Page 58 of Rivals and Liars

Leire coughs and thumps her chest in surprise.

"Sorry—was that too blunt?" Candela reaches for the recorder to turn it off, but Leire waves her hand to stop her.

"It's fine, it's a question I expected—just maybe not as the first one." She smiles, a little flushed.

"I can reorder things. I don't need to follow any particular structure here. I'll edit it carefully and I can—"

"Seriously, it's okay." Leire takes a couple of sips of water and breathes in before answering. "Okay. I think I knew early, though maybe too early to know what to do with it. By sixteen I had a pretty clear sense of it, even if I wasn't calling it that yet. In my head it was just confusion—I kept trying to convince myself it was a phase, that it was normal at my age not to have things figured out. I called it everything except what it actually was. I think that was my way of avoiding something that scared me a lot."

"And in tennis? What's that second world like for someone going through that?"

The tennis player takes a few seconds to find the right word.

"Quiet," she says finally, without a trace of hesitation. "It's not that there's open hostility about it, but at least in my world, it was something nobody talked about—though now that I think about it, maybe I was the one avoiding those conversations. And when you spend years on a circuit without hearing anyone talk about it like it's normal, the silence starts to feel like a rule. You learn that some things make other people uncomfortable, so you just don't say them."

"When did it start weighing on you more? It's been a lot of years of silence," Candela continues. She jots down the occasional note to flag certain details, but mostly she listens closely and tries not to interrupt, because she knows better than anyone how hard this is.

"When it stops being just yours," Leire says, pausing to think. "When it only affected me, I could manage it. I was focused on tennis and everything else felt secondary. But when there's someone else—someone who loves you, and you realize you love them back, and you still ask her to hide—" She leaves the sentence unfinished and takes a moment. "That's when it really starts to get complicated."

"What did you feel when you finished a match and couldn't look at that person in the stands the way you would have if things were different?"

"Like I was cheating. Like I wasn't being honest—not with the crowd, not with myself, but with her. Every time I walked onto the court and acted like she didn't exist, or gave her the same glance I'd give anyone else, all I was telling her was that she wasn't worth enough for me to face my fear for her. And that wasn't it at all—it was the opposite. I was so scared it paralyzed me."

"Can you define that fear? What exactly were you afraid of?"

"Everything." Leire looks down at her hands, feeling for a second the same dread she used to carry back then. "Sponsors, the press, my dad, what people might think of me—ever since I was sixteen." The tennis player smiles bitterly. "I was terrified of disappointing people I didn't even know, people who didn't care about me, and while I was busy being scared of all that, she was waiting. She was still there, loving me, and I kept asking her to stay in the dark a little longer. I always had an excuse—the season, the sponsorship deal, anything to avoid facing myself."

Candela writes something in her notepad and takes a sip of water.

"Everyone knows that person who was waiting has a name. Can we say it?"

Leire smiles.

"Yes, of course. Kate Brogan." She says it with pride and something close to adoration.

"How long did you keep the relationship hidden?"

"About three years. When I met her—" Leire travels back in time, smiling at the memory. "—she was like my opposite. She didn't hide her sexuality and she didn't care if people saw her with another woman. She lived her life out in the open, not worried about anything except being happy, and I couldn't understand how she did it. We started seeing each other in secret—at first with no strings attached, just having fun—but over the months it turned into something else, and by the time I realized it, I was in love with her."

"At the US Open final you decided to take the leap. Was it planned?"

"Not at all. When I woke up that morning I had a lot on my mind, but making my feelings for Kate public was not part of the plan," the tennis player says.

"So what happened that made you do it?"

"I understood that I'd asked her to wait too long, and that Kate couldn't keep standing by my side settling for the scraps I gave her. That's what really scared me." Leire smiles, feeling a flutter of nerves in her stomach. "In that moment none of the rest of it mattered. I jumped, and it turned out I had an enormous parachute strapped to my back—so big I didn't even feel the drop."

After several more questions that help Leire tell her whole truth, they reach the end of the interview.

"One last question and we're done: do you regret jumping?" Candela looks at her steadily.

"Not for a second. I only regret not doing it sooner."

The journalist turns off the recorder and the two of them sit quietly for a moment.

"How do you feel? You seemed relaxed by the end—are you okay?" she asks.

"Yeah, great. Thank you for letting me do this."