egg white omelets it is.”

Thankfully, Michelle is much more adept at working with egg whites than either Rebecca or Henry, and they’re in the middle of making their first attempt at a spinach and feta omelet when Rebecca, to her alarm, hears a heavy, slow tread on the stairs.

“Ted?” she calls out in disbelief, rushing to the foot of the stairs where, unbelievably, Ted is slowly making his way down, gripping the banister tightly. “Ted, what the fuck do you think you’re doing? Go back to bed!”

“Nah, I’m good,” Ted says, even as he’s moving like an eighty-year-old man, hair rumpled, obviously still half-asleep.

“You are not good, you are still in recovery and—” Rebecca huffs in exasperation as Ted reaches the bottom of the stairs and moves past her to make his way into the kitchen, smiling at a dubious-looking Henry and a blank-faced Michelle. “Ted. Didn’t we agree last night that you were going to stay in bed and have us bring your meals up to you?”

“Mm, no,” Ted says, shuffling towards the espresso machine. “You said I should do that, I did not actually agree with you. Is there coffee?”

“Not for you there isn’t,” Rebecca replies immediately, and Ted finally turns to look at her, still smiling, but there’s a touch of exasperation in his eyes and along his jaw.

Good. If they’re actually going to have this battle, Rebecca refuses to be the only one losing her temper. “Come on, Rebecca, one cup of coffee isn’t going to—”

“We were just discussing how much your diet sucks,” Rebecca says, grandly waving at Henry and Michelle. “You are going to have orange juice and some egg white omelets, not coffee and fatty pastries that’ll only contribute to your shit blood pressure. And it is shit, Ted, every one of your doctors agrees.”

Ted’s mouth thins, but he says, “Fine. But I’m eating down here for my meals.”

“No, the fuck you aren’t,” Rebecca says sharply, and Ted, finally losing his temper, retorts, “Yes, the fuck I am, dammit, Rebecca, I’m not an invalid and I won’t be treated as one, even if I do gotta make some lifestyle adjustments—”

“You have to make a lot of lifestyle adjustments, and I won’t have you jeopardizing your recovery right from the start!” Rebecca retorts, unrepentant and uncowed.

“Excuse me,” Michelle says, her face pale, and rushes out of the kitchen, through the door that leads to Rebecca’s garden. She’s in such a rush that the door slams shut behind her, leaving all three of them to blink in surprise.

Ted’s the first to cut into the silence, flushing hard as he says to Henry, “I’m sorry for cussing in front of you, buddy, and losing my temper like that. That’s not fair to you.”

Henry looks remarkably nonchalant. “Nah, I’m okay. It’s actually kind of funny hearing you cuss,” he adds, grinning mischievously. “You sound weird when you do it.”

“Yeah, I’m a little out of practice,” Ted admits, rubbing a hand over his still-unshaven face. “God. This is why I need coffee in the morning, I’m not human without it.”

“Well, we’ll survive you being inhuman in the mornings while you kick your caffeine addiction,” Rebecca says, then adds archly, “Of course, this would be the perfect time to switch over—”

“I swear before God, Rebecca, if you tell me that now’s the time to start drinking tea,” Ted starts indignantly, but then he catches sight of her twitching mouth and finally breaks himself, chuckling as he drops his head, his sudden burst of temper disappearing as soon as it came. “Oh, Lord. You sure you don’t regret inviting me to stay here?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Rebecca says briskly. “You’d have to do far worse than this to scare me off.”

Ted scratches at his head, still abashed. “Seems like I scared Michelle off though. Think I oughta talk to her—”

“No, it’s okay, I’ll go,” Rebecca says quickly. Between Ted’s moodiness (perfectly expected in someone newly recovering from a heart attack) and the long-running tension between him and Michelle, never mind whatever it was that pushed Michelle to exit so abruptly just now, this is the perfect time for Rebecca to run interference between them.

So she slips out into the garden, only to stop abruptly at the sight of Michelle feverishly smoking from a vape pen, pacing back and forth along the brick path.

Michelle stops dead when she sees Rebeccca, snatching the pen away from her mouth and futilely waving at the cloud of smoke around her. “Sorry. I should’ve asked if I could smoke here.”

“No, it’s fine,” Rebecca says. “I just…didn’t know you were a smoker.”

“I’m not,” Michelle says quickly. “Usually. Only when I’m stressed out.”

“Ah,” Rebecca says with understanding, gently sitting down at the nearby bench she’d had put in three years ago. “That’s perfectly understandable, this is a stressful time.”

“Mm,” Michelle agrees tightly, staring down at the vape pen in her hand. Rebecca’s not sure, but it looks like Michelle’s gripping it tightly.

“I’m sorry if that little scene upset you,” Rebecca begins carefully. “It’s perfectly all right though, a little moodiness from Ted is expected, especially in the wake of a heart attack, all the doctors and literature agree—”

Michelle laughs suddenly, and the bitterness in it has Rebecca pulling back with surprise. “Oh, but Ted doesn’t do moods. Ted has one mood: optimistic. Fifteen years of marriage, and he never fought with me about anything. Not once. Not one fight, ever.”

The way that Michelle speaks, you would think this was a tragedy beyond words. “I…”

“Fifteen years of marriage, and I don’t think he ever bit my head off,” Michelle continues, starting to pace again, rolling the vape pen back and forth between her hands. “Never snapped, never cursed, never got angry. Not once. But with you—you, he snaps at. He gets moody in front of you. He curses in front of you.”

Rebecca has no idea why Michelle is spitting this out like it’s a personal affront.

But then Michelle stops dead in her tracks, and turns to look at Rebecca, her face stricken and her eyes wet. “He’s an actual person with you,” she says. “I never got that from him. No matter how hard I tried, he never let me in. Never trusted me enough to…to let himself be ugly in front of me.”

Oh. Oh, hell.

Rebecca opens her mouth, and closes it. “I don’t know what to tell you,” she finally admits. “It’s just…this is how we are with each other.” Something about the admission has Rebecca’s heart clenching in her chest, the realization of how much Ted trusts her, how utterly desolate she’d be if she didn’t have that from him.

Like Michelle is right now, even though she’s been divorced from Ted for over half a decade.

Michelle visibly gathers herself. “No, it’s okay. It—I’m glad he has that with someone, even though it’s not me.” She pauses, and then says slowly, as if she’s realizing it to herself, “And it’s not going to be me…not now, maybe not ever.”

“Michelle—”

“It’s fine,” Michelle says quickly, holding up a hand, and Rebecca thinks to herself that perhaps Ted isn’t the only one who has a hard time letting himself be ugly. “It’s fine, I just…seeing him like that with you…I just needed a minute.”

“Of course,” Rebecca says. “I…do you want me to go? Give you some space to think? And to vape?”

Michelle lets out a little choked laugh, wiping at her eyes. “God. Yes, please, thank you. I’ll be in soon, I just…”

“You need a minute,” Rebecca says, and Michelle nods gratefully.

So Rebecca goes, leaving Michelle to smoke out her stress in the garden. She comes back to the kitchen to see Ted demonstrating how to flip an omelet to Henry. “Everything okay?” Ted asks as she comes in.

Rebecca gives him a reassuring smile. “Everything’s fine, Michelle just wanted some air.” Ted looks like he wants to press for more, but Rebecca glances meaningfully at Henry and says, briskly changing the subject, “Now see, I could never quite manage the flip. I always cheat and use a plate instead.”

“Wait, how do you use a plate?” Henry asks, and Ted laughs and suggests, “Well, why don’t we show you with the next omelet, okay, buddy?”

*

Michelle leaves the house soon after breakfast, and doesn’t come back until after dinner, where Rebecca has gracefully conceded ground to have Ted sitting in the living room with her and Henry, and Ted in turn has agreed to avoid coffee for the time being, as well as taking it easy and not overextending himself too soon. And once Ted has said he’ll do something, he’ll do it.

So after dinner, the three of them are watching yet another superhero movie and awful film aside, Rebecca could get used to this, very easily.

Michelle arrives about midway through the film, her eyes suspiciously a little red when Rebecca answers the door. “Michelle, is everything all right?” Rebecca asks in an undertone, ushering her aside.

“I’m fine,” Michelle reassures her. “Just had a long dinner. With Beard, actually. We had a good talk.”

“Incredible how good a conversationalist that man is, given how few words he actually says,” Rebecca muses.

Michelle chuckles, but her laughter sounds a little watery. “Yeah, it’s a constant puzzle.”

“We’re just watching a film, if you want to join us?” Rebecca offers up.

Michelle’s smile turns wry. “Let me guess. There are superheroes.”

Rebecca sighs. “Sadly yes.”

Michelle chuckles. “Sure thing. I’ve suffered through them all, I can suffer again.”

But once Michelle’s with them in the living room, Rebecca notices she watches Ted and Henry more than she turns to watch the screen, her expression achingly sad and tender as she looks at her son, curled up against Ted’s side as he exhorts Ted to pay attention, because this was a really good bit. “I’m watching, buddy, I’m watching,” Ted promises, his arm slung around Henry’s shoulders.

Whatever else happens, whether Henry stays here or goes back to Kansas with Michelle, at least Rebecca will have seen this: Ted with his son, safely home from hospital, looking utterly content and at peace.

Her eyes stinging just a little, Rebecca turns her head to find Michelle studying her now, her expression having become thoughtful.

All in all, it’s not entirely a surprise when Michelle politely asks Henry to go upstairs to his room, as she needs to have a conversation with his dad for a moment.

“If it’s about me, I should stay here,” Henry says, mutinous. “I deserve a say.”

“Son,” Ted says, his voice kind but firm. “Go on up and let me have a quick chat with your mom.” Henry opens his mouth to protest, and Ted lifts his eyebrows; Henry scowls but desists after that, though his stomping footsteps up the stairs are a clear sign of how displeased he is about it.

Despite not wanting to, Rebecca feels obligated to say, moving as if to stand up, “If you two would like some privacy, I can—”

“No, it’s okay,” Michelle says. “It involves you too, so you should be here.”

Rebecca sits back into her seat, and waits to hear what Michelle has to say. She keeps an eye on Ted as well, watching the way his hands curl in his lap as he looks at Michelle patiently.

“So I won’t lie,” Michelle says, taking a deep breath as she jumps right into it, “I came here with every intention of dragging Henry straight back to Kansas, no matter what he told me. And then Henry made it very clear that he would literally have to be dragged to the airport before leaving you, and that we would end up plastered all over social media before we even got checked in at the airport.”

“You’d also be all over every tabloid in the country,” Rebecca says; when Ted raises an eyebrow at her, she lifts her hands and says, “I’m sorry, but it is true. You are very famous here, Ted.”

Ted concedes the point with a roll of his shoulders, but he squares them and looks Michelle in the face as he says, “I know Henry’s been giving you a hell of a rough time these last few days. I should’ve pushed back on that with him sooner, and I’m sorry.”

“Thank you,” Michelle says formally. “But the truth is that I can’t actually force Henry to come home. And I also can’t pretend he wouldn’t be happy here with you, in England, living in this…remarkably large house,” she says, glancing around her. “Seriously, from the front you wouldn’t think it was half this big.”

“It’s like a TARDIS,” Ted says, and Rebecca fails to hide her grin; seven years living in England have left their mark. But casual Doctor Who references aside, Ted’s expression is so fragile, like he’s afraid to hope this conversation is leading in the direction he wants. “Michelle, are you saying—”

“What I’m asking is,” Michelle plows on, determined, “if Henry were to stay here, in London with you, what…God, what does that even look like? Do you guys live here with Rebecca? Where does he go to school?”

Vibrating with excitement, Rebecca says quickly, “If you could just hold that thought for one second, Michelle—” She’s already moving in the direction of her briefcase as she speaks, snatching it off the ground in search of the brochures she’d left there.

Ted and Michelle’s faces are a picture as she comes back, carefully fanning out the school brochures on the table in front of them. “So I’ve done some research,” Rebecca says, “And these are the top schools in the area that Henry could attend. Two are within easy walking distance, all of them with excellent track records. This one is my early pick, it has great science and maths programs, and I know those are Henry’s favorite subjects…”

She trails off, looking into their dumbfounded faces, and sits back. “Have I overstepped?”

“No, no,” Ted says quickly. “I just…you did research?”

“I wanted to be prepared in case this was a possibility,” Rebecca says, confused by his bewilderment—she’d told him she’d do everything she could to make this happen, how is he surprised that she stuck to it?

“Of course you did,” Ted says, his eyes going soft.

Her cheeks turning hot, Rebecca turns to a wide-eyed Michelle and says, “I’m not sure how much time you have left before you need to return to the States, but I can get us interviews with all the heads of these schools by tomorrow morning, we can tour all of them within the next day or two, and if you don’t like any of them—”

“You’ll have another half-dozen alternative options ready for me to consider by then,” Michelle says, her voice faint.

“We can make this work, is what I’m saying,” Rebecca says, looking Michelle in the face and willing her to believe it.

Michelle holds her gaze for a long moment, then she looks down at the brochures, slowly picking one up and studying it. “You said this was your pick?” she asks.

Rebecca lets out a breath. “Yeah. I did.”

*

Two weeks after Ted’s moved into her house, Rebecca’s finally stepping into the office more regularly for work, which is how she walks into her office one morning, biscuit box in hand (Ted still insists on making them for her, she just carries them into work herself) to find Roy, Beard, Colin and Higgins all waiting for her.

Rebecca’s stride slows as she sees them, and she says slowly, “Why does this feel like an ambush?”

“It’s not,” Higgins says quickly.

“Eh,” Beard says, wobbling his hand back and forth. “Kinda is.”

“We just wanted to go over something with you,” Roy says, with a quelling look sent at Beard.

“Okay,” Rebecca says slowly, sitting behind her desk. “What’s it about?”

Roy nods at Colin, who takes a breath and unfolds an oversized sheet of paper. “It’s this.”

Rebecca looks it over with confusion. It’s a calendar—a remarkably crowded calendar—with appointments and meetings color-coded in a blinding mix of fuschia, turquoise, and neon yellow. “I don’t understand—”

“This,” Roy says, tapping the schedule, “is Ted’s work schedule. Best as we can figure it out.”

Rebecca stares at it, then looks at them all, completely aghast. “That’s not possible,” she says. “He wouldn’t have time to eat. Or even breathe.”

Higgins grimaces, saying, “He did have a tendency to skip lunch quite a lot.” At Rebecca’s expression, he hurries on, adding, “What we mean is, Ted had a habit of…”

“Sticking his nose into every department in this club,” Roy finishes.

“He liked—likes,” Higgins corrects himself, with another grimace, “—knowing how each part of this club works. I’ve talked with people from marketing, scouting, the academy, and everyone agrees that he wasn’t overstepping, they all liked having him come in and ask questions, having him follow up on any problems, and so it just became…a habit. A habit that turned into that overcrowded schedule.”

“I am not doing that,” Roy says flatly. “I’m filling in for Ted as manager and that’s fine, but I’m not gonna add half a dozen different jobs on top of the job I’ve already got. Fuck’s sake, did the man ever sleep?”

“Apparently not,” Rebecca sighs, rubbing at her forehead. “There’s no way this can continue, not with Roy, and not when Ted’s back at work. Higgins, you’ll pass that message along, I trust?”

Higgins nods his head. “Of course.”

The meeting breaks up not long after that, but Roy lingers. “How’s Ted and Henry?” he asks abruptly, once they’re alone together.

“Fine,” Rebecca says, starting to smile a little. “I’m taking Henry out tonight for Guy Fawkes—he’s very confused as to why we have a holiday celebrating someone who tried to kill the king and failed miserably at it, but he’s still excited to see the bonfires and fireworks at Richmond Park.”

Roy nods. “Ted going with you?”

Rebecca’s smile grows a little smaller. “Ah. No. No, Ted prefers to stay in tonight.”

Roy’s expression doesn’t move by a millimeter, but he says, “Ted seems to be staying in a lot since he got out of hospital.”

“He’s still recovering from the heart attack, Roy,” Rebecca says, defensive. “He’s in physical therapy, dealing with the doctors and the dietitian and the—” Rebecca’s hands are moving in the air as she tries to convey the constant cycle of appointments and tests, not to mention getting Henry settled into his new school—

“But he’s feeling all right?” Roy presses, then scowls. “I’m asking for Keeley, she’s still stuck on that business trip out in Dubai, and she’s worried about Ted.”

“Right,” Rebecca says. “She’s worried.”

Roy’s scowl only deepens, and Rebecca relents. “He’s okay. He’s…adjusting.” She pauses, then starts speaking as the idea occurs to her, “Maybe we could have people over for a small dinner, nothing too big. I think he could handle that.”

“That’d be all right,” Roy quickly says, hands in his pockets. “Keeley would like that, I know.”

“Yeah,” Rebecca says, smiling. “I’m sure she would.”

*

"Thanks for taking Henry out tonight," Ted says that evening as they're getting ready for bed.

"Oh please, I enjoyed every minute of it," Rebecca says dismissively, heading into Ted's bathroom. Over the last couple of weeks, as they've continued to share a bed (while definitely not discussing their decision to do so) Rebecca's found that more and more of her skincare products keep migrating from her room to Ted's.

It's only reasonable, if she's staying the night. Practical, even. And yet the sight of her serums and night-time moisturizer carefully lined up next to Ted's shaving cream and aftershave is...well. It still throws her, even if just for a second.

Shaking it off, Rebecca works her cleanser into a lather and starts scrubbing her face, pausing only to add, "Although I can already tell I'm going to need to brush up on my history, if only to keep up with Henry's questions. We had to actually stop in the park just so I could Google details of the English Reformation—"

She hears shuffling footsteps, and looks up to see Ted leaning in the doorway to the bath, amused as he asks, "Good Lord, he had you going that far back?” He’s wearing his usual sleepwear, loose sweatpants and a worn t-shirt, this one emblazoned with the Sporting Kansas FC logo. He’s also taken to letting himself skip shaving for a few days in a row, and the stubble is…oddly appealing, even if Rebecca finds herself hoping he doesn’t actually grow a full beard. After all this time, she’s fairly sure she’s been Stockholmed into preferring the mustache.

"Yes, he most certainly did," Rebecca confirms, rinsing the foam off her face and patting it dry with a hand towel. "It was actually rather fun though, he wants to go to a bookstore this weekend and pick up some history books. I was thinking you could come with us, we could make a day of it."

She's not imagining the brief hesitation before Ted says, "Yeah, that sounds like a good idea." Smoothing her serum across her face, Rebecca looks at Ted, who pulls a face and admits, "Guess I'm a little nervous still about being out in public after...everything. Keep thinking the paparazzi are gonna jump down my throat the minute I step outside."

"It's not an unreasonable fear," Rebecca admits, thinking it over. "Actually...I could probably call the local Waterstones, see if we could be allowed in before or after normal hours, give you and Henry a chance to browse in peace—"

Ted looks tempted for a moment, but shakes his head. "Nah. I gotta get used to getting back out there, might as well start now. And I wanna keep Henry's experiences here as normal as possible, you know?"

"Oh, shutting down a bookstore for a private tour isn't normal?" Rebecca asks in mock-confusion. Ted's dimples peek out as he grins, and Rebecca chuckles.

"Anyway, I'll let you get back to your routine," Ted says affably, moving as if to leave, but Rebecca calls out, "Oh wait, I wanted to talk to you about something."

“Sure, what’s up?”

Gently patting in her eye cream, Rebecca begins, “So I was thinking about hosting a small dinner party here. No one you don’t know, obviously, just Keeley and Roy, Higgins and Beard and Colin—I realized when going into the office today that they haven’t seen you in a while, and I think they’d all love to see you.”

Ted doesn’t say anything at first, and when Rebecca turns to look at him, the hesitation is clear. Surprised, Rebecca leans her hip against the cabinet and says slowly, “But if you don’t want to, obviously I won’t—”

“No, no, it’s okay,” Ted says quickly, and Rebecca gives him a look. “Ted.”

Ted wrinkles his nose, looking away, then looking back at her, a little sheepish. “Not sure how much fun I’ll be,” he admits at last. “Between the meds and the rehab, some days it’s all I can do to keep my eyes open past seven o’clock.”

“No one is expecting you to be the headlining act, Ted,” Rebecca says. “You’re not going to need to entertain people. And I can have everyone arrive early, make sure they know not to stay too long—”

“What, you gonna kick them out the minute the clock strikes eight-thirty?”

“If you want me to,” Rebecca replies immediately. “And they’re your friends, they’ll understand if you need to make it an early night.” Suddenly aware that she might be pressuring him too much, Rebecca adds quickly, “But if you don’t want to—”

“No, it’s a good idea,” Ted says. He smiles a little, clearly reading her just as well as she can read him. “It is, Rebecca, you’re not twisting my arm here.”

“If you’re sure,” Rebecca says, still watching him, wanting to kick herself. “You can tell me to fuck off, you know, if I’m pushing you too hard.”

Ted laughs openly at this. “Oh yeah, because that’s certainly something I’m gonna do.” Rebecca’s expression doesn’t shift, and Ted’s smile fades. “Rebecca. It’s okay. I’ll tell you if you’re doing something I don’t want.”

“Will you?” Rebecca can’t help but press.

Ted’s expression shifts, as he realizes this is something she needs him to confirm. “Yes. I’ll even tell you to eff off if I think you’re wronger than Crystal Pepsi,” he adds, the joke making her smile. “But I doubt I’ll need to—you’ve got a habit of being right.”

With one last smile, he turns to leave her to the last of her skin care routine, and Rebecca turns back to the mirror, feeling reassured.

She does have to pause for a moment before getting into the bed, but that’s not her fault—two weeks in and the sight of Ted reading in bed, the reading glasses she insisted he purchase perched low on his nose, still throws her for a loop. He’s working his way through the copy of Persuasion that Alistair gave to him in the hospital, taking his time even though Rebecca knows he’s read it multiple times before.

He must sense her watching him, because he looks up and smiles. “You know I haven’t read a book not related to my job in…God, I can’t even remember how long. Hell, I can’t remember the last time I read a book, period. Even when I was out of the office, I was still looking over scouting reports, watching film from the games…”

“About that,” Rebecca says, finally going forward and slipping into her side of the bed, beneath the sheets. “I had a meeting today with Higgins and the coaching staff, about your schedule. Ted, how on earth didn’t you let me know how much work you were doing?”

He looks baffled by the question. “It was my job, Rebecca.”

Rebecca hadn’t wanted to have this conversation now, late at night when no matter how fraught the conversation gets, they’ll still have to sleep in the same bed at the end of it, but here they are anyway.

“No, it wasn’t!” she insists now, leaning forward. “It wasn’t your job to manage the transfer department, or the academy, or the marketing team—I didn’t ask you to do that, Ted. No one expected it of you—your job is to coach the team, not—” the words drive yourself into an early grave are sitting right on the tip of her tongue, but Rebecca will choke if she says them, so she says instead, “Not drive yourself mad doing the job of five people.”

“I wasn’t trying to—” Ted starts defensively, but checks himself. He pauses, looking down at the book in his hand, then says slowly, “I didn’t realize what was happening ‘til I was already in it, you know? It was like…juggling a bunch of balls in your hands, if you stop to think about what you’re doing, everything’s going to fall to the floor.”

But it all fell anyway, Rebecca thinks, her stomach cramping. “Well, now you are going to stop and think,” she says firmly. “And when you come back to work—which will not be until you’re fully recovered—I am going to go through your schedule with a fine-tooth comb and if I see anything unrelated to your actual duties, I will be displeased.” She puts as much emphasis into the last word as she can manage, crisply enunciating, knowing that Ted will be amused by her putting on what he calls her “Dame Judi Dench game face”.

But Ted doesn’t look amused, his gaze is still turned inward, as if he’s turning something over in his head. “Yeah,” he says finally. “Think I could let you do that.”

Rebecca lets the moment rest, and nudges him a little with her elbow. “So where are you in the book?”

“Poor Louisa Musgrove’s just cracked her head open on that sea wall in Lyme,” Ted responds immediately, and Rebecca settles back against the pillow.

“Can you read some of it to me?” she asks, and Ted smiles down at her, his eyes crinkling behind his glasses.

“Sure thing, Miss Spring Fling,” he agrees, and Rebecca smiles as he begins to read Austen in his low voice, the long American vowels somehow not jarring at all with the prose, Rebecca growing drowsier and drowsier as he reads.

It’s all been so wonderful, having him here. For all the fretting and wrangling she’s done, for all that she knows Ted’s been indulging her overprotectiveness, it’s just…it’s so lovely, having his presence here in the house, everywhere that Rebecca turns. It’ll end eventually, Rebecca knows that it’ll have to end, but…not just yet. Not quite just yet.

At some point in the night, Rebecca has a confused memory of Ted pulling his arm away from where it’s resting across her waist; her mind clouded from sleep, she makes a dissenting noise and reaches out to pull him closer, huffing as she pulls his arm back around her, the weight of it heavy and warm and satisfying.

And in the morning, as has become usual over the past two weeks, neither of them talk about it.

*

Rebecca’s taking Henry with her as her guest to the early-kickoff match against Southampton, and it’s a bright, bitterly cold November day. Henry doesn’t seem to mind the chill, his cheeks pink as he watches the teams warm up on the pitch.

“Is it weird that I’m here without Dad?” he asks Rebecca, and Rebecca blinks in surprise.

“Of course not, you’re here as my guest,” she tells him, but Henry looks at her with a worried crease between his eyebrows, and she realizes what he’s not quite asking. “I think your dad wants to give Roy and the coaching staff some space,” she admits in a low voice, glancing around to make sure none of the other minority owners or their guests are close enough to overhear. “If he’s seen in the stands watching, and the team doesn’t do well today—”

“The media’ll make a whole thing out of it,” Henry says, understanding. “Okay, that makes sense.” He pauses, then says, “You think we can get him to come out of the house more often, though?”

“Certainly,” Rebecca says, but hesitates. “But—just so you know, when we go out with your dad in public, there might be some press attention anyway. Photographers, fans, that kind of thing.”

“Oh, I’m used to that,” Henry assures her. “Everybody at school knows who Dad is, I’ve been a coach’s kid my whole life. It won’t bother me.”

“Good, good,” Rebecca says in relief, rubbing his arm. It’s become easy to be tactile with Henry the same way that she is with Nora; Rebecca would have been fond of him no matter what for Ted’s sake, but Henry is a wonderful kid in his own right.

“Well, will you look at that, it’s the mini Lasso.”

Rebecca smiles at the sound of that familiar Scottish burr, looking up to find Alistair Crane standing to her left, smiling behind his large aviator sunglasses, which look far better on him than they should.

“Henry, do you remember Alistair Crane?”

“I do, nice to see you again, sir,” Henry says politely, reaching out to shake Alistair’s hand.

“Will you look at those manners,” Alistair marvels. “Hello, lad. How’s your father doing?”

“He’s doing all right,” Henry says.

Alistair settles into the seat next to Henry and immediately engages him in conversation, which is a little bit of a surprise, but perhaps not; Alistair’s never struck Rebecca as the sort of man to like children very much, but he’s fond of Ted and therefore he’s fond of Ted’s son. And Henry is exactly the sort of well-mannered boy that’ll charm cantankerous old men, he takes after his father that way.

Rebecca’s watching the game, only halfway listening to Alistair and Henry’s conversation, which is why it comes as such an unwelcome surprise to hear Bex Mannion’s voice behind her. “Rebecca, lovely to see you.”

Rebecca twists around, baffled and annoyed. “Bex. What are you doing here?”

Bex is standing before her, hair shining in sleek waves, looking fashionable and beautiful as ever. “I’m a minority owner of AFC Richmond and the team’s playing today, why shouldn’t I be here?”

Because Bex, for all of her vaunted love of Richmond, hardly ever attends matches in person, and Rebecca cannot fathom why she would be here today, for a fairly unimportant match early in the season.

But Rebecca refuses to rise to the bait. “Well, enjoy,” she says dismissively, and turns away.

Or rather, she tries to, except Bex is sliding into the seat right behind Rebecca, good God, is this a punishment from the universe? Did she step beneath a ladder, kick a black cat, burn down a field of four-leaf clovers without realizing? “Rebecca,” Bex says, in her most reasonable tones, one that immediately puts Rebecca’s back up, “Now that I’ve got a bigger stake in the club, I’d really like for us to…turn a page in our relationship. We don’t need to be enemies here.”

“Well, we’re certainly not going to be friends,” Rebecca says icily. “And I hardly think this is the time or place to discuss business, thank you.”

Rebuffed (but unfortunately not quashed entirely, Bex has the self-preservation skills of a cockroach) Bex sits back in her seat, murmuring, “Suit yourself, Rebecca. You always do.”

Breathing hard through her nose, Rebecca stares ahead at the pitch.

Unfortunately, the game isn’t a classic—both teams have a hard time creating clear chances, and Richmond ends up squeaking through with a 1-0 win thanks to Komoh winning a penalty and Jamie Tartt coolly slotting it away in the far right corner, past the despairing Southampton goalkeeper.

Henry has a good time at least, singing along to every chant (he knows all of them, even the ones created a good sixty years before he was born) and chattering away with Alistair, Rebecca letting their voices wash over her until she hears Henry asking, “Are you coming to the party tomorrow night?”

“What party?” Alistair asks, and Rebecca says with a laugh, “It’s not a party, just a small dinner party I’m hosting for Ted.”

“I like dinner parties,” Alistair says, in a tone of dramatic injury. “How am I hearing about it now?”

“Because of a grievous oversight,” Rebecca says dryly, and then pauses and looks at him, considering him—the larger than life personality, the dozens of times she’s seen him dominate a room. “Actually, Alistair, are you free tomorrow night?”

“Oh I see,” Alistair says. “Just an afterthought, am I? Need to fill an empty seat, do you?”

“For God’s sake,” Rebecca starts, exasperated, then checks herself, looking at Henry. “Henry, sweetheart, do you mind getting me some water from inside?”

Henry easily agrees, and once he’s slipped past Rebecca to take the stairs inside the owner’s box where the refreshments are, Rebecca says in a low voice, speaking quickly, “Look, I kept the guest list small because I don’t want Ted to get overwhelmed, he’s…not exactly ready yet for large crowds.” Alistair’s face flickers with concern, and Rebecca adds, “But if you’re there, being loud and strident and Scottish, then Ted won’t feel the need to—”

“Pick up the slack and make a big show of reassuring everyone he’s fine,” Alistair finishes for her, understanding. “I see.” He frowns, adding sharply, “Not that I’ve ever been strident in my life, Rebecca.”

“No, of course not,” Rebecca agrees smoothly.

“But if you need to have me there to smooth the way,” Alistair continues, scratching at his goatee, “Well. I suppose I could oblige you.”

“So generous of you,” Rebecca says, very dry, and Alistair grins, laughing at himself as much as anything else.

*

The guest will be arriving soon, and Ted keeps tugging at the hem of his jumper, as though he's afraid it doesn't fit. After the past few weeks of seeing him in loungewear, going days without shaving, it's somehow oddly jarring to see him with his jaw and cheeks clean-shaven, in his long standing uniform of a jumper over a button-down shirt—though thankfully he's forgone the khakis for a pair of jeans.

"Time isn't going to move faster no matter how much you look at the clock," she says gently, when she catches him glancing at his watch yet again.

Ted gives her a rueful smile. "But maybe this watched pot’ll boil if I stare at it long enough.”

He’s not the only one acting ridiculous, as Henry calls out doubtfully, “I think…people are here?” and Rebecca goes to the door to find that Keeley and Roy have arrived and are pacing on the doorstep, refusing to ring the doorbell until it’s exactly six o’clock, as Keeley shouts through the window when Rebecca asks.

“You’re ridiculous,” Rebecca calls out.

“I’m being polite!” Keeley yells through the door.

Ted, cheeky little shit, starts an actual countdown to six o’clock, Henry joining in, and they cheer as Keeley hits the doorbell exactly at six, Rebecca throwing open the door to Keeley’s beaming face and Roy’s usual stone-faced expression.

“See, polite,” Keeley exclaims, jumping in for a quick hug, before wriggling past Rebecca and through the door. “Told you she’d be excited,” Roy says ruefully as he steps inside after her.

Keeley immediately launches herself at Ted, wrapping him up in a hug. Smiling over her shoulder, Ted immediately returns it, only to slowly become surprised as Keeley refuses to let go. “Oh, hey now, hey, what’s this?” Ted murmurs, rubbing Keeley’s back in that comforting way he’s so good at. “You okay?”

“I am,” Keeley says, muffled. She finally pulls back, wiping at her face. “I am, and you’re okay. God, you look so good, Ted! You look like yourself, instead of like, the living corpse you were in hospital…oh, fuck, I promised myself I wasn’t going to say that, but you did.”

Roy grimaces but agrees. “She’s not wrong, mate.”

Ted looks a little overwhelmed by that, his gaze turning to Rebecca, who says briskly, “Well, anyone will look better once they’re no longer suffering through a massive health crisis.” She pauses, then adds with a smirk, “And once they’re eating real food and not living off protein bars and coffee.”

The joke works, as Ted says indignantly (even as she can see the relief in his face), “Hey! There was pub food in there too, don’t forget.”

“Oh, how could I forget you living off fish and chips for actual years,” Rebecca replies, in her most sarcastic tones, and gets Ted dimpling at her for her pains. “I swear to God, if I thought it would work I’d have Mae ban you from the Crown and Anchor.”

“She would never turn on me like that,” Ted says, and Keeley confirms, smiling happily, “Ted can’t even get Mae to take his money anymore after Richmond won the title, and there are at least three regulars there with tattoos of Ted’s mustache. Or his whole face.”

“Wait, what?” Henry asks, grinning. “Your whole face?”

As Ted is explaining to his son that some tattoos are just “a no-good, terrible, very bad idea” no matter how happy you are about getting a trophy, the doorbell rings again, and Rebecca smiles as she turns to invite in her other guests.

She'd insisted on having the party catered, for all of Ted's protests; the entire point of this was to have Ted relaxed in a social setting, not have him going mad cooking all day for half a dozen guests. Ted had eventually relented, but had still insisted on baking a truly decadent chocolate cake that Rebecca is sure will have Keeley going off yet again on how Ted should take up the longstanding offer to go on Celebrity Bake Off.

Over the main course, the subject turns to Henry settling in at school—Henry looks amusingly tolerant of every adult he meets asking him the same questions, but gamely answers that he’s doing fine, he likes his teachers and his classes, and oddly, one of his classmates who recently moved to London from Liverpool gets more grief over her accent than Henry gets over his.

“You know,” Colin says thoughtfully, “I just realized that your accent doesn’t sound a lot like your dad’s.”

Henry grins suddenly, eyes alight with mischief, and he casually throws a bomb out into the middle of dinner. “That’s ‘cause Dad’s accent is from Texas.”

Keeley’s head shoots up at this, while Ted just closes his eyes and sighs heavily through his nose. “I’m sorry?” Keeley asks in disbelief. “A Texas what? But Ted’s from Kansas. And look, I don’t know where all the states are in America, because your country’s got too many of them, but I know those aren’t the same.” She turns to Roy and whispers, “They aren’t, right?” and sighs in relief when he shakes his head.

Henry, meanwhile, has a giant grin on his face. “Dad’s only sort of from Kansas, at least if you listen to Grandma’s side of the family.”

“You’ve been listening to Great-Uncle Clayton again I see,” Ted sighs.

Meanwhile, Colin has dug out his phone and is jabbing at the screen with growing consternation. “They’re not even next to each other?” he exclaims, showing an image from Google Maps to the entire table. “There’s a whole other state between them!”

“There are plenty of other people back home in Kansas that sound exactly like me,” Ted protests.

“Ehh,” Beard says, wiggling his hand back and forth. “Debatable.”

Ted throws a betrayed look at his friend. “Et tu, Beard?”

Henry, meanwhile, is grinning at his father, as this is clearly something he loves to tease Ted about. “Dad’s accent is really from Galveston, because that’s where he was born, and because Grandma’s from Galveston and he spent summers there as a kid and also coached there before I was born, so his accent is really from Texas,” Henry declares, all while Keeley’s eyes grow to the size of dinner plates.

“What the fuck is a Galveston,” Roy wonders out loud.

“Whatever it is, it’s eight hundred and forty miles away from Kansas,” Colin says, still poking at his phone. “At least according to Google.”

“Christ, your country’s too fucking big,” Alistair says. “Do you know how many countries in Europe you’d drive through if you were traveling for eight hundred miles?”

“How do you have an accent from a place eight hundred miles away from where you grew up?” Keeley wonders. “I thought you were from Kansas!”

“I am from Kansas!” Ted protests.

“Ted, did we ever really know you at all?” Keeley exclaims, staring at him, looking utterly betrayed. “God, what are we going to find out next, that your mustache is fake?”

Ted gasps, lifting a hand to his mustache as if to make sure it’s still on his face. “Keeley, I love and appreciate you dearly, but those are fighting words.”

Snatching Colin’s phone out of his grasp, Keeley jams it in Ted’s face, pointing wildly at what Rebecca can only assume is the map of the United States, and the distance between Kansas and Texas. “Ted, explain.”

“Okay, but what is an accent, really,” Ted offers up, and Keeley makes a lot of outraged noises at this.

As everyone continues to debate about accents and how ridiculously oversized the United States is—Beard takes the controversial opinion that it’s not that the US is large, but everywhere else is just too tiny for its own good—Rebecca takes a moment to fix the image in her memory; her favorite people all sitting at her dining table, being silly and happy together, and Ted in the center of it all, his eyes shining and his mouth curved up in a smile, his posture relaxed, looking healthy and at ease.

Ted must notice her watching, as he turns to look at her for a moment, his smile deepening, and Rebecca’s cheeks are now flushed for a reason that has absolutely nothing to do with the wine.

Chapter 5

It was only a matter of time until the press got wind of the fact that Ted and Henry are living with her, but Rebecca is still irritated when photos of Ted and Henry returning to the house from an errand end up in the Daily Mail.

All the tabloids run stories about it, of course, but what really has Rebecca’s blood boiling is the article from Trent Crimm in the Independent. He doesn’t speculate on the nature of their relationship and whether or not they’re sleeping together, that would be too crass for him. No, it’s worse than that.

The partnership between Ms. Welton and Mr. Lasso has always been a fascinating and complicated one. Rebecca Welton has never given a detailed explanation of the thought process that led her to hire an American to manage Richmond, let alone an American who had never coached football—or, if we must, ‘soccer’. At the time, it looked like lunacy; seven years later, Welton’s gamble has paid off in ways that would have been unimaginable at that first, disastrous press conference, and even more disastrous season. A league title, two FA Cups, semi-regular qualifications for the Champions League (which as Arsene Wenger has taught us, is basically a trophy in itself). Richmond is the underdog perennially punching above its weight, maximizing every part of the organization, from transfers to the academy to the medical department, until it reaches its full potential. By every standard, the Welton-Lasso partnership has been an unqualified success.

But now they’re linked together in ways beyond football. Ms. Welton famously flew herself and the entire Richmond squad to Kansas in the middle of the season to attend the funeral of Mr. Lasso’s mother three years ago, and was photographed at Lasso’s side at the gravesite. Mr. Lasso is frequently seen as Ms. Welton’s companion at various charity events. And, most recently, sources have confirmed that Ted Lasso was in Rebecca Welton’s office the day that he had his heart attack, that it was Ms. Welton who called for the ambulance, that she traveled with him to the hospital. One club employee said, “It was absolutely gutting. I was there when the paramedics took him out of the building, they were saying if she hadn’t been there, he would have died for sure.”

There’s more, of course, but it doesn’t matter. Rebecca hates that Trent Crimm still has sources in the club, she hates that he got a window into that awful day, she hates…well, she hates every word of that article, especially because everything in it is true.

“The press coverage has been less awful than I expected,” Keeley says over lunch, glancing up at Rebecca from over her glass of water.

“Mm,” Rebecca says. “Ted’s health means they can’t let themselves be as awful as they’d normally be.”

“Maybe,” Keeley says, non-committal. She nudges her salad with her fork and says, casually, “So…how long will Ted and Henry be staying with you, then?”

Rebecca watches her closely. “I haven’t put an end date on it,” she says slowly. “Ted’s still recovering, Henry’s just settled into his school. They’ll stay as long as they need to.”

“Must be quite a change,” Keeley says, still in that artificially light tone. “Living with your friend and his teenage son.”

Rebecca sits back in her seat and fixes Keeley with a look. “Keeley, what are you trying to get at?”

Keeley pressed her lips together, but Rebecca waits her out, and it takes only a few moments before Keeley breaks, bursting out, “Okay, it’s not that I don’t love what you’re doing for Ted and Henry, I do, it’s just that it’s so much and you keep acting like it’s nothing at all, no big deal—”

“Because it isn’t,” Rebecca says, trying to keep the edge from appearing in her voice. “I have the space, it made it easier for Henry to stay in the country—”

“But it’s still a lot,” Keeley says gently. “It’s a lot to be the primary caretaker for someone recovering from a major heart attack, even if you’re happy to do it, even if you can do it. Rebecca. Talk to me.”

Rebecca swallows, and doesn’t speak, not at first. It’s Keeley’s turn to use patience as a tactic, and it works just as well now that it’s been turned on Rebecca, how fucking awful. “Honestly—I couldn’t stand not having him stay with me,” she admits, her voice low. “He scared the shit out of me with this, Keeley, I have to keep an eye on him, otherwise I’ll go mad with worrying. Well, even more mad,” she corrects herself, with a little laugh. “And he’s so shit at taking care of himself, it’s unbelievable. The man would absolutely be drinking coffee in the morning still if Henry and I weren’t on him all the time about it.”

Keeley makes a sympathetic noise. “You wouldn’t think he would be,” she muses. “Ted always comes off as so…capable and competent, you know? With his neat jumpers and his polo shirts and the baking, I suppose I just always felt like he had it all together, you know?”

“Yeah,” Rebecca says. “Ted’s really good at making it seem like everything’s okay.”

Keeley opens her mouth, visibly checks herself, then says, “Well, I’m glad he’s letting you help him like this. Just…make sure you’re taking care of yourself too, okay?”

“Of course,” Rebecca says, smiling easily.

*

"What do you think about the monarchy?"

Rebecca coughs, accidentally catching the eye of a nearby Beefeater, who’s clearly holding back a smirk. She’s taken Henry out for the day on an excursion to the Tower of London while Ted goes in for another consultation with his doctors, soothing her lingering worry over Ted's health by splurging on a private tour for her and Henry. Henry's had a ball all morning, gawking at the royal jewels, listening solemnly to the guide’s lecture on the princes who disappeared in the tower, and now he’s looking over the tower ravens, where he's apparently been inspired to quiz Rebecca on what it's like to live in a constitutional monarchy.

Since he's still waiting for her answer, Rebecca offers it. "Honestly, I don't think about the monarchy very much at all."

"So you don't mind having them around?" Henry presses, and all right, that eavesdropping Beefeater is definitely smirking now.

Rebecca tilts her head back and forth, considering, "I suppose that's right." She smiles and adds, "Though I'm not going to say much more, given where we're at at the moment."

Henry grins mischievously and turns to the Beefeater who's been listening to their conversation all this time, asking, "Excuse me, sir, what football team do you support?"

The man actually blushes, practically matching the color of his red coat. "AFC Richmond," he admits, glancing at Rebecca. "Lovely to see you here, Ms. Welton."

"See, we're fine," Henry says cheerfully, and Rebecca does not drop her face into her hand, but it's a close-run thing.

She eventually manages to distract Henry from musing on when and if the British monarchy will fall, and as they go to look at the Tower Green, Henry sighs happily and says, "Y'all's history is so weird. It's great. Kansas state history is so boring, it's all Bleeding Kansas and nothing else."

"I'm sorry, Bleeding what?" Rebecca asks, and promptly gets a really rather coherent introduction to the American Civil War and historical figures such as John Brown, and when Henry finally pauses to take a breath, she says slowly, "I won't lie to you, Henry...nothing about that sounds dull to me."

"Huh," Henry says, considering. "Guess it's a matter of perspective."

His good mood propels them through the rest of the tour—Henry has his father's knack for charming strangers, something Rebecca watches with a great deal of amusement—and through to lunch at a nearby cafe, right up until Rebecca gets a quick text from Ted that reads, All good at the doctor's office! with an attached photo of Ted and a bemused Dr. Bhamra giving the camera a thumbs-up.

She shares this with Henry—not adding that she will be pumping both Ted and his doctors for more information later—and Henry looks pleased at first, but then seems to falter, frowning at his sandwich rather than eating it.

"Henry?" Rebecca prods gently, setting down her salad fork. "Is everything all right?"

"Yeah," Henry says immediately, but undercuts it by adding, "Can I ask you a question?"

"Of course," Rebecca agrees, mentally preparing herself for yet another quiz on her feelings about the royal family, or why the UK is one country and four countries all at the same time.

But Henry's question has nothing to do with the system of British government at all. It's far more complicated than that. "Do you think my dad's doing okay?" Henry asks, his face a little shadowed.

Startled, Rebecca sits back a little in her chair. "Of course I do," she says slowly, wondering where this is coming from. "The doctors are all agreeing that your dad's recovering really well," she says gently. "The diet and the medication are working, his rehab is going well—"

Henry shakes his head. "I don't mean like that," he explains. "I mean...do you think he seems different to you? Quieter?"

Rebecca takes a moment, a thread of worry coiling through her stomach. The truth is that she has noticed that Ted's been...well, more somber lately. Not depressed, at least she doesn't think so, but yes, quieter, more mellow, less gregarious and excitable. She'd chalked it up to the lingering effects of the heart attack, to the fact that he's been forced to move at a slower pace now that he's on leave from the club, but—

"Perhaps a little," she hedges. "Are you worried about your dad?"

Henry gives her an impatient look. "I'm always worried about my dad," he says, then scowls down at his half-eaten sandwich. "I don't know. People can get depressed after having a heart attack, and I...I just wondered if that was what was happening with him."

Rebecca takes a moment before responding. "Maybe. Have you considered asking him how he's doing?"

Henry looks at her as if she's gone mad. "No, he'll just tell me he's fine and there's nothing to worry about. But everything I've read says that there is, especially when..." Henry's voice drops, and he mumbles, "Especially when you've got a family history of...stuff."

Oh, Christ. Squashing down her growing sense of panic and dismay—even if Rebecca doesn't feel remotely equipped to having this conversation, she’s here now, and the least she can do for Henry is answer his questions as honestly as she can. Even if everything British in her is howling in protest. "Is that what's got you worried, then? Thinking about your dad and your grandfather?"

The anxious, wide-eyed look that Henry gives her is absolutely heartbreaking, particularly because it's so familiar. He nods a little, even as he says quickly, "I know it's not the same thing. Dad's not, like, a Vietnam vet the way Grandpa was, and people can get help for stuff now. But."

He stops there, clearly at a loss for words. Swallowing past the lump in her throat, Rebecca reaches out and carefully touches his arm, smiling at him gently when he looks back up at her. "It's okay, Henry. If you need to...to talk about this, or ask me questions, it's all right."

When Henry's shoulders slump in relief, Rebecca knows she's said the right thing. "Thanks," he mumbles. "It's hard asking my parents about this. They talked to me about it before, when that book was coming out—" Rebecca silently curses Trent Crimm for the millionth time, "—because they didn't want me to find out on my own, but..."

"But you didn't feel comfortable asking a lot of questions?" Rebecca prods gently.

Henry looks at her with a bleak expression, and says flatly, "If you'd seen the look on my dad's face that day, you wouldn't have asked any questions either." He scrubs at his face, fretful. "I tried asking my mom some more, when my dad wasn't around, but she didn't...she didn't know a lot, because it happened before she met Dad. So I asked Great-Uncle Bobby, and he said—" Henry's voice catches, but he continues bravely, "He said that nobody saw it coming. When my grandpa...did what he did. Nobody knew he was going to do that, they didn't know how bad...how bad he was. Nobody had any idea at all."

"And you..." Rebecca has to pause to take a breath, but pushes on. "And you're afraid that your dad will—"

"No!" Henry bursts out, looking horrified. "No, I—I know my dad wouldn't do that to me. I just...I worry that he's covering stuff up, sometimes. Smiling or whatever even when he's feeling sad, just so people don't worry about him."

Oh hell. It feels absurd to wish that Henry was a little less smarter, a little less observant, but God, she almost does wish that.

Rebecca has no idea what to tell Henry. Platitudes won't work, he's too clever for that. And she can't put him off with excuses, he deserves better than that. He trusts her enough to ask her about it, and so the only thing Rebecca can offer in return is the truth.

"Sometimes I worry the same thing," Rebecca admits, her heart speeding up as Henry looks at her with curiosity. "Your dad is...he’s so good at making people happy, and I worry that...that he's not taking the same care with making himself happy."

"So how do you handle it?" Henry asks. "Worrying about him, I mean."

Rebecca laughs a little. "Well, I handled it by insisting he move into my house so I could make sure he was taking care of himself," she says wryly, and Henry laughs. "But...I could also try talking to him about my concerns too." She pauses, then asks delicately, "Is that something you think you could do? Talk to your dad about worrying about him, and why you're worried?"

Henry sits with that for a moment, then slowly shakes his head, looking ashamed. "I can't," he admits in a small voice, looking up at her through his eyelashes. "He...I can't..."

Rebecca doesn't make him continue. "Do you want me to talk to him about it?"

Henry glances up at her, pauses, then nods slowly.

"Okay," Rebecca says, giving Henry her most reassuring smile. "Then I will." The overwhelming relief on Henry's face is wonderful to see, even as Rebecca is silently worrying over just how on earth she's going to broach this with Ted.

*

But broach it with Ted she does, that evening after dinner, and for her reward Rebecca gets to witness the sight of Ted Lasso burying his face in his hands, completely at a loss for words.

“Ted?” Rebecca says at last, sinking down next to him on the edge of the bed, letting her hand rest on his knee. “Ted, darling, please talk to me.”

Ted finally lifts his hands from his face to look at her, and his eyes are wet. "I knew he was worried about me," he admits, his voice low and raw. "I knew...but I thought it was just because of the heart attack, I didn't—"

"It is because of the heart attack," Rebecca tells him. "It's just that Henry’s a smart young man who knows how to look things up, and he knows that depression is a common response to surviving a heart attack. It's not..." she falters, not knowing how to say, your son isn't judging you, he's just scared.

"It's not that he's terrified I'm gonna end up like my dad?" Ted asks, staring down at his knees, his voice hitching.

"Ted," Rebecca says softly, reaching out for him, her hand resting on his knee as she leans into his side. "Henry just wants to know that you're okay." She breathes quietly, letting the warmth of Ted's body against hers sink in, and then asks the question she has to ask. "Are you okay?"

Ted is quiet for a long moment. "Dr. Bhamra wants me to see a therapist," he says quietly. "He's been, uh, pretty insistent about it, actually. Well, as insistent as any of you Brits ever get about anything."

Rebecca swallows. "That might be a good idea," she says. "Do you want to see a therapist?”

"Heck no," Ted responds immediately, and the emphatic response has Rebecca letting out an inappropriate little giggle, some of the tension breaking as he does. "I absolutely do not. But..."

He trails off, and Rebecca finishes it for him, pulling away just far enough to look at his face, which she can read so easily by now. "But just because you don't want to do something, that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it." She thinks that sentence over, adding, "I feel like there were too many negatives in that sentence."

"Nah, I followed you just fine," Ted assures her, smiling crookedly.

The fabric of his sweatpants is soft beneath her fingers, and Rebecca has an absurdly urgent desire to cup his face in her hand, feel the stubble of his cheek against her palm. She flexes her free hand into a fist, and smiles, even as she pats his knee and pulls her hand away. "There you go, then. If this is something you need to do, then you should.”

*

Unsurprisingly, once Ted makes up his mind to go to therapy, he makes it happen at lightning-quick speed, taking the referral from Dr. Bhamra and scheduling his first appointment for the end of the week.

"Why does Dr. Fieldstone's name sound familiar?" Rebecca asks one evening as they're making dinner together?"

"She's that sports psychologist Higgins brought in for the team, back when we were in the Championship," Ted says, ruthlessly chopping carrots for the shepherd's pie they'll be having tonight.

"Oh, yes," Rebecca says, remembering. "Isn't she fluent in like, seven languages? I remember I found her to be a terrifyingly competent woman. Which is good, I suppose, at least you'll be dealing with the best."

"Mm." Ted's focus is on the cutting board. "She remembered me when I called. Said she was glad for the chance for us to finally work together."

"That sounds...loaded," Rebecca says.

Ted huffs out a laugh. "Yeah, I thought so too. But they do say she's the best, and Dr. Bhamra'll have my hide if I try and worm out now, so." He gives Rebecca a sidelong glance, before asking, "Did you ever do it? Therapy, I mean."

"No," Rebecca said, checking her intital response, which would have been a forceful and immediate fuck no. "It always seemed like you were paying someone to tell you what was wrong with you, and if there's one thing I can say, it's that I know exactly what's wrong with me."

Of course Ted, because he is irrepressibly wonderful, looks up at that and says with sincerity, "There ain't nothing wrong with you, Rebecca."

There's standing closely together at the kitchen island, and Ted's warm brown eyes are looking directly into hers, that wayward lock of hair falling over his forehead as it always does. Rebecca smiles, and pushes away her instinctive response to having Ted this close, having him look right at her as he says yet another kind, casually wonderful thing.

God knows she's had enough practice at it by now.

Instead, Rebecca smiles and says lightly, "That's sweet, Ted. Astoundingly incorrect, but sweet all the same." Before he can protest further, Rebecca changes the subject, quickly saying next, "Now, since Henry's been shut up in his room doing homework, I think we can convince him that dinner tonight will be nothing but blood sausage and stargazy pie, what do you think?"

"Bold of you to assume a teenage boy wouldn't be thrilled to have a dinner that disgusting," Ted replies, grinning back at her. "You're on."

*

“Your tits look fantastic in that,” Keeley says with a reverential air.

Rebecca chuckles, even as she plucks at the neckline. “You’ve said that about every dress I’ve tried on.”

“Well, I guess your tits look fantastic no matter what you wear,” Keeley says, lounging on the ottoman in Rebecca’s admittedly giant walk-in closet. “I do like this one best, though.”

“Mm,” Rebecca says thoughtfully, stroking the skirt and feeling the gold sequins ripple beneat her palm. “You don’t think it’s too flashy? This is a charity event, and I’m not even running it. Perhaps the black Jenny Packham dress—”

“Oh, but it’s so plain,” Keeley whines. “What about the turquoise Christian Siriano instead?”

“Hmm, maybe,” Rebecca concedes.

There’s a muffled shout from the bedroom, and then Sassy’s poking her head into the closet, saying, “Stinky, has your bathroom been robbed? I was poking about, trying to figure out which wildly expensive skincare product has your face glowing like that, but the whole place seems to have been cleared out.”

“Ah.” Rebecca honestly should have seen this coming from the moment Sassy came into town for their girls’ weekend, but she hadn’t thought about it at all. Or rather, she hadn’t wanted to think about it, knowing full well that Sassy almost certainly had Opinions about Ted and Henry moving in with her, and that was without even knowing—

“That’s because I’m keeping all my toiletries elsewhere,” Rebecca says, in a futile attempt at staying vague.

“Why would you keep them elsewhere, it’s your bathroom,” Keeley wonders out loud.

Sassy, meanwhile, has already leapt onto the right track, as she asks slowly, “Stinky, is the reason your things aren’t in your room perhaps because you have moved into another bedroom in this gigantic house?

Rebecca hesitates for a second too long, and Keeley gasps, dramatically playing a hand to her chest. “Rebecca! Are you shagging Ted?”

“No!” Rebecca says, then has to correct herself. “I mean, we’re sleeping together, but not like that—we’re just sharing a bed. Platonically.”

Sassy’s jaw drops, and Keeley actually looks like she’s going to fall off the ottoman. In the mirror’s reflection, Rebecca can see them staring at her in disbelief, before turning to stare at each other, having an entire conversation in just one look, and for no reason, Rebecca can feel herself becoming…unsettled.

Suddenly needing more air and space, Rebecca hikes up her skirt and moves to the door, saying as she slips past Sassy, “It’s not a thing, I don’t need either one of you turning it into one—”

“Oh, it’s definitely a thing,” Keeley says, as she and Sassy follow her into the bedroom like two inquisitive ducklings, if one of the ducklings was wearing Moschino. “You’re sleeping with Ted, how is it not a thing?”

“It’s for health reasons!”

Sassy looks incredulous. “His health requires you cuddling up to him each night? Well, hell, give me the name of his GP, because I’d like a chance to cuddle with that bloke from Outlander on the regular—”

Rebecca hisses in frustration, dramatically flouncing onto the edge of her bed. “Florence—”

“Rebecca,” Sassy intones, in exactly the same commanding voice that Rebecca’s just tried to use on her. “Look, you can’t drop a bomb like that on us and act like we’re the weird ones for wanting clarification! Now, exactly why are you and Ted the Marlboro Man sharing a bed if you’re not actually shagging?”

Put like that, Rebecca has no other option but to explain about Ted’s fears the first night out of hospital, and the habit they’ve developed ever since.

Both Sassy and Keeley do soften, but when Rebecca winds it up with, “So you see, it’s all perfectly reasonable,” Sassy’s eyebrows fly right back up her forehead.

Keeley leans back on her heels and lets out a long and doubtful, “Well…”

“Oh Lord, now what?” Rebecca grumbles.

Sassy fixes Rebecca with a steady look. “What’s going on with you and Ted? I don’t just mean with the bed-sharing—although we are absolutely coming back to that—I mean as a collective whole. What’s happening there?”

For absolutely no reason, Rebecca’s face goes hot. “Nothing,” she insists, but the way her voice is wavering admittedly makes it sound less than believable.

Sassy’s steady gaze doesn’t flicker by even a millimeter, and this right here is the danger of having a trained psychologist for a friend, because when it counts, Sassy’s got the tenacity of a bulldog and the poker face of a seasoned gambler. “Let’s just recount what’s been happening the last month and a half. In the wake of Ted’s health crisis, you move not only him into your home to stay with you, you also move his twelve year-old son clear across the Atlantic to also live with you, indefinitely. You go to practically all of Ted’s doctor appointments and you sit in on his physical therapy sessions—”

“Not all of them,” Rebecca mutters, even as she feels herself going hot all over, realizing what this actually looks like, and not just to the fuckers at the Daily Mail who have never seen a slimy innuendo they wouldn’t publish. “And Ted has his PT here in the house, I’d have to work to avoid them, it’s just easier to hang around.”

Sassy and Keeley don’t reply to this, they just keep staring at her.

Rebecca realizes that she’s twisting the ring on her index finger round and round, an obvious tell. “It’s not that big a deal,” she tries next. “Ted needed the help, and he needed to have his son with him. I have the space and the time—”

“And you’re in love with him,” Keeley says, then puts a hand over her mouth as Sassy and Rebecca both stare at her. “Sorry!” she says, voice muffled by her fingers. “I know we were supposed to be guiding her into figuring it out herself, but I couldn’t help it!”

Rebecca’s heart actually feels like it’s seizing in her chest for one horrible moment, but she barely manages to laugh it off, scoffing, “Oh God, when did you come to that insane conclusion?”

Keeley, affronted, plants her hands on her hips and retorts, “When you moved him into your house, also you go all cow-eyed every time you look at Ted.”

Her entire face turning red now, all Rebecca can do is insist stubbornly, “I do not!”

“If this turns into an endless round of ‘do not, do too’, I will run screaming for the hills,” Sassy warns them both.

Setting her teeth, Rebecca gathers together the tattered remains of her patience and dignity and says, her voice sharp. “Look. I’m telling you it doesn’t matter, all right? It doesn’t matter that the Daily Mail can’t stop implying that Ted and I have been secretly shagging for seven years, it doesn’t matter that the paparazzi have started staking out my front door again, or that I had to get an American custody lawyer on retainer just in case—”

“Sorry, you did what?” Keeley interjects, but Rebecca barrels on over her.

“It doesn’t matter how it looks or what I’m feeling about him, what matters is that Ted is here where he can be safe and be properly looked after!” Rebecca winds up, defiant.

Sassy pauses, then asks delicately, “So…what are you feeling about him?”

Rebecca stares at her two best friends in the world, and despite herself—

—despite everything she’s pushed down and ignored for weeks and months—

—the words bubble up to the surface anyway.

“Well, of course I’m in love with him,” Rebecca finds herself saying, impatient and matter of fact and like an utter lunatic, “But it doesn’t matter—what am I going to do, find a moment between his physical therapy and doctor’s appointments to say, ‘By the way, I’m in love with you, now how’s your blood pressure looking today?’”

The words finally out of her mouth, Rebecca finally comes to a halt, breathless and bristling still—and then she looks at Sassy and Keeley’s shellshocked faces, and the magnitude of what she’s just said, what she’s just admitted, finally sinks in. “Oh fuck,” Rebecca says, and buries her face in her hands so she doesn’t have to look at anyone, or see them looking at her.

There is a beat of perfect silence, in which Rebecca can hear nothing but the sound of the central air running, and the sound of her own too-quick breathing.

“Babes,” Keeley says, slow and tentative, the mattress sinking down as she carefully sits next to Rebecca, “Babes, are you…are you okay?”

“Obviously not,” Rebecca says, the sound muffled by her hands, which she’s refusing to lift away from her face. “Have you not heard what I’ve been saying for the last five minutes? I’ve gone mad.”

“Only a little mad,” Sassy says comfortingly as she sits down on Rebecca’s other side, rubbing Rebecca’s bare shoulders. “Speaking as a professional, perfectly sane people are dull as ditchwater. And if there’s anything you’re not, Stinky, it’s dull.”

Rebecca breathes in and out, leaning against Keeley’s side and letting the warmth of Sassy’s hand sink into her skin, before she finally pulls her hands away from her face, half-laughing as she asks, “How the hell did I even get here.”

“It’s Ted,” Keeley says, as though that explains everything, and really—it does.

They’re quiet for a moment longer, then Sassy says, though not with any real heat to it, “I cannot believe you thought we wouldn’t notice. You moved the man’s son clear across the Atlantic to make him happy.”

“In my defense,” Rebecca says, still somehow unable to stop herself, “Henry moved himself across the Atlantic, I just moved him into my house.”

Keeley bursts out laughing at this, a hand clapped over her mouth. “Sorry, sorry,” she says, giggling. “It’s just—how is this your life?”

Despite herself, Rebecca finds herself chuckling too. “Honestly, I have no idea.”

And because Keeley is a very good friend, within twenty minutes Rebecca is out of the gold sequin dress and sitting on her couch with an excellent French 75 cocktail in her hand as she recounts for a patient Sassy and Keeley all the times that Ted’s unwittingly driven her mad with a combination of longing and lust.

It’s a long list.

“God, you have got it bad, babes,” Keeley says, after Rebecca’s just finished describing what it’s like to watch Ted bake for her in the kitchen, and how at one point when he’d rolled up his sleeves, she was overcome with the urge to bite his forearm.

“I do,” Rebecca admits. “I love everything about the man. Even the stuff I hate, like his insistence on listening to Phil Collins as he gets ready in the morning—even that I love, because it’s him doing it! It’s appalling.”

“You could tell him, you know,” Sassy says, deliberately casual, but Rebecca shakes her head. The thought of looking Ted in the face and opening her mouth to say—absolutely not. A pit opens up in her stomach at just the thought of it.

Sassy must read this on her face, as her expression firms a little and she points out next, “You told us and the world didn’t end.”

Rebecca snorts, knocking back the rest of her drink. “I didn’t tell you anything, you came here and dragged it out of me.” She pauses, and then admits, only a little grudging, “And thank you.”

Keeley brightens at this, and immediately burrows in for a hug. “You can talk to us, you know,” she murmurs into Rebecca’s jumper, her Gucci perfume wafting into the air. “I’ve been worrying over you for ages, but I didn’t know whether to push—”

“So she called me and I decided that we absolutely had to push,” Sassy finishes, still sipping at her drink. “And yet again I was proven to be one hundred percent right.” She raises an eyebrow at Rebecca, who can hear the rest of what Sassy’s not saying, which is and I’m right when I say that you should tell Ted.

But Rebecca has had more than enough emotional disclosures for one evening—or even one lifetime—and so she hauls herself up to her feet and says, “Right, I’m in need of another drink, who’s with me?”

And because Keeley and Sassy are better friends than she deserves, they don’t press her further on telling Ted, and when Ted comes home later with Henry, they all smile brightly and tipsily at the Lasso men without giving any sort of hint to anything at all.

Rebecca holds her tongue, even as Ted, being the sweetheart he is, immediately whips together a quick meal to, as he says, “soak up all the booze y’all have been drinking, good God, how many empty bottles of champagne and booze do we have here?” But in the back of her mind, as she’s watching him move in her kitchen the way she’s watched him a thousand times by now, Rebecca thinks, in a constant refrain, of course I love him, of course, of course.

It doesn’t change anything. Ted needs her help, and Rebecca needs to help him; she’s not jeopardizing anything, especially not now. And yet—of course. Of course she loves him.

*

Given how little Rebecca wanted to go to this charity event to start with, she’s actually having a fairly decent time.

Alistair’s presence at her side is a major help; he’d promptly volunteered to escort her given that her usual escort, Ted, would be at home in his sweatpants, helping Henry with his homework and working his way through Anna Karenina, of all things. (Ted was the only person Rebecca knew who read that novel and was enjoying all the bits about farming.) Rebecca had promptly taken Alistair up on his offer, thinking that his usual brashness would help to ward off the other guests Rebecca didn’t want to speak to (Bex, Rupert, the toxic combination of Bex and Rupert) and Alistair was an amusing companion on the night, bitching loudly about the themed cocktails and Christian Paisley-Wolfe’s new hairpiece. Alistair actually asked the man, to his face, what animal he’d killed and skinned to get their fur on his head, and Rebecca had immediately fallen into a massive coughing fit.

“That was so inappropriate,” she’d hissed at him once she’d dragged him away, and Alistair had just given her an impish grin.

“But it was satisfying though, wasn’t it?”

Between wrangling Alistair and saying hello to the people here that she did like, Rebecca was actually quite content—even if there was a part of her that wanted to be back home on the couch, wearing sweatpants instead of shapewear, listening to Ted’s musings about classic Russian literature and pretending like she remembers enough maths to help Henry with his homework.

But then they arrive at their assigned table, and everything goes to shit.

Rebecca had had someone make a discreet request—well, a discreet demand—and she’d been assured that Rupert and Bex would not be at her table, but as she approaches the table on Alistair’s arm, who else is there at the table but Rupert, tanned and urbane in his black tux, with Bex at his side in a slinky black sequin gown. It might be Rebecca’s imagination, but Bex doesn’t look quite as serenely pleased with herself as she usually does.

“Rebecca, darling,” Rupert says, his smug smile only growing wider, and Rebecca sighs internally. He looks especially “refreshed” tonight, likely having made a trip to that Brazilian plastic surgeon that keeps Tom Cruise looking eternally thirty-five.

“Hello, Rupert, Bex,” she replies coolly.

Alistair is scowling at them both, and under the guise of pulling out her chair for her, he murmurs into her ear, “Is the fucker supposed to be at our table tonight?”

Rebecca keeps her face as serene as possible, even when murmuring, “Not at all.”

“Right,” Alistair mutters darkly, but unfortunately he doesn’t keep his voice as low as Rebecca has, so Rupert says, genially, “What’s that, Alistair?”

“Nothing, Rupert, just confirming you’re up to your usual bullshit,” Alistair says as he sits down. He’s staring right into Rupert’s face as he says it, and Rebecca can see the exact moment when Rupert decides not to press further.

It’s a momentary show of restraint, and Rebecca knows from bitter experience it won’t last.

The dread of it has her stomach churning in that familiar way, even as she smiles and greets Dakshesh and his wife Priya. And of course her instincts are proven right when Rupert says idly, champagne glass in hand, “Bad luck in that match against Spurs this weekend.”

Rebecca breathes through her nose and says crisply, “Yes, it was unfortunate, but the team will bounce back.”

“Bounce back from a 5-1 drubbing?” Rupert prods, with a put-on air of bemusement.

“Well, it’s important to have the memories of goldfish, as Ted always says,” Bex offers up, in a surprising attempt to deflect Rupert’s barbs. Rebecca has no idea what she means by it, and it puts her back up even more, because the last thing she wants when dealing with these two is more surprises.

Dakshesh raises his glass, because if there’s anything that everyone at this table (with the exception of Rupert) can agree on, it’s an unwavering faith in the wisdom of Ted Lasso. “Hear, hear.”

“Yes, but dear old Ted’s not in charge these days, is he?” Rupert ponders. “No, it’s Roy’s who’s managing the team at the moment.”

Alistair is eyeing Rupert with disdain. “Yes, Roy Kent’s the caretaker manager. Any other basic facts you’d like to recite, or can we get on with enjoying our dinner?”

Rupert shrugs expansively, but a slight twitch at the corner of his mouth gives away that Alistair’s open contempt is getting to him. “Well, I’m just wondering with the team currently stuck in the bottom half of the league table, whether or not it’s time to consider that poor Roy might be in over his head.”

“We’re in eleventh place, hardly anywhere near the relegation zone,” Rebecca says, hating that she’s responding to Rupert’s barbs but unable to keep silent. “And I have every faith in Roy.”

Rupert’s smile only grows wider, showing teeth. “Well, you’d know all about relegation, wouldn’t you, Rebecca? First owner in the history of Richmond to have the team relegated on his—sorry, her watch.”

“She’s also the first Richmond owner to win the league title on her watch,” Alistair says heatedly, sitting up in his seat.

“No, it’s all right,” Rebecca murmurs, putting a hand on his arm.

“Just an observation, Alistair,” Rupert says, putting on an air of innocence as he sprawls in his seat. Next to him, Bex is doing her best impression of a mannequin, face blank and still. This is the Bex Rebecca knows well; the pretty girl who somehow doesn’t see Rupert’s awful behavior—or perhaps just doesn’t care.

(Rebecca hadn’t ever managed that particular blankness when she’d been forced to sit next to Rupert at his worst behavior when they were still married, something in her face or her body language always would give her away in the end. Which would only make things worse with Rupert later on, of course.)

Alistair snorts. “An observation, he says. Well, I observed that Richmond won fuck and all when you were in charge, so why you think your opinion holds any real value is beyond me.”

An ugly expression flickers across Rupert’s face, and Alistair must see it as well as Rebecca can, because she can feel him tensing next to her—

But then Dakshesh says hastily, “Rebecca, how is Ted doing, by the way?”

“Yes, how is Ted?” Rupert asks, a sudden gleam appearing in his eye.

Fucking hell. Rebecca knows, she just knows what’s coming. Rupert reads the Daily Mail, he knows that Ted’s living with her, and he’s going to say something awful about it, that’s as guaranteed as Pep Guardiola lamenting the grueling fixture schedule every year. And judging from the wary looks everyone at the table is giving Rupert, they all know what’s coming as well.

But knowing where the trap is doesn’t mean you can avoid stepping into it. “He’s doing well,” Rebecca says, keeping the smile on her face. “The doctors are all very encouraged by his recovery.”

“Oh, that’s lovely,” Priya says, with real warmth to her voice, but she’s cut off by Rupert drawling, “I’m sure all that…hands-on nursing from Rebecca’s doing the trick."

Even though she knew it was coming, Rebecca’s cheeks still go hot. Priya looks visibly exasperated, Dakshesh is staring at his plate, and Bex is frozen in her seat.

Rebecca opens her mouth, but then Alistair says in a low growl, “The fuck did you just say to her?”

The room doesn’t actually go quiet, but it feels like it should. God. “Alistair,” Rebecca begins, but it’s no good, Alistair’s got the bit between his teeth now and can’t be deterred.

“I know the fucker who cheated on his wife with dozens of women before finally getting caught with his cock out by every newspaper in the country wouldn’t dare speak about this woman’s relationships, romantic or otherwise,” Alistair thunders, leaning in over the table to emphasize his point. “Particularly when he’s already humiliated himself twice over by losing his club in the divorce and then marrying a girl young enough to be his granddaughter!”

A faint noise escapes Rebecca’s throat, and she can feel the weight of people’s gazes turning to their table, the sudden quiet that comes when the people around you want to better hear whatever argument’s happening.

“I don’t know what you’re implying,” Rupert begins, a flush rising to his cheeks, but Alistair barrels right over him.

“Who’s implying anything?” Alistair asks with a snort. “I’m just stating facts here. You like facts, don’t you, Rupe? Well, here’s some more for you. Everyone knows. They know why you married an infant with the same name as your ex-wife, why you bought her shares in the club you can’t own anymore, why you show up year after year at events like these—hell, we all know why you’re sitting at this very table tonight. It’s the pathetic lashing out from a man desperate to get any response from the woman who was always too good for him, and who’s made Richmond the success that he never could.” Alistair gives Rupert a mean smile, leaning in as he delivers the final blow. “And you’re counting on the rest of us being too polite to say anything about it. Except if there’s one thing I’m not, it’s polite.”

There is a beat of perfect silence. And then Priya, of all people, lifts up her chin and her glass, and echoes her husband’s toast from just a few minutes before. “Hear, hear.”

“Excuse me?” Rupert snaps at her, while Alistair openly chuckles, delighted with the chaos he’s wrought.

“Darling,” Dakshesh murmurs in his wife’s ear, but she just lifts an eyebrow and says, unrepentant, “What? Alistair is right, it’s perfectly obvious what Rupert’s been doing.” She looks Rebecca’s ex-husband over and her lip curls in disdain—and Rebecca remembers two important facts: one, that Priya is the same age as her, and two, that she and Dakshesh have been married for almost thirty years. “And he’s right—it is pathetic.”

Dakshesh opens his mouth, pauses, and then nods his head as if to concede that his wife—and by extension, Alistair—are right.

Holy fuck.

Rupert’s smile gains that particularly fixed quality it gets when he knows he’s lost the upper hand, and desperately needs to leave before it becomes obvious to everyone else. “Well, since my presence here is so unwanted, I think we’ll head someplace more welcoming. Bex, darling.”

Bex is still sitting stiffly in her chair, not responding immediately to the summons from Rupert. For one moment, Rebecca actually finds herself wondering if Bex will actually have the nerve to stay seated and follow Rupert’s lead. But, after a long pause, she does get up and take Rupert’s arm, giving them all a tight smile as she murmurs, “Excuse us.”

“Shan’t,” Alistair says crisply, irrepressible as ever.

Rebecca is almost certain she sees both Bex and Rupert twitch at that, and she definitely sees Rupert glaring at Alistair for a moment—but Alistair is meeting Rupert’s gaze calmly, and it’s already clear which of them is going to back down first, and everyone knows it.

So as Rupert and Bex retreat as gracefully as possible, Rebecca finds herself thankful she’s already sitting down, because she’s not sure her legs would support her if she were standing up. “I can’t believe you just did that,” she murmurs blankly to Alistair, who is now tucking into his beef medallions as if he hasn’t just upended the entire evening.

“Don’t look at me like that, it was long-overdue,” Alistair huffs. “What was I going to tell Ted when he asked me how the night went? That I let that fucker have a go at you all evening without doing anything about it? Please.”

“I do feel bad for Bex,” Dakshesh murmurs, and Priya gives him an unimpressed look. “I do! Every year, Rupert comes in and makes a public spectacle…”

Priya huffs at this. “I don’t feel sorry for her. The girl knew exactly what she was in for, marrying that man. I would feel sorrier for her if she didn’t seem like such an eager participant in all of Rupert’s…” Her lip curls as she waves a hand around, obviously at a loss to describe it.

“Bullshit?” Alistair offers, and Priya laughs.

“Yes, Alistair, thank you.” She turns to Rebecca with a sympathetic look. “I’ve always wanted to say—I don’t know how you keep your composure while still having to deal with them.”

“Well, Ted’s usually around at these events,” Rebecca says. It all feels surreal still—Rupert’s humiliation, watching people—not her people, not Higgins and Keeley and Ted and Roy—but casual acquaintances, the kind of people her father would have laughingly called “our sort”, actually acknowledging to her face, publicly, what Rupert was like. What he did. “He’s good at…deflecting Rupert’s attentions. Or making me just care less about them.”

The moment the words are out of her mouth, Rebecca wants to drag them back, thinking she’s revealed too much. But no one seems surprised at what she’s admitted, instead everyone is nodding in agreement, and Dakshesh says, his sudden amusement making him look remarkably boyish, “That darts game at the Crown and Anchor has become the stuff of legend.”

More out of surprise than anything else, Rebecca bursts into laughter. “Yes, exactly. And—” she pauses, realizing the words are true even as she says them out loud, “And I think, after all this time…the real victory comes from not being the woman who has to go home with Rupert tonight.”

She meets Priya’s gaze as she says it, and Priya smiles softly at her, with an understanding Rebecca would have never expected before tonight.

“Now that,” she says, lifting her glass, “—is truly worth toasting to.”

And, still feeling like this moment is a dream, too good to be real, Rebecca lifts her glass of champagne and delicately clinks it against Priya’s.

Of course, the evening doesn’t end there. It can’t. Rebecca still has to sit through the dinner and the auction, and more to the point, she has to sit through the gazes and the murmurings of everyone around them, everyone who either bore witness to what happened or who’s heard about it breathlessly from someone who did.

It should feel satisfying—it does feel satisfying—but it’s also going to be a headache for the club’s publicists to handle come morning. There are journalists here, for fuck’s sake, and the Sun and the Daily Mail will absolutely have articles up before the night’s done.

The evening gains a surreal edge before long—the radical candor at her dinner table contrasted with the rest of the event—as Rebecca starts to circulate around the room, it’s clear that everyone there is determined not to talk to her face about what they all saw, even as they’re gossiping with each other about it all as soon as Rebecca’s back is turned.

And they are gossiping—by the time the auction has gotten underway, Rebecca’s already received multiple texts from Sassy, who’s already heard from a mutual acquaintance about what’s happened, and she puts it: if Alistair’s on the hunt for wife number four, you let him know I am more than willing.

You’d either kill each other or take over the world in a week, and either possibility is terrifying, Rebecca texts back.

But Sassy’s not here tonight, she’s back home in Brighton, and Keeley’s at that conference in Prague, and whatever truth-telling that’s happened here, Alistair’s the one with the monopoly on it, and Rebecca’s just moving through the awkward aftermath.

After being caught in a truly ghastly conversation with Gemma Wexley-Wyndam about safaris and why fox hunting is somehow good for the environment, Rebecca escapes to the nearest restroom, desperate for some quiet without the constant weight of everyone’s eyes on her.

So of course it ends up being the exact same restroom that Bex Mannion has also sought sanctuary in.

“Fuck,” Rebecca says without thinking as she catches Bex’s eye in the mirror.

“Yeah, that about sums it up,” Bex says, her tone darker than Rebecca’s ever heard it before. As Rebecca moves past the first reaction of surprised dismay, she notices the flush to Bex’s cheeks that no Charlotte Tilbury palette would have created, and how glassy her eyes look.

Ah. Fuck.

Steeling herself, Rebecca clears her throat. There’s nothing more she wants to do than to flee and avoid this, but knowing what Ted and Keeley would both do in this situation, she elects (and not for the first time) to behave as the person she knows they would want her to be. “Are you all right?”

Bex chuckles. “As if you care. You think I’m nothing but an ‘eager participant’ in Rupert’s schemes, isn’t that right?” At Rebecca’s startled expression, Bex smirks bitterly as she turns around to look Rebecca dead in the eye, lifting up her phone. “Plenty of people heard you, and they are all very eager to report on what was said.”

“Then you should know I’m not the one who said it,” Rebecca says coolly.

“But you think it’s true?” Bex presses, looking at her with an oddly sharp expression.

“I think that you don’t give a shit about what Rupert tries to do to me,” Rebecca replies. “And no, I don’t mean that in a positive sense.”

Bex is quiet for a moment, then she lifts her chin. “Were you ever successful in talking him out of something he wanted to do?”

Rebecca blinks. After a beat, she concedes, “No, I wasn’t.”

“There you go then,” Bex says, with an irritable shift of her shoulders as she turns back to the mirror. “As if my entire life revolves around making you miserable. As if I actually wanted tonight to turn into—” She cuts herself off, and the fleeting expression of deep unhappiness is a jolt to Rebecca’s system.

Rebecca has no idea why she even asks the question; she knows the answer, and yet she still asks, “It was Rupert’s idea to crash the table tonight, wasn’t it?”

Bex snorts. “Of course it was. I tried to talk him out of it, I told him how bad it would look, that it wouldn’t impress any of the other owners, but after the press found out about Ted staying at your place, he wouldn’t listen.” An alarmed look appears on her face, and Bex whirls around to say, “And I had nothing to do with tipping off the photographers either, I don’t want you telling Ted that—”

“I never thought you did,” Rebecca replies, startled. “He and Henry have been staying at my house for ages now, it was only a matter of time before the press twigged onto it.” Bex’s shoulders slump in obvious relief, and Rebecca’s astonishment only grows. “Do you…actually care what Ted thinks of you?”

Bex gets a very defensive look on her face. “As if you wouldn’t care what the nicest man in the world thinks of you!”

“Fair enough,” Rebecca concedes, because really, it’s not as if she has any room to talk, she has gone to truly absurd lengths to keep from ever being on the receiving end of a disappointed look from Ted Lasso. “Look…tonight will blow over. Nothing ever sticks to Rupert for long, anyway.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Bex mumbles, looking away, arms folded protectively across her stomach. “And he’ll be a nightmare to deal with until it does, anyway.”

Almost without meaning to, Rebecca asks a question she’s been turning over in her head for years now, ever since Bex started taking an active interest in the club. “Why did you marry him?” As Bex looks at her with wide eyes, Rebecca elaborates, “It’s just…a girl like you, you had—you have options. I know Rupert’s Rupert, but even so…”

To her surprise, Bex doesn’t seem to take offense, but grows pensive. “I thought…I thought he was a good bargain,” she admits at last, her voice quiet. “He was still handsome for his age, charming, wealthy—and I didn’t have the drive to keep trying to make it as an influencer, that shit is exhausting. It looks so easy, but you’re having to constantly mine your entire existence for content and I just…I was so tired of hustling for a career I didn’t even like. And I had so much debt from my student loans, my parents weren’t in a position to help, and I just…I wanted an easier life.” Instead of looking relieved at admitting that, Bex looks…well, she looks lost.

Rebecca’s not sure she likes feeling sympathetic towards Bex. And yet… “What about now?” Rebecca asks, trying to keep her voice gentle. “Is it still a good bargain?”

“I have my daughter,” Bex replies. “And the club, it…” Her mouth firms and she lifts up her chin again, saying, “I know you think I’m an obnoxious bitch who loves to challenge your every decision. But it’s not about that, the club’s the only place where…”

“It’s the one place where you have control,” Rebecca says.

Bex looks startled for a moment, before nodding emphatically. “Yeah. Everything else always has to come second to Rupert, everything else is connected to Rupert, but…not Richmond, weirdly enough.”

No, Rupert has nothing to do with Richmond anymore.

“This still doesn’t mean you’re getting your way with the stadium naming rights,” Rebecca says after a moment, wanting to move back to steadier ground.

Bex actually laughs. “Didn’t think it would.” She gives Rebecca a sly look, and says, “You’ve never admitted that I’m right before, so I don’t see why you’d start now.”

Rebecca finds that her answering chuckle doesn’t have to be forced at all. “Keep thinking that if it makes you happy.” She turns back towards the door, because there’s no reason to keep this encounter going any longer—even if it’s been far less painful than she would have expected. “Have a good evening, Bex.”

“You too,” Bex says, her voice sounding thoughtful, as Rebecca exits.

*

Of course Ted’s waiting for her when she gets home. He’s lying on the couch in his Kansas Sporting City sweatshirt and loose sweatpants, his feet bare and his copy of Anna Karenina in his lap, with his reading glasses perched on his nose.

There were actual male models in exquisitely tailored Tom Ford suits at tonight’s party, and he’s still somehow the best thing Rebecca’s seen all night.

Ted gives her a soft, fond smile. “Hey there, stranger.”

Rebecca sighs heavily and tosses her clutch in the direction of the nearest armchair. “Make some room, I need to collapse before my feet mutiny for good.”

Ted, obliging soul that he is, immediately does just that, and Rebecca collapses into the opposite corner of the couch. She’s absolutely dying to get out of her dress and Spanx and these cursed heels, but she’s also too fucking tired to move.

Ted’s watching her with a knowing glance. “How bad are your feet feeling, scale of 1 to 10?”

Rebecca grumbles. “Seven. No, eight. It would have been less, except I stayed even later than I planned to just to make it clear to everyone that I was perfectly unbothered by what happened tonight. God, keeping appearances up is exhausting.”

“Oh, did something happen tonight?” Ted asks innocently. Too innocently.

Rebecca rolls her eyes at him. “Don’t try and tell me that you didn’t get half a million texts from half the guests there giving you the exact breakdown of everything that happened with Alistair and Rupert tonight.”

Ted shrugs a little. “They did, but it didn’t matter. Journalist from the Mirror was live-tweeting the whole thing.”

“I’m making Alistair send our whole PR team gift baskets,” Rebecca grumbles, reaching down to pick at the tiny little buckle holding the straps of her heels together, and making an unhappy noise when it refuses to give way.

“Oh here, let me,” Ted says, and he’s bending over to work the straps free with his nimble fingers, the touch of his hands on the delicate bones of her ankles making Rebecca go very still. She’s never thought of her feet as being particularly sensitive, but having Ted kneeling down to…and his hands are so warm…

She makes a tiny noise in the back of her throat, and Ted looks up, hair falling over his eyes as he gazes up at her. “Feet still hurting?”

“Um. Yes.” Rebecca shivers as Ted’s thumb absently rubs against the jutting bones of her ankle.

“Well, let’s fix that, then,” Ted says cheerfully, and despite her belated protests (not that she protests very hard) within just a few moments, Ted’s got her feet in his lap, working out the aches with his strong hands, and Rebecca is melting into the couch.

Sighing with pleasure, Rebecca finds herself murmuring, “I should’ve stayed home tonight. I would have had such a better time with you.”

Ted tilts his head. “It didn’t feel satisfying, watching Rupert get what was coming to him?”

Rebecca opens her mouth to protest, then reconsiders. “Honestly, I think I was too shocked to really take it in. I just…I don’t know, you weren’t there, so I was preparing to tolerate Rupert’s nonsense as best I could. I had no idea Alistair would take your apparent mandate to look after me quite so literally.” Ted opens his mouth, and Rebecca lifts her finger. “Ah, ah, don’t try and tell me that you didn’t ask Alistair to try and protect me from Rupert.”

“Might’ve had a word with him,” Ted admits. He bobs his head from side to side as he concedes next, “Although when I said, ‘keep an eye out for Rupert and don’t let him get to Rebecca’, I was not expecting ol’ Alistair to go on and practically shiv the man right there at the table.”

“You really should have, he’s done far worse in public,” Rebecca says. “Have you heard the story with him and his second wife, and the guacamole that was allegedly laced with poison?”

“I have, the man’s lived a life more exciting than Erica Kane on All My Children,” Ted says. “But enough on that, I wanna hear how you’re holding up.”

The answer is surprisingly well, though a lot of it has to do with being on this couch, with Ted solicitously rubbing at her aching feet until Rebecca could just melt into the couch cushions.

She feels so cozy, in fact, that in this moment Rebecca can hardly bring herself to care about Rupert, and says as much. “It’s an odd feeling, though, feeling sympathy for Bex,” Rebecca eventually admits. “The entire time at that table, I just kept looking at her and thinking, thank God that isn’t me anymore.”

Ted smiled a little, his hand still curled around her ankle. “Weird, isn’t it, when the people we can’t stand reveal themselves to be human?”

Rebecca huffed. “Next you’ll tell me I’m going to start feeling pity for Rupert.”

“Hell no, I certainly will not,” Ted says, with such emphasis that Rebecca giggles in reply. “Still though. It’s funny how that works.”

Rebecca considers him, and asks, “Speaking from recent experience, are we?”

Ted pauses, then tilts his head to the side. “Yeah, you could say that. Got a call from Nate, couple days ago.”

Rebecca blinks. Then she blinks some more. “Well.” After a moment to collect her thoughts, she says, “I hope it included a groveling apology on his part.”

Ted crooks an eyebrow at her. “Is there an apology he could make that would be groveling enough for you?”

“Probably not,” Rebecca admits. Even if it has been years, and Richmond has gone on to win nearly every trophy they can win in British football under her and Ted’s stewardship—and even if Rebecca has evolved enough to feel sympathy for Bex Mannion, she still knows her limits, and forgiving someone who hurt Ted is definitely past them. (Not to mention being unable to get past her own chagrin at having misjudged Nate Shelley so badly.)

Still. Ted doesn’t have that horribly bruised look to him that he would get whenever the subject of Nate came up, so Rebecca cautiously asks, “So…how did it go then?”

Ted dimples. “Proud of you for getting that out without immediately threatening to rain destruction down on Nate’s head if it went badly. That’s real growth, Becca.”

“Oh, hush,” Rebecca says in exasperation, poking at him with her big toe. “I am capable of restraint when I want to be. It’s just that most times I don’t want to bother.”

Once Ted’s finished chuckling at that, he says, “It went…it went okay. Better than I thought it would. Just complicated, you know?”

Rebecca does know, and Ted does seem to be at peace, but she still has to check. “So no destruction needed then?”

Ted grins. “The city can stay standing, King Kong.”

“Please. If I was going to become a city-destroying monster, I’d obviously be Godzilla.”

They keep talking from there, the conversation meandering along from Rebecca’s night to the usual rhythm of their lives. Ted is growing to appreciate tofu (but only when it’s prepared correctly) and Rebecca’s addicted to the latest Agatha Christie adaptation from the BBC. Henry’s got an upcoming parent-teacher conference, and Rebecca already has her schedule cleared, they just need to work out the timing so that Michelle can call in from the States.

And in the middle of this lovely, perfectly ordinary chat, there is a moment where Rebecca looks at the healthy color to Ted’s cheeks and the relaxed line of his shoulders, and she’s filled with both relief and a premature sense of loss, already anticipating the day when Ted will no longer need her, and he and Henry will leave…

But that day’s not here, not yet. So Rebecca sits back in her finery and soaks up all of it, Ted’s presence, his warm hands on her bare feet, storing it up for the day when she won’t have him anymore.

Dimly, she hears footsteps coming down the stairs, and then the footsteps pause—and then Henry’s coming into the living room, exasperated, knuckling the sleep from his eyes as he says, “Dad, you know you’re supposed to be getting rest, you can’t stay up all night and read—oh. Hi, Rebecca.”

“Hi, Henry,” Rebecca says, smiling. She’s seen Henry lecture his father dozens of times and yet it’s still amusing, mostly because it’s so effective.

“Don’t worry, bud, I’ll be up to bed soon, I just wanted to hear from Rebecca how the event went,” Ted promises. “Don’t tell me you came down just to check on me—“

“No, I wanted some water and saw that the lights were on,” Henry says, but in a distracted way—he’s looking at where Ted still has Rebecca’s feet resting in his lap, Rebecca realizes.

Flushing, Rebecca is torn between immediately pulling away—this is Ted’s son, what must he be thinking—versus staying absolutely still so that she can’t call further attention to it.

She ends up choosing inaction, holding herself very still as Ted cheerfully promises his son that he will not be pulling an all-nighter just to read a hundred year-old novel, whose plotline and ending have been widely known for just as long.

“All right,” Henry says at last, though he still has a thoughtful look on his face as he watches them, as though he’s working something out. “Night, Dad, Rebecca.”

As he trudges off and hopefully out of earshot, Rebecca whispers, “Was that weird?”

“Weird how?” Ted asks, bending down to pick her heels up off the floor. From that angle, she can’t quite see his face.

“Henry walking in and—no, never mind,” Rebecca says quickly, because if Ted hasn’t noticed anything odd about their situation, damned if Rebecca’s going to point it out for him now. “We should probably call it a night before Henry has to come back down here and confiscate your book.”

Ted laughs as he gets to his feet, Rebecca’s heels dangling from one hand. “Well, we can’t have that, I still need to see how Levin and Kitty’s marriage turns out.”

He holds out his free hand to Rebecca, a silent offer and (like every time with this man) Rebecca smiles at him and takes it, rising to her feet and following where he goes.

Chapter 6

“So Rebecca’s jackass ex—”

“Language,” Ted warns mildly, and Henry wrinkles his nose.

“I’ve heard you call him a jackass lots of times,” he points out, and Rebecca hides her smile as Ted’s cheeks go pink, before he determinedly turns back to the stove where he’s making them all egg white omelets for breakfast.

“That may be,” Ted says, “But there’s no need for you to follow my bad example.”

“So I can follow Alistair’s instead?” Henry asks, cheekily.

Rebecca laughs, but says, “Please don’t, I’ve already had to field two separate phone calls from the PR team this morning.”

“This going to cause any real problems?” Ted asks with concern, plating the first omelet and putting it in front of Henry.

Rebecca shrugs. “It’ll blow over soon enough, at least publicly,” she says. “I’m sure Rupert will try and plot some absurd, baroque revenge but…” She thinks of Bex in the ladies’ room last night, the open frustration on her face, and shakes her head. “Honestly, I refuse to worry any more about Rupert Mannion. Being divorced from the man should at least come with that perk.”

“Hear hear,” Ted says, smiling at her.

Henry says, “I think it was nice what Alistair did. Loud, sure, but nice.”

“That’s a great way of describing the man,” Ted says, heading back to the skillet. “Just don’t let him hear you say that.”

“He went with you that night because Dad couldn’t go, right?” Henry continues, and something about his innocent glance to Rebecca has her suddenly wary. “I mean, Dad’s the one who usually takes you to stuff like this, but because he’s still resting up—”

Rebecca clears her throat. “Yes, well, your father’s been gracious enough to escort me a time or two—”

“It’s more than that though,” Henry says, and Rebecca’s wariness only grows. “I mean, the press call him your “constant mustachioed companion”, and they wouldn’t do that if you two didn’t go everywhere together.”

“Where on earth did you hear that?” Rebecca asks, astonished. Ted, too, is looking over his shoulder at his son in surprise.

“Tatler,” Henry says, nonchalant. “They actually have a lot of articles about you two, which is funny, because everyone else they seem to write about has to have a title.” He pauses, then looks at her with a wary eye. “You don’t have a title, right?”

Rebecca chuckles, her momentary suspicions laid to one side. “No, Henry, I don’t.”

“Because it seems like all you British people secretly have titles. That one guy from Game of Thrones has a whole coat of arms and everything. And Marianne from school, her uncle’s a viscount or something,” Henry continues, watching her with a suspicion that as far as Rebecca’s concerned is totally unjustified—she’s posh, but not that posh.

(Somewhere Keeley Jones has gone into a major coughing fit.)

“So how about it, Rebecca?” Ted asks teasingly, setting her own omelet out in front of her. “You got a title tucked away in your pocket we don’t know about?”

“Yes, I’ve secretly been a duchess all along, you should properly refer to me as Your Grace,” Rebecca deadpans, and immediately regrets it when both Lasso men turn to stare at her. “Oh, for God’s—I’m joking.”

Henry narrows his eyes at her and says, “I’m gonna look up your family tree anyway, just in case.”

“Smart plan,” Ted mutters.

They all sit down to eating soon enough, but Henry, much like a dog with a particularly tasty bone, will not let the Alistair and Ted thing go. “So does Dad go with you to all these fancy events?”

Rebecca tries to take refuge in her glass of orange juice, but Henry’s watching her with a mild (yet strangely relentless) gaze, and so she says, “Not always, but often.”

“I never mind putting on a penguin suit and eating tiny food, you know that,” Ted jokes.

“Is it just so you can have backup with your jac—I mean, your jerk ex-husband?” Henry asks next.

Rebecca can feel her cheeks growing hot, and quickly takes a great interest in buttering her toast. “I invite your father because these sort of events can be a bore, and your father is a lot of things, but he’s not boring.”

“I don’t know why you’re so shocked that someone might enjoy my company on occasion,” Ted says to Henry, raising his eyebrow.

“Well,” Henry says, as though he’s considering it, “—you do make a lot of puns.”

“That’s because a pun is nothing but good fun, honeybun,” Ted says, waggling his eyebrows, and Rebecca feels no guilt about joining Henry in a long groan of disapproval.

Thankfully, the conversation turns away from Rebecca’s habit of dragging Ted to event after event, but she can’t quite shake her unease…probably because Henry keeps looking from her to Ted and then back again, like he’s trying to work out a math equation in his head.

*

It’s a delicious spread that Keeley’s laid out for dinner the following Sunday, but given what’s happened at this morning’s football match against Everton…well, no one has much of an appetite.

“Medical team says we’ll have to wait until the swelling’s gone down before we’ll know how bad Taylor’s injury is,” Beard’s saying now in a low voice.

Henry looks a little pale, and Rebecca wishes once again that he hadn’t been there in the stands to see firsthand what, at the time, looked like a literal leg-breaking tackle that left Taylor Komoh writhing on the ground in agony. “But his ankle isn’t broken, right?”

“No, no,” Ted reassures his son quickly. “We know that nothing’s broken. Chances are it’ll turn out to look a lot worse than it actually is.”

Given that the match had to be paused for nearly ten minutes while their star young midfielder was taken off the field on a stretcher, and Richmond ended up losing 2-1, Rebecca can only hope he’s right, because it looks pretty fucking terrible at the moment.

Roy’s showing the stress of it as well, his face set in even grimmer lines than usual, as he mutters, “Team was just getting into a good rhythm, and now this—”

“Taylor’s injury leaves us rather thin in midfield,” Rebecca murmurs. “And if he’s out for more than a few weeks…”

Both Roy and Beard grimace, but they don’t argue. Colin, looking anxious, says tentatively, “We might want to give some of the academy kids a run, if only as substitutes. Moran’s looked fantastic in training.”

“He has, but there’s a difference between training and a Premier League match,” Roy says. “I’m all for blooding the youth—” Henry looks startled at this, and Keeley leans in to reassure the poor boy that no leeches are involved in the development of football players. Roy goes on next, “But this run of games we’ve got coming up, for fuck’s sake—we’ve got City, Liverpool, and Arsenal next.”

“What do you think, Ted?” Colin asks, turning to Ted, who’s been fairly quiet so far during the whole discussion, aside from reassuring Henry.

“I think we should all take a step back,” Ted says after a moment. “Let’s take it one step at a time. First thing’s making sure Taylor’s supported during all this. Now, I’ll be visiting him tomorrow, and I wanna be clear with him and the physios that regardless of what the scans show, I don’t want him rushing back before he’s ready. This is about his career, not—”

“Not one match, or even one season,” Roy, Beard, and Colin all finish in unison, the three of them all smiling for the first time that evening—and of course they are, it’s a favorite saying of Ted’s.

Ted grins. “Love to hear you boys harmonizing.”

For all of Ted’s reassurances, Rebecca knows that it is about the season as well—Taylor Komoh’s injury is the latest one for Richmond’s squad, only just covered up by the string of unlikely wins the players and coaches have managed to put together. They’re now light in midfield as well as defense, and right in time for a busy run of fixtures. There’s the league, European football, not to mention the League Cup…

“We may have to consider dipping into the transfer market in January,” Rebecca says.

Roy pulls a face. “Fees are always over-inflated in the January transfer window.”

“We’ll manage,” Rebecca says. “We always do.”

“Well, whatever happens,” Keeley says, in a determined way, “It’s not going to be all settled tonight.”

Ted’s answering smile is rueful. “Think that’s Keeley politely asking us to change the subject.”

“That’s Keeley asking you to eat your food before it gets stone cold,” Keeley says, then pulls a face. “And now you’ve got me sounding like my old gran! Start eating before I slip even further and talk about how dishy that old bloke from Midsomer Murders was.”

As a command, it works beautifully—everyone does start to eat, and the conversation moves along, even as Rebecca’s thoughts don’t—she’s thinking of the team, the dent in the budget should they be forced to buy in January, and that’s assuming they’d even be able to make a deal for their preferred target…

I need to talk to Ted about this, she automatically thinks, before checking herself. Ted’s on leave, the last thing she wants is for him to start overworking himself again, no matter that she could use a dose of Lasso reassurance at the moment.

And to give him credit, Ted hasn’t tried to jump right back into the thick of things. He’s been great about giving Roy and the rest of the coaching staff space to manage the team, regardless of the up-and-down quality of the team’s play so far, and that’s continued all the way up to tonight, with Ted not offering up his opinion until Colin asked for it.

It’s good. A little disconcerting still, but good.

Settling back into her seat, Rebecca relaxes and joins in as Keeley tries to explain the strange allure of Midsomer Murders and John Nettles to an increasingly bewildered Ted and Henry.

The only truly odd moment of the evening is when Rebecca returns downstairs from a trip to the restroom only to find Henry in some sort of intense conversation with Beard, exclaiming in outrage, “How? That doesn’t even make sense! They’re always—”

“Hi, Rebecca,” Beard says loudly, his face doing that startled-owl thing.

“Hello,” Rebecca says slowly, pausing on the bottom stair. “Is everything all right?”

“Uh huh,” Henry says. “Uncle Beard and I were just talking about the rumors about the next Fantastic Four movie.”

“Ah.” Rebecca’s not entirely sure she believes it, but if it’s true, she’s going to retreat as quickly as possible, having no interest in getting caught up in yet another discussion about superhero films that she barely remembers watching in the first place. “Well, let me leave you to it.”

But even as she heads back to join the others for coffee and dessert, Rebecca thinks back to Henry’s bright gaze and how quickly he’d replied to her question, and how carefully blank Beard’s face was as Henry spoke.

Ted, however, is shockingly nonchalant about the possibility that Henry’s hiding something from them. “He probably is,” he says with a shrug as they’re getting ready for bed, later that night.

“And you’re…not worried?” Rebecca presses as Ted downs the medication he’s meant to take in the evening, cracking open the childproof bottles with practiced ease.

“Not especially, no,” Ted says. Once he finishes swallowing the pills with water, he says, “Grilling him’s not going to do much good, it’ll just prove we don’t trust him. His grades are great, his moods are steady, and he’s a good kid. Whatever it is, he’ll come to us when he’s ready to talk about it.”

“You’re probably right,” Rebecca concedes, trying to ignore the warm glow she feels at having Ted so easily refer to the two of them as…well, as a unit.

“I tend to be, from time to time,” Ted says cheerfully.

And he’s proven right with this too, although even Ted will admit later that he’s proven right in a way he never saw coming.

*

Henry’s very quiet at dinner a few days later, frowning down at his plate as he pushes his food back and forth.

Glancing at Ted, who nods at her, Rebecca turns to Henry and asks, gently, “Everything all right, Henry?”

“Hm? No, I’m fine,” Henry says quickly.

“Because if there is something wrong, you could tell us,” Rebecca goes on.

Henry glances at her, his face troubled, before looking at his father, and then his jaw sets in a way that suddenly takes Rebecca back to the year that Richmond won the title, and Ted seemed to greet every match with the same stubborn set to his jaw. “Can I ask you guys something?”

“Of course, buddy,” Ted immediately says.

“And you won’t get mad?” Henry pushes.

“Of course we won’t get mad,” Rebecca says reassuringly, even as her mind races with what this could be—trouble at school? Homesickness? Perhaps he regretted not spending Thanksgiving in Kansas after all—

Henry looks between them once more, and then—he just says it. “Are you guys dating or not?”

Rebecca nearly chokes, and Ted’s eyes grow huge. “I’m sorry?” Rebecca finally manages to get out of her throat, the words strangled, feeling as though waves of heat are washing over her.

“Are you guys dating?” Henry asks. “Uncle Beard said that you weren’t, but it doesn’t make any sense.”

“Good God, that’s what you two were talking about at Keeley’s the other night?” Rebecca bursts out. “I knew it wasn’t really about that superhero movie—”

“Rebecca, maybe a little more focus,” Ted says, and while he’s keeping his composure better than Rebecca is, that doesn’t say very much, as his face and his ears are turning a distinct shade of red. “Henry, buddy—you know that Rebecca and I aren’t, well, you know that we’re friends.”

But Henry is staring at his father as though he’s gone mad. “How could I know that? You sleep in the same bedroom!”

“Oh my God,” Rebecca says blankly. If she could, she’d fling her napkin over her face until this nightmarish conversation was at an end, but she can’t. How, how could they have been so foolish as to think Henry would never notice that Rebecca never spends the night in her own room? Fuck’s sake.

Now Ted’s entire face is turning red and he, too, looks like he longs for a napkin to cover his head. “That…isn’t what it looks like.”

Henry blinks slowly at them. “So, you aren’t dating.”

Ted shakes his head. “No.”

Henry is frowning in earnest now, glancing quickly at Rebecca before scowling down at his plate. After a moment of quiet (and for Rebecca, an eternity of quiet mortification) he looks back up and asks, “So then…what happens when Dad goes back to work?”

Ted blinks at his son, and Rebecca feels a chill growing in the pit of her stomach. “What do you mean?”

“What happens when you stop being on medical leave?” Henry asks. “Do we have to move out of Rebecca’s house?”

“Certainly not,” Rebecca says before she can stop herself. As both Ted and Henry look at her, she stammers out, “Well, it, it only makes sense to have Henry finish the school year here. It’s only a brief walk away from the house, and the flat’s much further away.”

“Okay, but after the school year,” Henry pushes. “What if Mom makes me move back to Kansas? Is Dad just going back to live in that apartment again? By himself?”

Oh, hell. Rebecca bites the inside of her cheek before she can say, once again and with even more feeling, certainly not.

But a crease is appearing between Ted’s eyebrows, and he asks, more urgently, “Henry, what’s this really about?”

Henry looks utterly miserable, and he mumbles, “May I be excused, please?”

“Henry,” Ted begins, but Henry doesn’t wait for his father to finish, he just shoves his chair back, legs squeaking loudly against the tile, and quickly rushes off in the direction of the garden.

“Oh, hell,” Ted mutters, and goes after his son.

Rebecca stares after them, and then, as if her body is moving of its own will, she follows, hovering by the screen door to the garden, which in his haste to follow Henry, Ted forgot to shut all the way.

Henry is sitting on the bench, arms wrapped around himself, as Ted kneels in front of his son, his voice barely carrying as he asks Henry what’s going on.

Henry is staring at the ground. Very softly, so softly that Rebecca strains to hear it, he says, “I don’t want you to end up like Grandpa did.”

Rebecca closes her eyes. Jesus.

“Henry,” Ted says, and God only knows what it must be costing him to sound so calm and steady. “Henry, that’s…you know your grandfather didn’t die of a heart attack. We talked about this, buddy, remember?”

“Mom says you’ve been killing yourself for years, because of how much you work,” Henry says. “I heard Roy and Uncle Beard talking once, they said your work schedule was insane and that it’d drive anyone into the grave—”

“Henry—”

“And you don’t listen!” Henry bursts out. “When someone tells you to stop, you just smile and act nice until they leave you alone, and you just keep doing what you want anyway. The only people you listen to are me and Rebecca, and if I’m gone and you don’t live with Rebecca anymore then—”

“Henry, Henry,” Ted says, gently taking his son by the shoulders. “Henry, that ain’t gonna happen.” Henry begins to protest, and Ted says, with emphasis, “That ain’t happening. I promise you it won’t.” Enough light is coming from the house and the streetlamps that Rebecca can see the way that Ted’s throat works as he adds, his voice wavering, “I know I haven’t…I know I haven’t been good about taking care of myself. I know I made you worry, and I’m sorry—”

Henry’s thin shoulders are shaking now, and standing in the open doorway, Rebecca can feel her eyes stinging, her vision growing blurred. It would be easy to lie to herself and say that it’s due to the night wind—it is November, after all—but then, what’s the point of lying to herself now?

“I’m so sorry, buddy, but I’m going to do better now. I promise you, okay?”

Henry is quiet, and then he says softly, sounding so very young, “You promise?”

“Yeah, buddy. I promise you. Cross my heart.” Ted carefully moves up from his knees to sit next to Henry on the bench, wrapping his arm around his son’s shoulders, and Henry just as carefully leans in against his father’s side. Ted’s murmuring something to Henry now, but Rebecca can’t hear what it is.

The wind picks up, causing Rebecca to shiver, and as she shivers she comes back to herself, realizing that she’s still watching them and she has no business watching this. This isn’t her place, Henry isn’t her son and Ted isn’t…Ted isn’t…

She slips away from the door, shutting it behind her as she goes.

*

After a bout of hiding in her study, Rebecca eventually goes out to do what she needs to. She finds Henry in his bedroom, playing a game on his phone. He looks calmer, abashed even, cheeks going pink as she knocks on the door and asks if she can come in. “Sorry for all the drama,” he says quietly, eyes dropped low.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Rebecca says, in as crisp a tone as she can manage. “Come back to me when you’re trending on Twitter because your ex-husband’s behaved like a twat—now that was unnecessary drama.”

Henry smiles a little, but still seems down. Hesitating, Rebecca finally opts to sit down on the edge of his bed, saying carefully, “Henry…”

“It’s okay,” Henry says. “I know you and my dad aren’t dating.”

“Well…yes,” Rebecca says. “But, even if we aren’t a couple, that doesn’t mean that I won’t still look out for him. I wouldn’t let, well, what happened before, I wouldn’t let it happen again.”

Henry nods, but still looks troubled. Finally he asks, “Do you believe it? That my dad would be okay on his own?”

“I think we won’t have to find out,” Rebecca says. “Because he’s not going to be alone.” Henry opens his mouth, but Rebecca continues, gentle yet firm. “Even if you go back to the States, Henry, I promise you—nobody’s going to leave your dad to fend for himself.”

Henry looks at her and nods. “Okay.”

Rebecca leaves him not long after, her stomach turning over as she goes up the stairs to her own room, where she knows Ted will be.

And just as she expects, Ted is there in the bedroom they’ve shared for all these weeks, sitting on the bed with a pensive look on his face, a mirror to the one that Henry had on his face just now. He looks up as Rebecca comes in, giving her a smile, and no matter how tired the smile is, it still causes her to flutter. “Checking on Henry?”

Rebecca shrugs, feeling sheepish and off-kilter. “I just wanted to see how he was.”

Ted nods. “Well, I appreciate that, Rebecca, I do. He’s lucky to have you in his corner, we both are.”

The words should make her feel warm—they do make her feel warm—but Ted’s expression is so solemn that her unease only grows. Forcing the words out, Rebecca says, “I know it was my idea for us to share a bedroom. Ted, if I’d realized that Henry would notice—”

“Nah, this is on me,” Ted says, shaking his head. “He’s such a good kid, and he seemed to be settling in so well—I don’t know, somehow I fooled myself into thinking everything was all right. That he wasn’t still worrying over me.”

Rebecca wants nothing more than to curl up against Ted’s side, lean in and wrap her arms across his shoulders and feel the heat of him sinking into her body—not for lust, but for comfort, and the effort of holding herself back from doing so is like a physical ache. Wringing her hands, she asks, helplessly, “Is there anything I can do?”

Ted shoots her a quick, unreadable glance. “Rebecca, you’ve already done enough—more than enough, honestly. This isn’t on you to solve or fix.”

Rebecca immediately retorts, affronted, “Don’t be absurd, of course I should be able to fix it,” and then she flushes as Ted smiles at her, rueful and fond in equal measure. “And,” she continues, feeling as though she’d rather walk on hot coals than keep talking about this, but knowing she has to, “If, I mean, about us sharing a bedroom, I can explain to Henry that—”

A shadow flits across Ted’s face, and he looks away. “Like I said, Rebecca, that’s not your responsibility. If Henry’s got the wrong end of the stick about—about you and me, then that’s my fault. I’ll set him straight, don’t worry.”

“Your fault?” Rebecca repeats dumbly, not understanding. “How? It was my idea to move in here.”

Ted opens his mouth, and then shuts it. To Rebecca’s growing confusion and alarm, he lets out a deep breath and glances away, murmuring to himself, “Gotta put your big-boy pants on, Lasso.”

“Ted?”

Ted exhales deeply, and then says, his voice soft and measured, “I mean that it’s my fault, because I’m pretty sure Henry’s picking up on…on the way I feel about you.”

Rebecca hears the words, and her brain immediately turns into white static. Bzzt. Bzzt.

“And listen, that’s not your problem or your burden to carry, I don’t want you feeling like you need to do or change anything, I just need to get my head right, and then I’ll—”

“Ted,” Rebecca interrupts, her heart pounding. “Ted.”

“—just talk to Henry, make sure we’re all on the same page, and once I get the all-clear from Doc Bhamra I can get out of your hair and—” Ted’s voice is rising with nerves, words tumbling over themselves as he stares down at his feet, and Rebecca reaches out and clamps her hand on Ted’s wrist, gripping it tightly.

Ted falls silent, looking at her with wide eyes, the light from the bedside lamp catching at them so they look like brandy in a glass, and Rebecca grits out, “Ted. Do you honestly mean,” her voice catches for a minute, but she forces herself on, “Do you honestly mean to tell me that you have romantic feelings, for me, and you’ve somehow missed that I’m completely mad about you?”

Ted is gaping at her in a way that would be thoroughly unattractive on anyone else (or to be fair, it would be unattractive to anyone who isn’t as gone on the man as Rebecca is). “You—but I—okay, now hang on. You’re saying—”

“Oh no,” Rebecca insists, her voice admittedly going a little shrill. “You confessed first, therefore you have to explain first, those are the rules!” And if Ted goes first, she might actually be able to let it sink in enough to believe what he’s saying. Maybe. Eventually. She’s still half-convinced this is all some grand hallucination.

A disbelieving smile is starting to appear on Ted’s face, his eyes alight. “There are rules for this?”

“There have to be, otherwise we’ve just been idiots circling around each other like two addled goldfish for ages!” Rebecca retorts. “God, how did you not see it? For weeks now I’ve been a total lunatic about you! I went completely round the bend when you collapsed, I tricked my way into sleeping in your bed, I moved your son across the Atlantic to keep you happy, I—”

“Becca. Sweetheart.” Ted reaches out with his free hand and strokes her hair, and Rebecca feels it like a bolt of lightning moving down her spine. He doesn’t say anything else, just continues to stroke her hair with a soft smile on his face, as though he would be perfectly content to do this, and only this, all night.

But Rebecca…God, she’s always wanted more than what she could get. She’s wanted exactly what she thought she couldn’t have, and tried and failed to be content with what she had, but now, but now—

Hardly daring to breathe, Rebecca reaches out and does all the things she’s wanted to do for all these weeks…let her finger brush along the faint laugh lines at the corner of Ted’s eyes, fit her palm to his cheek and just…just look at him, drinking in the sight of him, alive and healthy and hers, finally all hers at last.

Dazed, Rebecca looks into Ted’s eyes and finds herself murmuring, “So…I’m in love with you. Probably ought to have mentioned that by now.”

It turns out it’s even more fantastic to feel Ted’s dimple deepening in his cheek than to see it happen. “That’s okay,” Ted says, joyously. “I probably should’ve figured it out before now, to be fair.” His smile only deepens, eyes twinkling as he adds, “I mean, after all…you did move us into your house.”

Rebecca could once again make the perfectly valid point that it was a supremely rational decision, but Ted is right there, smiling and happy and hers, and kissing him is a much better use of her time, so she does.

It’s so blissfully easy, that’s the incredible thing. It feels like the most natural thing in the world to do, to lean in and press her mouth to his. Rebecca hadn’t let herself think about a lot of things with Ted, particularly about what it would be like to kiss him, but she’s fairly sure her imagination could have never matched up to the reality of it—how warm he feels, how gently and softly his mouth moves against hers, until it literally feels as though all of her bones have turned to soft wax.

“Holy fuck,” she murmurs when they finally pull apart. “How are you so brilliant at kissing?”

“Well, it helps when you’re doing it with the right person,” Ted says, dimpling at her. His face is flushed, that lock of hair falling over his face.

As if in a dream, Rebecca finds herself smoothing it back, joy fizzing up inside of her. “Yeah. It does, doesn’t it?”

*

They don’t actually sleep with each other that night. Well, of course they sleep together, Rebecca’s hardly going to move to another bedroom now, but as for actual sex, that part is on hold, because as Ted ruefully confesses, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is, uh, kind of on ice so to speak.”

“Oh, of course,” Rebecca says. “If you think I’m not waiting until we at least get the all-clear from Dr. Bhamra, you need to think again. I’m not putting you back in hospital just for the sake of an orgasm or two.”

Ted’s eyebrow flickers up, and he says mildly, “Oh, I think we can do better than one or two.”

“Well,” Rebecca manages after a moment, feeling dizzy with lust. “I…look forward to the effort.”

“Mm,” Ted says, smiling at her in a way that indicates he has somehow gleaned every filthy thought that’s ever run through Rebecca’s mind, and doesn’t mind one bit.

But filthy thoughts and future promises aside, they do settle in for bed eventually, even if the position is new—legs intertwined under the covers, Ted’s arm around her waist and Rebecca’s hand running up and down Ted’s back, both from a desire to be close and from the need to prove to herself, even now, that this is really and truly happening.

Her eyes are growing heavy despite herself—it’s all the emotional conversations she’s been having today, she’s too British to be equipped for them—but Rebecca murmurs, “I still can’t quite believe you didn’t see it. I was always…I always worried that one day you’d just look at me, and you’d know, and you’d be kind about it.”

“Okay, so first off, I cannot believe you thought I’d be enough of a fool to turn you down,” Ted immediately retorts, and Rebecca snickers, moving a little bit closer to him as his arm tightens around her waist. “And honestly…I never let myself think about it. I was just…” He grows quiet, before saying, “Being here with you and Henry, it’s the happiest I’ve been in a long, long time. I didn’t wanna risk losing it.”

“Me too,” Rebecca admits, leaning in to kiss him softly, because she wants to and because she can. They stay like that, tangled up in each other, sleepily trading kisses back and forth until, between one breath and the next, Rebecca falls asleep in Ted’s arms.

*

The next morning starts as so many have, with Rebecca wrapped around Ted’s broad back, her nose pressed to his neck and her arm possessively curled around his waist.

Only this time, Rebecca doesn’t abashedly pull back. Instead she sighs happily, nuzzling Ted’s shoulder as she murmurs, “Good morning.”

She can hear the smile in Ted’s voice as he rumbles, “Morning, sweetheart.”

His t-shirt has ridden up a little, just enough that part of her wrist is brushing against bare skin, and almost before Rebecca can catch herself, she finds that her fingers have slipped entirely beneath the hem to stroke Ted’s stomach, the trail of chest hair underneath his belly button. His skin is hot to the touch, and she can feel the muscles of his abdomen shift and tense beneath her fingertips.

“Are you trying to start something?” Ted asks, his warm voice sending a shiver down Rebecca’s spine.

“Maybe,” Rebecca admits. “Is it working?”

“I’d have to be a dead man for it not to work,” Ted says, and Rebecca snickers. But then Ted’s twisting about to look her in the face, his hair a wreck and a pillow crease on his cheek, looking so lovely that it makes her heart thump in her chest. “But let’s see about taking care of you for a bit.”

“Oh?” Rebecca questions, even as she instinctively follows Ted’s lead, even as that turns into her lying back against the pillows, her breathing going unsteady as Ted settles in between her open legs, an intent look on his face.

“Mm hmm,” Ted confirms, and then his hand is sliding underneath her pajama shirt, his pinky finger just barely slipping beneath the waistband of her silk trousers. Oh fuck. “This all right?”

Rebecca can barely remember how to speak, but manages to nod and squeak out, “Yes. Yes, please.”

Ted’s dimple peeks out for a moment, and then he leans in to kiss her on the cheek, then on the throat, and the combination of his warm lips and the bristle of his morning stubble are just wonderful enough to almost, almost distract Rebecca from how he’s slipping his hand beneath her pajamas to cup her through her underwear.

“Oh holy fuck,” she says blankly at the ceiling, and Ted chuckles—chuckles!—against her throat as he carefully and methodically begins to take her apart, his strong fingers stroking at her clit and cunt until she’s wet and open, and then his fingers are inside of her and Rebecca is letting out a groan that seems even louder in the morning light streaming through the window.

“All right?” Ted presses, and at least he’s starting to sound breathless too now.

“Fuck, don’t you dare stop,” Rebecca groans out, clutching at his arm, the sheets, at anything she can reach just to try and anchor herself, even as she’s pressing her hips up against his fingers. Ted’s thumb presses against her clit just so, and Rebecca makes a desperate noise, only barely muffled by her burying her face in his shoulder.

“God, of course you’re good at this,” Rebecca gasps out. “Months, years, I could have had you doing this to me, I could have had you in my bed—”

Ted’s fingers speed up, and he makes a low, wanting noise against her throat, and she feels the vibrations of it all the way down to her toes, making the heat in her stomach, between her legs, get even hotter and hotter. And so Rebecca keeps going, she keeps talking, every filthy thought she’s ever had about Ted spilling out of her mouth, all repression and restraint gone.

“I could have had you in my office, in my kitchen, in the treatment room at the stadium—”

“Not the treatment room,” Ted protests, half-laughing, but she can hear it in his voice, how he’s picturing it too now.

“Yes, the treatment room,” Rebecca retorts, never mind that she’s never actually considered it before now, she should have had him in the treatment room, a dozen times over— “I should have had you everywhere, I wanted, I want—”

That’s as much as she can get out, as the heat comes over her in a wave, and she’s coming, clenching around Ted’s fingers as she shakes and comes apart entirely.

Little by little, she comes back to the surface, blinking dazedly as she turns to look at Ted, who’s gone still and watchful, his eyes dark and wide in his face. Rebecca exhales, the aftershocks still going through her, and then she pulls him in to kiss her, morning breath be damned.

*

The plan, as Rebecca and Ted work out during a very long and enjoyable shared shower, is to take things slow, to be discreet. It’s the smart decision, taking the time to work out what this is, what it means going forward, and without dragging Henry and all their friends into it. If last night has confirmed anything, it’s that what they do affects more people than just them, and in ways that Rebecca can’t predict.

It’s a good plan, the mature decision, so of course it all falls to pieces before the morning’s done.

No plan survives first contact with the enemy, after all, and in their case the enemy is the two of them and their complete and total inability to have any sort of poker face.

In her defense, Rebecca is the giddiest she’s ever been, incredulous joy bubbling up to the surface every time she thinks about Ted, and she can’t think of anything but Ted—her entire brain is full of him, the weight of his body on hers, his hands on her body, the sound of his voice in her ear, even as he’s standing in front of her in the kitchen, making breakfast for her and an oblivious Henry.

And from the shy smile Ted gives her as he hands her a cup of coffee, their fingers brushing over the handle, he’s in the same boat.

Still, Rebecca thinks they’re doing a reasonable job of keeping things under wraps, but is rudely awakened from this when Henry looks up from his bowl of cereal to ask, suspiciously, “What’s going on? You two are acting weird.”

“Are we?” Ted asks, just as Rebecca reflexively denies, “No, we aren’t.”

They trade embarrassed glances, which Henry doesn’t miss of course. His eyes narrowed in suspicion, Henry says, “Your faces are all red and you’re both jumpy. What’s going on?”

“Nothing at all,” Rebecca tries, but Henry looks unconvinced.

“Why are you holding hands,” he asks next, and Rebecca jumps, realizing too late that her hand is resting on top of Ted’s.

“God, how are we so bad at this,” she says despairingly. She moves to pull her hand away, but Ted catches hold of her fingers.

Startled, Rebecca looks up at Ted, who gives her a crooked half-smile, squeezing her fingers in reassurance. “Think we might need to call an audible on this one,” he says, and it’s a measure of how well and deeply she knows him that she perfectly understands that reference.

Sighing, mostly in relief, Rebecca says, “Well, if you’re sure…”

Ted nods, and turns to Henry, who by this point, looks thoroughly exasperated with them both. “Henry, look—”

“Are we moving out?” Henry blurts out, looking wary.

“Good God, of course not,” Rebecca says.

“No, we aren’t,” Ted confirms. “But, uh…well. Last night, Rebecca and I got to talking, and we realized that, uh, certain assumptions may not have been exactly incorrect.”

Henry looks befuddled, and Rebecca is rather bemused herself. At her questioning look, Ted makes a face and mutters, “Give me a break, I’ve never actually tried to have this conversation with my son before.”

“Yes, that is blindingly obvious,” Rebecca says dryly.

Thankfully, because Henry is a very bright and precocious young man, he quickly puts it all together and puts his father out of his misery. “Are you two dating now?” Henry yelps in shock.

“Well, yes,” Ted says.

Henry stares at them for a long moment. “But…you weren’t dating before last night.”

“No,” Rebecca confirms.

“But you’re dating now,” Henry presses.

“We are,” Ted says. “That okay with you?”

Henry’s astonishment disappears, to be replaced with exasperation. “Of course it’s okay with me, I was the one saying you should—wait. Wait.” A light appears in his eyes, and Henry asks next, “Did this happen because of what I said last night?”

Rebecca sighs, because between Henry and Sassy, she will absolutely never live this down. “That may have played a factor in it, yes.”

“So what you’re saying is, I fixed everything,” Henry says, gleeful.

“I wouldn’t put it quite like that,” Rebecca begins, and Henry just grins at her.

“Don’t worry,” he said, cheerfully smug, “I would.”

He’s not the only one, of course, as Keeley (apprised of the evening’s events by a furiously blushing Rebecca during a hastily-arranged lunch date) takes a break from shrieking with joy, demanding the details be retold for the fifth time, calling Sassy and Higgins and just about every one of their mutual friends to announce the news, to come over to dinner that evening and immediately pounce on Henry once she’s through the door.

“Henry Lasso, you absolute legend!” Keeley shouts gleefully, swooping in on Henry and hugging him enthusiastically, completing it all with an equally enthusiastic kiss on the cheek.

“We are never living this down, I hope you know this,” Rebecca says to Ted, pretending to be annoyed, but secretly thrilled at the casual way Ted has his arm looped around her waist.

“I can live with that,” Ted says, smiling, right before Keeley pounces on him and demands to know all the details, but from his perspective this time.

Chapter 7

“Glad we got the chance to do this,” Ted says, his smile warm and his eyes soft.

Rebecca finds herself melting, not an unusual sensation for her at this stage. “Me too.”

Henry’s spending the night at a friend’s house, and Ted and Rebecca are taking the opportunity to go out to dinner—not in their usual Richmond haunts, but at a lovely Greek restaurant in Notting Hill. Ted has taken the opportunity to discard his current uniform of loose t-shirts and soft sweatpants for a nice suit with a forest-green shirt, the top two buttons undone, and Rebecca is very much looking forward to peeling him out of his clothes at the end of the night.

They’re not front-and-center in the restaurant, but they’re not exactly hidden away either—it’s a quiet table in the back, but there are still people around them, and Rebecca’s caught a couple of diners doing double-takes, so far nobody’s approached them, and Rebecca has yet to see anyone take their phone out for photos or video. All in all, it’s easier than she would have expected to focus on Ted, on their conversation, on their date, rather than worry about any potential response or reaction.

Ted’s finished Anna Karenina, and has moved on to Rebecca’s dog-earned collection of Golden Age mysteries. Rebecca is smiling as she listens to Ted’s earnest opinions on Lord Peter Wimsey and his romance with Harriet Vane, “—now I’m trying to reserve judgement, but there is a time and a place to announce to a woman you have feelings for her, and when she’s sitting in a prison cell on murder charges just ain’t it,” Ted wraps up, nodding emphatically.

Rebecca smiles into her wine glass. “Yes, you prefer to wait until you’ve moved into a woman’s house, with your son, and have been platonically sharing a bed with her for ages—”

“Hey now,” Ted protests, though the broad smile on his face undercuts it rather. “You moved me into the house—”

“Some people would call that a declaration,” Rebecca says loftily, and Ted raises an eyebrow at this.

“Some people haven’t watched you make grand gestures practically every week for seven years,” he points out. “Remember that time some influencer tried to start a feud with Keeley and you tried to call up Mark Zuckerberg to have them banned from Instagram for life?”

“I still think Mark could have been more accommodating,” Rebecca sniffs, and Ted laughs.

His hand is resting on the table, and Rebecca idly reaches out to stroke the back of his hand with a finger. Ted catches her fingers with hers, and for a moment, they are that couple, lovingly gazing at each other over a table in public as they hold hands.

Of course, in the next moment, Rebecca has to excuse herself to use the loo, but at least the moment happened. After using the toilet, and taking the time for the customary bout of primping before the mirror—reapplying her lipstick, making sure that her dress is lying as it should—Rebecca turns to go, but is caught by her reflection in the mirror.

She looks good, of course, that’s not the surprise. What is surprising is how…happy she looks. There’s a glow to her face that has nothing to do with the Charlotte Tilbury makeup she’s wearing, an ease to her posture that can’t be blamed on the wine she had with dinner.

Rebecca looks happy, because she is happy. What a radical concept. What a wonderful state of affairs.

Smiling, Rebecca exits the restroom to find that Ted has been cornered by a Richmond supporter. This time, it’s an elderly Irish woman, chatting Ted’s ears off while her two younger companions (daughters, Rebecca’s guessing, from the mildly exasperated looks on their faces).

“But you’re feeling all right, then?” the woman’s asking now, and the genuine concern in the question is nice to hear. Rebecca avoids social media as much as she can, but she still has to be aware of it, and the growing demands from Richmond supporters to have Ted return as soon as possible, never mind his health, has set her teeth on edge lately.

Ted smiles and nods, “I am, Eileen, thank you for asking.”

“That is excellent,” Eileen declares. “Because I tell you, this Kent lad’s doing his best, but I’ll feel much better once we have you back in the technical area.”

“Dugout, Mammy,” one of her daughters says in long-suffering tones, then frowns. “Is it dugout?”

“I think that’s in baseball,” her sister says, then shakes her head. “Wait, why am I answering the question when there’s a soccer coach right in front of us?”

Before Ted can reply to this whirlwind, he catches sight of Rebecca, and his smile growing, calls out amiably, “Hey, Rebecca, I was just having a nice chat with Eileen and her daughters here.”

“I can see that,” Rebecca says, smiling back as she walks up to her seat, but doesn’t sit down just quite yet, as Eileen seems dumbstruck looking at her, in a way she hasn’t seemed to be with Ted. Bemused, Rebecca stands still for a moment, letting the woman look her fill.

“Lord love you,” Eileen says at last, after silently looking Rebecca up and down—Rebecca has more than a foot on the woman, at least. “Your legs really do just go all the way down to the floor, don’t they?”

“Yes, they do,” Rebecca agrees, for lack of anything better to say.

Eileen, who seems the affable sort, nods as though Rebecca’s said something incredibly wise. “Magnificent.”

“Jesus, Mam,” one of her daughters is saying now, the one who thought dugouts are only for American baseball, “his date’s come back, let them get back to their meal—”

Her sister elbows her and hisses, “That’s Rebecca Welton! She owns the club!”

“I know that, I’m just saying that in that dress—”

While the sisters bicker, Eileen’s gaze is now caught on Rebecca’s feet. “You’re wearing heels, I like that,” Eileen says. “Any man looking to make you smaller so he feels larger isn’t a man worth keeping.”

Rebecca finds herself smiling back. “Yes, I’ve found that out myself,” she agrees, glancing at a pink-cheeked Ted, as she finally takes her seat.

Eileen cackles. “So you have!” She nods once more and says, “I’ll leave you to it and take my girls elsewhere.” She reaches out to shake Ted’s hand, telling him, “Ted, you’re as lovely as people say you are, which is the best compliment I can give a man.” She turns to Rebecca and adds, “Make sure we get this man back on the sidelines soon, eh?”

“We’re doing our best,” Rebecca says with a warm smile, but out of the corner of her eye, she sees a flicker of movement—as if Ted’s twitched his shoulders or something.

But when she turns back to him, he’s smiling and at ease, saying, “Now how long do you think it’ll be before that ends up on Twitter?”

“Bold of you to assume it hasn’t already been filmed and posted on TikTok,” Rebecca says dryly, but adds, hesitant, “Do you—we should have talked about this before, but will you mind? If this goes public, if people start asking questions?”

Ted looks as if he doesn’t understand the question. “Bit late to mind it now, we’re already here,” he points out. “And why on earth would I mind people knowing I’m with you? That’s like winning the lottery and burying the ticket in a hole in the backyard.” He reaches out to take her hand again, saying tenderly, “I’d have to be a fool to mind being seen with you, and I think we’ve had enough of that already, don’t you?” His smile turns a little rueful, as he adds, picking up his drink, “Or so Beard and Higgins keep telling me, they are being very free with their opinions on how long it took us to get our act together.”

“Really?” Rebecca asks, picking up her own wine glass. “Keeley and Sassy just keep giving me sex advice,” and smirks as Ted chokes on his non-alcoholic cocktail.

*

They don’t get stopped by the paparazzi on the way out of the restaurant, but pictures do make it onto social media; by the morning, Rebecca’s getting calls from Richmond’s PR team, headed by Keeley’s replacement, Helen Kamara.

“Want me to come in with you?” Ted offers as Rebecca puts on one of her earrings, dropping a kiss on her bare shoulder.

“No, no, it’ll be fine,” Rebecca says. “You’ve been living with me for ages now, surely this can’t be causing that much of a stir.”

But when she walks into her office to find not only Helen, but Roy, Beard, and Higgins waiting for her as well, Rebecca starts to worry she might be wrong on that point.

“I see this is going to be a group discussion, then,” Rebecca says, as mildly as she can manage as she seats herself behind her desk. If she’s going to be forced into a group chat about her romantic relationship in this context (and not during a cozy teatime chat with Higgins where they are emphatically off the clock) she wants to be in as powerful a position as possible. Helen and Higgins are sitting in front of her, and Beard is settled in the back of the room, leaning against the wall, looking between them all with interest. Roy, meanwhile, has his arms folded across his chest, his face set into his usual glower.

Once she’s settled in, Rebecca squares her shoulders and says, “Right. How much of a fuss are people making about me and Ted?”

But, to Rebecca’s surprise, Helen looks nonplussed at the question, tilting her head. “Fuss? What fuss?”

“The fuss that has us all in this office doing damage control?” Rebecca prods, growing confused herself.

“Ah,” Higgins says. “I think we may have a bit of a misunderstanding here. Helen—”

Nodding, Helen steps forward and says, in her crisp way, tossing her dreadlocks over one shoulder, “Rebecca, if I can be candid?” At Rebecca’s nod, she says bluntly, “Most of our supporters and the media already think you’ve been dating for years, it’s old hat to them by now. The majority of the comments on Twitter and Instagram are about identifying the designer of your dress, not about whether you and Ted are a couple.”

Rebecca takes a moment to let this sink in, promptly has a vision of Mae and the punters at the Crown and Anchor debating the state of her love life, and just as promptly discards it for the sake of her sanity. “And the tabloids?”

“Oh, you’re in the tabloids,” Helen confirms. “But after your ex-husband’s outburst, it’s just not the right sort of environment for them to try and make a scandal out of it.”

“Plus they already caused enough of a fuss when Ted and Henry moved in,” Higgins points out. “The two of you going out to dinner just can’t really compare.”

“Then…why are we here?” Rebecca asks.

It’s Roy who answers. “We think it’s time Ted came back to the team.” In the back of the room, Beard’s chin dips down, so that his baseball cap is covering half his face.

“I’m sorry, what?” Rebecca stares at them all, then says slowly, “Listen, I know Ted’s looking a lot better these days, but he still hasn’t been cleared for work by his doctors—”

“No, no,” Higgins says quickly. “We mean Ted should come in to visit the team, not that he should jump right back in as manager. Certainly not.”

“A visit?” Rebecca repeats, sitting back in her chair.

“He can stop by during a training session,” Helen explains, with more than a touch of excitement. “We’ll have our in-house cameraman nearby, capture some footage, a few photos, and post it all on our official social media posts. It’ll give a real boost, and…we could use a boost right now.”

Rebecca takes a breath. “A visit from Ted isn’t going to push us any higher in the standings.”

“No,” Helen agrees, “but it will quiet some of the fans wondering why Ted Lasso is well enough to have a night out in Chelsea, but has been missing in action from the stadium for almost two months now.”

“Now hang on,” Rebecca begins, heated, but Higgins holds up a hand.

“We know that’s not what it is, Rebecca,” he says, in his gentle way. “It’s just what people are saying.”

Rebecca presses her lips tightly together. “I don’t want Ted pressured into this,” she says finally. “He nearly died in this office, he should have as much time as he needs, and some whingers on Twitter or Reddit or wherever shouldn’t bloody change that.”

“No one wants to pressure Ted into anything,” Helen begins soothingly, but Roy cuts her off.

“It’d be good for the players to see him,” he says, hands shoved into his pockets. Something about his stance reminds Rebecca of Ted, when he’s facing up to do something. “Be a boost to team morale as much as anything else. More, even.”

That does get Rebecca’s attention. The team’s hanging in there, and is probably doing better than expected given the injury crisis that’s hit so many of the players, but they’re still sitting in eighth, four places away from a Champions League spot. Ted can’t fix Taylor Komoh’s ankle, or Isaac McAdoo’s knee, but Rebecca’s watched the man work miracles for seven years now; she can’t discount the human factor, or how much of an impact it could have.

It’s odd. As Ted’s partner, she’s spent months defending her right to wrap the man up in soft wool until he’s cleared by the doctors. As the owner of AFC Richmond, who has responsibilities to the employees and the fans and the stakeholders, and who is all too aware of what it will mean if the team doesn’t qualify for European football next year…

She can, unfortunately, see the point that Helen and Higgins and Roy are all trying to make.

She looks towards the back of the room, where Beard has stayed silent all this time, even as he’s watched everyone speak with his usual owlish expression, head tilting back and forth as he considers everyone's point.

Rebecca asks him, a little pointedly, "And what do you think, Coach Beard?"

Beard makes a show of pausing to consider it, before saying briskly, "Team could use the chance to see Ted."

"There you go," Helen says triumphantly, as Roy and Higgins nod in agreement.

And so, reluctantly, Rebecca concedes. “I can talk to Ted, see if he’d be comfortable stopping by. That is all I will be doing, and if he’s not ready, then he’s not ready, and we’ll just have to come up with some other heartwarming viral moment for the masses.”

Helen and Higgins are graceful in victory, Beard his usual laconic self, and the conversation moves on to other, just as necessary topics. Eventually they all move to leave, but Rebecca calls out as Roy starts to follow them out of the office, “Roy? Can you stay behind for a moment?”

“Sure,” Roy says.

Once the door’s shut, Rebecca just goes for it. “You know that even Ted would be struggling with the team if he were in charge now, right?”

Roy doesn’t play coy or dumb—the man is physically incapable of it, Rebecca’s convinced. “It’s not about that, Rebecca.”

She lifts her eyebrows and asks, “Isn’t it?”

Roy is quiet for a moment, before settling down in the chair facing her desk. “It’s not,” he begins slowly, then grimaces. “Okay, yeah, sometimes there is a voice in my head going, what would Ted Lasso do?” He tilts his head back and forth on the last few words, almost making them into a song. “But Ted’s been keeping his distance, and we all know why. It’s my job to prove he doesn’t have to.”

Rebecca nods in understanding, but says, “I have every confidence in you and the team, Roy. I mean that.”

“I know you do,” Roy says, inclining his head. “But the players miss him. It would be a boost, having him around, even if it’s just so he can tell us another insane story about his aunt in Missouri or wherever that got hit by lightning three times.”

“Great-aunt in Texas,” Rebecca corrects without thinking, and Roy smirks.

“Well, you would know.”

Rebecca waves it off, but can’t help but smile herself. “Okay. I’ll talk to Ted then.”

“Good,” Roy says, and just like that it’s all settled. For the moment at least.

*

Ted is very quiet when Rebecca talks to him that night at dinner. Rebecca finds herself speaking more quickly due to sheer nerves, although why she’s nervous about this, she can’t say.

“And Roy’s really okay with this?” Ted asks, a crease between his eyebrows as he looks down at his half-eaten plate.

“He really is,” Rebecca says. “He think it’ll be a boost to the team’s morale.” She’s quiet before adding, “He says the players miss having you around. And that you should tell the story of your Great-Aunt Peggy being hit by lightning again.”

A corner of Ted’s mouth tilts up, amused and skeptical. “Now I know you’re lying about that last part.”

“Well, it’s what he meant,” Rebecca says, pleased with herself for making that line between Ted’s eyebrows disappear, even temporarily. “But if you don’t want to, or even if you don’t want it to be on camera, that’s all right, really—”

“I’ll do it,” Ted interrupts.

Rebecca pauses. It’s what she wanted to hear—at least she’s pretty sure of that, but she still has to ask, “Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” Ted says, his face smooth and unworried, his gaze steady and clear. “It’ll be good for the team, and I miss the players too. As long as Roy doesn’t feel like I’m stepping on his toes, I’m good to go.”

He’s lying. Rebecca can’t point to why she’s so sure of it, but she is. For whatever reason, Ted absolutely does not want to do this, but is still agreeing to it anyway. Rebecca wants to press him on it, but has no idea where to start, and Henry’s at the dinner table too, the last thing she can do is start interrogating Ted in front of him—

“I wanna go too,” Henry pipes up, watching them both closely. “Can I?”

“Yeah, why not,” Ted says. “I’ll write a note to your teachers, get you excused from school for the day.”

“Cool,” Henry says, and pokes at his grilled chicken.

“All right,” Rebecca says, putting a smile on her face. “Excellent.”

She doesn’t get a chance to corner Ted about it until they’ve gone upstairs for bed (Henry had a school project he wanted Ted’s help with) but she doesn’t let herself off the hook, asking as she scrubs her face clean of that day’s makeup, “Ted, are you sure that you want to visit the team this week?”

“Yeah, I’m sure,” Ted says, and Rebecca glances out through the open door to see Ted stripping down out of his jumper and into one of his sleep shirts, this one a ratty Sporting Kansas City shirt that she’s fairly sure he got as a gift.

“Because,” Rebecca says, wiping away the last of her makeup remover, “—you don’t seem like you do.”

There’s a pause, and then Ted moves to stand in the doorway, eyebrow raised. “Is there a required level of enthusiasm I should be showing here?”

His voice is very mild, and Rebecca feels her shoulders going back without meaning them to. “Of course not,” she says. “I just—I want to make sure none of us are pushing you into something, that you’re not just saying yes because you feel like you should.”

Ted’s mouth purses for a moment, then he makes a little face. “Suppose this is what Doc was talking about,” he mutters, and at Rebecca’s confused look, makes a stronger face and explains, “Doc Fieldstone—Sharon—she was saying how if you’re never saying no, people can’t trust that you mean it when you say yes.”

“Oh,” Rebecca says, and turns that over in her head. “That’s actually rather sensible advice.”

“Yeah, turns out the shrink’s a smart one,” Ted says dryly. “So that’s why I’m telling you—I want to do this. I should see the boys, and I want to see the boys, and you can trust me when I say that. Okay?”

Rebecca still has her lingering concerns, but after a moment, she exhales, choosing to believe him. “Okay,” she agrees. Ted gives her a small smile, and drops a soft kiss on her bare cheek, before speaking in a lighter tone, "Besides, Beard thinks it's a good idea."

"Beard's spoken to you about this?" Rebecca asks, momentarily surprised—although now that she thinks about it, of course Beard would've approached Ted about this himself.

"Yeah, we went over it during our phone call this afternoon," Ted says easily.

Rebecca blinks. "Beard does phone calls?"

"Well, it's mostly just me talking, with him adding a couple of words or noises every few minutes, but we've got a bond," Ted explains.

"I'm just surprised he's willing to use a phone for calls," Rebecca admits. "In seven years, I don't think I've ever spoken to the man on the phone, he just texts like he's from Gen Z." And the texts, when they arrive, are in the style of team mtg @ 7pm while Rebecca texts back, Thank you.

As if he’s reading her mind, Ted smiles and says, “You just think that because you’re the type of person to text someone a sentence with the word ‘whilst’ in it.”

Aggravated (and relieved to feel aggravation instead of this nagging little worry) Rebecca huffs and says, “Whilst is a perfectly natural and reasonable word to use, you just don’t like it because you’re American and your country has discarded plenty of perfectly useful words from your lexicon.”

The resulting argument lasts for exactly as long as it takes for Rebecca to climb into bed, and climb onto Ted’s lap and kiss him quiet, pulling back only long enough to murmur, “I know what you’re doing, you’re just trying to egg me on.”

“Maybe,” Ted admits, smiling up at her, his hands resting on her hips, the touch easy and natural, as though they’ve been like this for years. “You gotta admit we’re having fun, though.”

“I can think of some other fun we could be having,” Rebecca tells him throatily, and leans in to prove it.

*

On the day of Ted's visit, Rebecca has to put in an extra half-hour onto the schedule, because she knows that the team won't be the only ones who have missed having Ted around. She's proven right from the very second Ted steps out of the car, and the man who's in charge of mowing the field gets straight off the machine to jog up to greet Ted, a huge smile on his face. The resulting in-depth conversation about sciatica is…well, it’s a lot of things, but the nicest word for it is astonishing.

Everyone wants to say hello, they all want to shake Ted's hand and say they're glad to see him back and looking so well. Henry sticks close to his father's side throughout, and so he comes in for his fair share of questions about how he's adjusting to life in England, with a few extra comments on how much he looks like his dad.

Rebecca ends up playing the role of timekeeper, finally dragging Ted off from an earnest conversation with old Owain Williams, Richmond's academy director—Ted's always wanted to keep a closer eye on the academy than most Premier League coaches bother doing, Rebecca’s always assumed it’s a throwback to his days coaching teenagers in America.

Finally, she has to loop her arm through Ted's and literally drag him off in the direction of the training grounds, with Ted calling out a goodbye to Owain over his shoulder.

It's all fodder for the camera following them around, of course, but Rebecca doesn't worry—she actually rather likes the thought of the image that they make together, her and Ted arm in arm, with Henry right at Ted's other side.

And that's how they walk out onto the pitch, with Ted only stopping once their feet touch the grass.

"Ted?" Rebecca asks.

Ted has a faraway look on his face. "It's all right, just give me a second.”

Rebecca does—she means to, at any rate—but just then Sam Obisanya turns from where he's been stretching out his legs, and his face breaks out into that famously bright smile. "Coach! It's Coach Lasso!"'

Because they're standing arm in arm, Rebecca is close enough to feel it as Ted takes a deep, steadying breath, before he slips free and steps forward just in time to be surrounded by a large crowd of boisterous, grinning footballers.

“You look good, Coach!”

“Haircut’s looking crisp, eh?”

“Look like you’re about to be on the cover of Men’s Health, right lads?”

Rebecca discreetly steps farther back, behind the cameraman, because this isn’t about her, not really. This is for the players, and the fans that will be watching this later on Richmond’s various social media accounts.

When Rebecca watches the artfully-edited video that the PR team puts together, complete with music that threads the line between charming and cheesy, she’ll notice how natural Ted makes it all seem—the way he seems to have a moment with every player there, from the veterans like Sam and Jamie, Jan Maas and Isaac (whose knee injury has improved to the point where he can do some light training) and to the younger players just fresh out of the academy, like Seb Moran and Ander Zárate, filling in at midfield and centerback respectively.

There’s a quiet word and an arm around the shoulder for Etienne Lefebvre, whose error at leftback cost them the game at Wolves in midweek, and Lefebvre’s usually solemn face is wreathed in smiles by the end of their little chat.

And of course there are shots of Ted with the coaching staff—in earnest conversation with Colin, standing side by side with Beard, listening carefully as Roy speaks (that’s a deliberate editing choice, Helen will explain, avoiding anything that makes it look like Ted is the one giving a lecture).

There are even a few shots of Henry with the players, kicking a ball back and forth with Sam and Jaime, laughing at something that Jaime’s said. Rebecca’s always thought he more closely resembles Michelle in his features, but Henry’s expressions are an echo of his father’s, especially when he’s laughing.

But at the center of it all is Ted, Ted smiling, Ted laughing, Ted striding around the pitch in his puffy coat and khaki trousers, as if he’d never left, as if the past two months were just a dream.

It’s a great video, and it’ll do exactly what they intended from the beginning: rack up the views, get them good press, reassure the fans without damaging Roy’s authority as manager.

It’s a great video, and it doesn’t tally with what Rebecca actually sees in the slightest. What she sees isn’t just the brightness of Ted’s smile, but the stiffness in his shoulders, how his hands never seem to leave his pockets and how tense the corners of his mouth are when his smile slips—though the smile never seems to slip for long.

It all makes for a faintly surreal day, Rebecca standing to the side in her peacoat and heels, wondering if it’s just her that’s seeing this—until she happens to catch Coach Beard’s eye, and he looks from Ted to her, and then dips his chin in the tiniest of nods.

Okay. So it isn’t just her seeing this. So now what is she supposed to do about it?

But of course, Beard is already well ahead of her, plotting what at first seems to be a detour but turns out to be a shortcut.

Not that he does it himself, of course. What he does, once Ted and Henry have left for the day but Rebecca’s stayed behind to review financial reports, is to send Colin up to see her.

“Ms. Welton?” Colin asks tentatively, hovering in the doorway. “Could I come in for a moment?”

“Of course,” Rebecca says, gesturing at an empty chair. “And call me Rebecca, Colin, I’ve told you before.”

Colin ducks his head, smiling. “Sorry. I know you have.”

But once he’s sitting down, Colin doesn’t seem eager to begin speaking—drumming his fingers on his knees, looking everywhere but at her.

Finally, Rebecca has to prod. “Colin? Was there something you wanted to speak to me about?”

“Coach Beard said I should talk to you,” Colin explains. “We were talking earlier, and then he said, ‘Think you should talk to Rebecca’, and so here I am.”

“Okay,” Rebecca says, striving for patience—honestly, this is what she gets for hiring a coaching staff comprised entirely of eccentrics. “What did you want to talk about?”

“Here’s the thing, it’s about Ted,” Colin explains. “Well, it’s about me first off, and then it applies to Ted, if you catch my drift.”

“I don’t, but I’m hoping to shortly.”

“So it’s like this,” Colin says, taking a breath. “After my accident, when I woke up in the hospital, the nurses and the doctors, they all did their best to prepare me for what was coming next. The surgeries, the physical therapy, what might be fixable and what would never be fixed.”

Rebecca sits back in her seat, surprised. She’s never actually had a conversation with Colin about the car accident that ended his career—she’d visited him in hospital, of course, and she’d immediately backed Ted when he’d insisted on bringing Colin onto the coaching staff—but she’d never, in all that time, actually heard Colin talk about the accident.

“And they did a good job of it, telling me,” Colin says, his gaze faraway, caught in a distant place that Rebecca’s never been, “But what they can’t tell you, what no one can tell you, is who I was going to be when it was all over. Because I wasn’t the same person I was before the car crash. Not just because I couldn’t play anymore—that was what I did. Not who I was, do you understand?”

“I—I’m trying to,” Rebecca admits.

“Even if I’d walked away from the crash without a scratch on me,” Colin says, looking at her earnestly, before adding, “Hell, even if I’d been able to walk away, period—I still wouldn’t have been the same. Getting that close to dying—it changes you. It changes what you want, what’s important to you.”

Rebecca swallows, as understanding washes over her. “And that’s what you were saying to Coach Beard, that he thought you should repeat to me.”

Looking deeply relieved, Colin nods. “Ted—well, it’s different working with him now as a coach than as a player. You see things differently, I guess.”

“But you didn’t,” Rebecca starts, then checks herself. “I’m sorry. Do you feel that you can’t talk to Ted about this?”

Colin shrugs. “Well, I still was his player, wasn’t I?” he points out. “It was like today out on the pitch—Ted shows you what he wants you to see. Because he thinks that’s what his job is.”

“So you told this to me instead, because…”

Colin just shrugs again. “Well, you’re the boss. Roy says you could stand in front of a rampaging rhino and make the rhino back down.”

Despite the seriousness of the conversation, Rebecca has to smile. “A rhino?”

“Rhinos are terrifying,” Colin tells her very solemnly, then gets to his feet. “Anyway, that’s all I wanted to say.”

He heads off for the door, in his blue Richmond tracksuit, this former player who is now the first openly gay man to coach in the Premier League, and Rebecca calls out impulsively, “Colin?”

He turns back at the door to look at her, face curious.

Rebecca smiles. “I rather like who you’ve turned into.”

A shy, crooked smile spreads across Colin’s face. “Thanks. Me too.”

*

Rebecca is the one who is fairly preoccupied that evening at dinner. She does her best to cover it up, listening as Henry outlines the history assignment he’ll be working on, an idea he got from Colin, where he plans to outline all the ways that the Prince of Wales title is a tool of “English colonial oppression.”

“God, you must be Colin's favorite person,” Rebecca observes.

Henry beams. “He’s gonna help me learn how to pronounce all the Welsh words and names,” he says proudly. “I already know how to say Owain Glyndŵr.”

“I’m sure it’s gonna be great, buddy,” Ted reassures him.

Henry nods, confident. “Colin says it’s enough to try to get it right, that that’s more than most people bother with.”

“Colin’s very wise,” Rebecca agrees, remembering how she’d just gotten proof of that this afternoon.

Ted’s watching her closely, and Rebecca smiles at him reassuringly, before offering to Henry, “We can probably do a weekend trip out to Wales, if you like, see Caernarfon Castle.”

Henry’s eyes light up, and they start planning the trip out right then and there. After dinner, Henry goes to his room to work on his schoolwork, and Rebecca starts to clear the dishes from the table, but Ted stops her with the gentle question, “Everything all right, Rebecca?”

Rebecca pauses, before carefully setting the dishes in the sink. “I rather think I should be asking you that question, actually.”

When she turns to look at him, Ted looks genuinely surprised. “Becca, sweetheart, I don’t…”

“Everyone thought today went really well,” Rebecca says, evenly. “We got lots of great footage for the PR team, and the players were thrilled to see you.” She pauses before saying next, “But I’m not so sure you were thrilled to be there.”

Ted inhales. “Rebecca—”

“Did I push you too much?” Rebecca asks urgently, unable to keep the words back any longer. “Was it too much, too soon? And don’t tell me there isn’t anything wrong, Ted, I know you. You think I can’t tell by now when you’re having to grit your teeth and bear it? You think I couldn’t see how stressed you were today, with your hands in your pockets and your shoulders all the way up to your ears?”

Ted is quiet for a long moment. At last he says, quietly, “It wasn’t…it wasn’t that bad.”

Something inside of Rebecca eases, at hearing Ted admit the truth. “But it wasn’t good either.”

Ted slowly sits down at the kitchen island. “No,” he admits heavily. “No, it wasn’t.” He looks up at her with a sorrowful expression. “I wanted it to be. God, you have no idea how much I wanted to just walk in there and feel nothing but joy. And I did feel joy, it just…it was work too.” He laughs a little, looking down at his hands. “It didn’t use to feel like work, this job.”

Rebecca exhales. “But now it does?”

Ted lifts a shoulder, not quite looking at her. “Now I’ve got Henry living with me, I’ve got you, I’ve got…” his throat works as he continues, “I’ve got Doc Sharon looking me in my face and asking me why I’ve been working myself to death for years, and I’ve got Doc Bhamra telling me I can’t keep working myself to death, and I—” He stops.

Rebecca wants to press, to push for more, but for once when it comes to Ted, she shows restraint. She waits for him to speak instead.

And he does, glancing up at her as he admits, “I don’t know how to do this job, coach this team, and not give it everything I have. But giving it everything I have is…Rebecca, it was wrecking me. Most nights during the season I couldn’t even get to sleep, I barely used my kitchen to do anything but make you biscuits, I couldn’t read a book or watch TV or do anything except eat, drink, breathe this sport.”

He stops to inhale sharply, shoulders heaving, and Rebecca just watches, squeezing her hands together, her throat stinging. Part of her is already self-flagellating, whispering about how she didn’t know, how could she have not known—

But isn’t that the point? They wouldn’t have gotten here, Ted wouldn’t have landed in that hospital in the first place, if it hadn’t been exactly this bad.

Ted’s eyes are wet now, and he says to her, urgently, “I’m so grateful for this job, this team. I told you years ago, you changed my life when you gave me this job, and I wouldn’t take it back for anything, Rebecca, not a damn thing in the world.”

Somehow, through her stinging throat, Rebecca smiles, and finally presses. “And?”

A corner of Ted’s mouth tilts up, despite his obvious pain, because he knows her too, and he knows what she’s asking him for—that final piece of truth that’ll settle this at last. “And when I think of going back, about picking it all up again—I feel like I’m setting my foot into a bear trap on purpose, just waiting for its jaws to snap shut on me. I can’t…I don’t know how to do the job I was doing and be a good dad to Henry, a good partner to you. And I don’t…”

He trails off, and Rebecca picks up the thread. “And you don’t want to go back and try to do the job a different way,” she finishes for him.

Slowly, Ted shakes his head.

Rebecca breathes in and out. She thinks for a moment, keeps quiet until she knows what she should say, and exactly how she wants to say it. And then she comes forward and stands before Ted, carefully holding his face, so dear to her, in the palm of her hands.

“Seven years,” she says. “Seven years, one Premier League title, two FA Cup titles, multiple runs in the Champions League, and one promotion from the Championship. That is a hell of a run by any measure, Coach Lasso.” As a tear finally slips from Ted’s eye, Rebecca gently presses a kiss to his forehead, and she finishes, “And it’s a hell of a legacy to end on.”

Ted lifts his chin a little, his face so heartbreakingly open as it searches hers, looking for something—and she can feel it in his body when he finds it, the tension leaving his shoulders at last. “Thank you,” Ted whispers, before dropping his head to rest against her shoulders, his arms coming round her waist to pull her in a close embrace, as he finally puts that last burden down.

Chapter 8

“It’s been a hell of a run.” Inside Ted Lasso’s second act and life after coaching
Trent Crimm, Chief Football Writer

For this profile, I meet Ted Lasso at a charming Russian restaurant in North London, where the pelmenis are delicious and they have every flavor of vodka you could imagine and some you wouldn’t wish to. (Horseradish vodka? For what?)

Ted Lasso is uninterested in the vodka, of course. Since his heart attack last fall, he’s gone teetotal, abandoning his former liking for a glass of whiskey for trendy “mocktails” and his usual diet of pub fare for brown rice and grilled vegetables. He hasn’t gone full vegetarian yet, but red meat is definitely no longer on the menu.

“The mocktails are pretty fun,” Lasso tells me of his new lifestyle, “But either way, the doctors were pretty clear, if I didn’t start taking care of myself properly, as they put it, I’d be back in intensive care within a year or two.” He shrugs and says, “And I’d like to see Henry graduate, so.”

He delivers that line in a light tone that belies the seriousness of the topic, both because his own father didn’t live to see him graduate, and because on that fateful day, it was an open question whether Ted Lasso would live long enough to see his son’s graduation.

Practically everyone knows the details, but here is the story in brief: in early October, Ted Lasso went into cardiac arrest in Rebecca Welton’s office. He was rushed to hospital and straight into emergency surgery, which saved his life. He spent over two months out on medical leave, with Roy Kent taking over as caretaker manager, and in May of this year, Ted Lasso announced his retirement as Richmond’s manager. Instead, he would be joining Richmond’s academy as the new director (replacing the outgoing director) and, in a surprise twist, also becoming part-owner of the club, thanks to Alistair Crane selling him half of his shares at, reportedly, the low cost of one pound.

Over the pelmeni and vareniki dumplings, I ask him outright if Alistair Crane sold him a 2.5% stake in the club for only one pound. Lasso just gives me that legendary smile of his, dimples on display, eyes twinkling.

“Well, Trent, I could tell you that, but then I’d have Alistair Crane hollering at me about revealing him to be a generous and kind-hearted man, underneath all the scowling,” Lasso tells me.

What about the rumor that Alistair Crane has already written into his will that Ted Lasso will gain the remaining 3.4% of his stake in the club?

Lasso just shakes his head. “Lips are sealed. Plus, I’m convinced Alistair’s gonna live forever, so I’m not worrying over it.”

When I finally get ahold of Alistair Crane, I’m treated to a five minute scold, complete with foul language, before Crane finally says to me, “Ted Lasso has done more for this club than anyone else in living memory, why shouldn’t he own a part of it?”

When I put it to him that essentially giving away valuable ownership shares in a Premier League club is a shockingly generous gesture, one that indicates the depth of gratitude and friendship between the two men, Crane says, in genuine exasperation, “Oh, fuck off,” before hanging up.

But Alistair Crane is just one among many of Ted Lasso’s admirers. A running joke among football fans is how even supporters of rival clubs can’t bring themselves to hate Lasso, even when his club’s beating theirs in a match, or pipping them to Champions League qualification.

As a friend of mine who is a lifelong Chelsea supporter (and thus deeply bitter about the club’s descent into mid-table mediocrity over the last few seasons) said to me once, in real frustration, “I ought to hate him, I should hate him, but I can’t do it. He’s just too damned decent!”

News of Lasso's heart attack went through the league like a thunderbolt, with seemingly every pundit, fan, player and opposing manager lining up to sing Lasso’s praises and wish him well. I ask if he was surprised by the outpouring of support after his heart attack.

“I was humbled by it,” Lasso tells me. “Just realizing how many people, people who’ve never met you, are rooting for you to be okay…it’s a humbling feeling. I never want to take that for granted. Truly.”

The goodwill towards Ted Lasso is as close to unanimous as the British public can get about anyone not named Sir David Attenborough, and nowhere is that goodwill more obvious than when it comes to Lasso’s personal relationship with Rebecca Welton, the majority owner of AFC Richmond. For years now, the nature of their relationship has been speculated on by the tabloid media, but when it emerged this past fall that Lasso and his son Henry had moved into Ms. Welton’s London residence, the reaction among the general public was muted. (No matter how many blaring headlines appeared in certain tabloids.) It was a rather ironic twist that by the time actual evidence appeared of their relationship being more than platonic, the speculation had died down to the point where people met the confirmation with a shrug.

“They won us the title, mate,” one Richmond fan said to me in a pub. “You think I give a shit about what they get up to in the bedroom after the trophies they've won? Rebecca Welton could parade Coach Lasso down the street with him in a leash and nothing but his underpants on and I would still not give a single fuck.”

Lasso chokes on his mocktail when I relay this quote to him. “Well, uh, that is certainly a robust way to show their support,” he manages to say, face pink. “But I don’t think there’s anything particularly scandalous about me and Rebecca, so it’s nice to hear others feel the same.”

He smilingly won’t go into any further detail than that, but the moment at his last home game said it all. Ted Lasso doing the lap of honor to salute the fans, teary-eyed throughout as he clapped, only pausing when yet another one of his players would pull him into an embrace. The fans gave him a standing ovation in return, the song they’d coined for him years ago ringing through the stadium. Right before he was about to disappear into the tunnel, looking overcome, Rebecca Welton emerged from the crowd to give him a hug and a quick kiss to the mouth, before they disappeared arm-in-arm through the tunnel, the fans roaring both their names. Open confirmation without a word being spoken, and the public on their side throughout, just as it had been for the past year.

But it would have felt churlish, somehow, to quibble at the relationship between two consenting, single adults—at least in this context, with the memory of Lasso’s health issues still so vivid, with the knowledge that this would be the last time we would ever see him on Richmond’s pitch as its coach. Of course we all clapped and cheered for that kiss, how could we not? It was the sort of fairytale ending you don’t expect to see in real life, except that fairytale endings have been Ted Lasso’s bread and butter for the past seven years in England. From the unlikely promotion from the Championship, to the even more unlikely Premier League title win (with a few FA Cup trophies and notable Champions League runs mixed in) we’ve gotten used to Ted Lasso’s particular brand of magic.

I put the question to him: does his career in England ever strike him as unlikely? Did he have any idea, seven years ago, that this is where it would all end, with him as the most successful coach in Richmond’s history?

“Heck no,” Lasso tells me without hesitation. “It is safe to say that seven years ago, I had absolutely no idea what I was in for.” His smile turns a little rueful, as he adds, “Which y’all in the press made very clear.”

I cannot confirm that I-being reminded of my first introduction to Coach Lasso and my now-infamous demand to know if this was all a fucking joke—blush a bit, but I cannot not confirm it either.

“But no,” Lasso continues. “No, I never saw any of this coming.” His smile grows smaller, more wistful, as he says, “As a wise person told me, it’s been a hell of a run. I’ve been lucky.”

Then why bring it all to an end?

Lasso is quiet for a moment, fingers drumming on the table. “Because doing the job, the way I was doing it, was killing me,” he admits at last. “It was killing me, and I couldn’t admit it to anyone, least of all myself. So the universe decided to give me a sign, a painful one, and I had to listen.”

It’s no secret that managing a football team is a notoriously stressful and lonely position—Pep Guardiola famously lost most of his hair during his first year coaching Barcelona—but Ted Lasso always seemed to carry the burden more lightly than his peers, his bright, mustachioed smile and aw-shucks charm dazzling all who witnessed it. It was the reason his heart attack came as such a shock, not just because you never expect someone to have a heart attack, but because we didn’t expect it for him in particular.

“What was wrong with the way you were doing the job?” I ask.

Another long pause from Lasso—which is rare, I must say. Lasso’s ease with the press, even under the most stressful of circumstances, is legendary. It’s shocking to see the man at a loss for words.

“I didn’t know when to stop doing it,” Lasso finally says. “And I didn’t know how not to take it home with me.” Haltingly, carefully, he starts to detail what previously had only been hinted at by club sources, and only then anonymously—the ways in which he took on more and more responsibilities within the club, wanting to be apprised of the goings-on with the academy, the marketing and PR department, scouting and transfers, so on and so forth. Not because anyone at the club asked him to take on the extra duties, but because he couldn’t help but get involved. He loved the work, and felt a responsibility to do it well. And the more he was able to take on and still lead the club to success, the more he felt he had to keep up with it, until it finally began to overwhelm even his indefatigable energies.

“I was struggling,” Lasso concedes. “I wasn’t sleeping well, I wasn’t eating right. I would be anxious and worried over everything—even the smallest things—but I’d gotten myself into such a state that I couldn’t even admit how bad it was, not even to myself.”

Did anyone else suspect, or try to talk to him about it?

“Coach Beard, he had an idea that I was struggling, but not how bad.” Lasso shakes his head a little. “I think…if anything, that’s been the real eye-opener for me. I look at the support I have now, the way people have been lifting me up all year long, and I wish I could go back in time and tell myself, “It’s going to be all right. You can ask for help, and the world won’t end when you do.’”

He is, he tells me, still bowled over by his good luck that he wasn’t alone in his office when he went into cardiac arrest, but that he’d gone upstairs to Rebecca Welton’s office for a quick chat. He admits that he had been experiencing symptoms for a while that day, but had written them off as heartburn, or as another one of the panic attacks he’d been secretly struggling with for years. “It’s incredible the ways you can keep fooling yourself that you’re all right, right up until the moment your heart’s exploding inside your chest and every breath you take feels like your last,” Lasso tells me.

Carefully, I ask about the panic attacks. Lasso is a little uncomfortable going into detail, but he willingly shares that he’s struggled with anxiety and depression in the past, but has recently gone and found a therapist who has given him the tools to better handle his mental health before it hits a crisis point. And in the wake of his heart attack, his son moved to London to be closer to him. The team and his coworkers all rallied around him. He was told that he would recover, but that he would need to slow down and take care of himself properly.

And once Ted Lasso was finally forced to slow down, he looked around at his life, and he didn’t like what he saw.

“I realized I could keep going down the path I was going, and end up not only letting everyone around me down, but letting myself down,” Lasso says. “I was going to be headed for an even worse crash.”

And he didn’t want to crash. He wanted to spend time with his son and with the woman he was falling in love with. He also wanted the best for the team he loved, for the players who trusted him, and the supporters whose hopes rested on his shoulders. And as the weeks passed, and as his health slowly improved, Lasso came to the conclusion that Richmond, the club whose success he’d been so instrumental in, had finally reached the point where it could survive and even thrive without him.

And that he, very possibly, could survive and even thrive without coaching.

It was a difficult process, confiding in those closest to him of his decision. Harder, he says, because of how unfailingly supportive everyone was. The club knew by December, and started an internal search for a successor, but—in another stroke of good luck—that was the time in which Richmond’s play and results started to improve, with Roy Kent eventually leading the team to a top-four spot and automatic Champions League qualification by April.

And so in May, Ted Lasso and AFC Richmond announced that he would be stepping down as coach by season’s end. The shock and sting of the announcement was soothed by the fact that Lasso would be staying on as the new academy director and (thanks to Alistair Crane’s generosity) as a minority owner, but even so—it was an earthquake within English football. The pundits disapproved, the fans were upset and grieving. But Lasso was steadfast. The club would be all right without him, the players were in safe hands with Roy Kent and the rest of the coaching staff, which would remain unchanged.

And as the reality sank in, it began to seem fitting, somehow, that this was how the Lasso experiment ended, that this strange American manager who managed to give us all so many fairy-tale endings would be able to write his own ending—going out on his own terms, with his beloved club left in a safe pair of hands and in good standing.

It seems even more fitting now, looking at Lasso across the table. He looks healthy and fit, but moreover, he looks calm, settled in his skin. If he’s worried about what life will look like for him after coaching, it doesn’t show. He’s confident that he will be able to make Richmond’s academy (already well-regarded) into even more of a success, that he will be able to step back and let Roy Kent coach the first-team squad and take Richmond into a new era, one where he will no longer play the role of unlikely talisman.

And who knows? He might be right. As one of the many people who were proven wrong about Ted Lasso, I know better now than to bet against him.

Trent Crimm @crimmt
There is something wildly hilarious about working for weeks on an in-depth profile of Ted Lasso, only for it to be overshadowed on the day of publication by photos of Rebecca Welton wearing a ring on her left hand.

Trent Crimm @crimmt
Is she engaged? Secretly married? Or just a fabulously wealthy woman who bought herself a wildly expensive sapphire and diamond ring? Judging from the trending topics, the internet is aflame trying to figure it out.

Trent Crimm @crimmt
The answer, per Ted Lasso himself, is a). They are engaged.

Trent Crimm @crimmt
Here is my profile of the man who, when asked about his engagement, confirmed it by saying, “She liked it, so I put a ring on it.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/sport/footb…