Read Chapter 2: The Contract

Camille had barely set down her coffee when a voice cut through the physio room's morning quiet.

"Roussel. President's office. Now."

She turned. Coach Delacroix stood in the doorway, arms crossed, face unreadable. He didn't wait for her answer.

She followed him down the corridor, past the weight room where a few players were already grinding through reps, past the video analysis suite with its wall of screens. The club's corridors smelled of pine disinfectant and old sweat—a smell she was learning meant home. Or at least, employment.

Delacroix held the door to the president's office. The room was all dark wood and chrome, and President Moreau sat behind a desk the size of a small car, shuffling papers. He was a thin man in his sixties with the leathery tan of someone who spent his winters in Courchevel and his summers on a yacht.

"Camille Roussel," Moreau said, not looking up. "Sit."

She sat. Delacroix closed the door and remained standing near it, arms crossed again. The posture of a man who didn't plan to stay long.

Moreau slid a folder across the polished surface. It was thick, dog-eared, the kind of file that had been through five seasons of club doctors.

"Julien Fournier," Moreau said. "His medical file. Read it."

She opened it. The first page was a standard intake form—date of birth, blood type, contact information. The second page was where things started to go wrong.

*Left knee: grade III medial collateral ligament tear, complete. Reconstructed 2014, 2016, 2018.*

Three surgeries on the same ligament. That wasn't in the injury report. The public story had been a "minor strain" in 2018.

Page three: *Chronic patellar tendinopathy, left. Degenerative changes noted on MRI. Pain management protocol ongoing.*

Page four: *Previous concussion protocol ×4. 2018, 2019, 2020, 2022. LOC in 2022 incident. Baseline neurocognitive testing showing persistent deficits in processing speed.*

She read slower.

Page five was the most recent report, dated three weeks ago. A scan of his lumbar spine showing facet joint degeneration. A separate note in handwriting she didn't recognize: *Injection recommended. Anti-inflammatory efficacy declining. Consider steroid cycle under medical supervision to manage through season.*

"His back," she said, voice flat.

"Not in the press," Delacroix said. "That's a muscle spasm. In the press."

Moreau finally looked up. His eyes were pale blue, cold and assessing.

"So you understand the situation," he said.

"He's not just carrying one injury. He's carrying five. Six, if you count the concussions." She closed the file. "You want me to fix him."

"We want you to keep him playing."

Camille let the distinction sit between them for a moment. Then she said, "What does that mean exactly, in practice?"

Moreau leaned forward, folding his hands. "Delacroix tells me you have a reputation. Not just for skill, but for judgment. You worked with athletes in Paris who had their own... complications. You're not afraid of them."

"I'm not afraid of athletes," she said. "I'm afraid of medical negligence."

A flicker of something passed across Moreau's face. Respect, maybe. Or irritation.

"Then let me be clear about what we're offering," he said. "You stay with the first team. You handle Julien exclusively—rehab, on-field management, pain protocols, everything. We reimburse your equipment budget, we give you office access, full staff privileges. And if Julien plays at full capacity by the end of the season, you walk away with a bonus of sixty thousand euros."

Camille didn't react. She was too busy calculating what the file had told her.

"Sixty thousand to play a man whose spine is grinding itself into dust."

"His spine is grinding itself into dust," Moreau repeated, tasting each word. "Yes. That's the situation."

"You want me to manage him through the season, not rehabilitate him."

Delacroix shifted his weight against the door. "Rehabilitate him, and you'll be waiting three seasons. He's thirty-four. There is no three seasons. There's this one, and then it's over. He knows it. We know it. The only person who doesn't know it is the press, and it's your job to make sure that stays true."

Camille looked at the file again. Underneath the medical jargon, there was something else. A pattern of decisions made by a man who kept choosing pain over retirement.

"Why does he want this so badly?"

Moreau's face didn't change, but something in his eyes flickered. "Ask him."

"I'm asking you."

"Then you have your answer," he said, and the finality in his voice told her the meeting had reached its conclusion. Moreau stood, extended a hand across the desk. "Do we have an agreement?"

Camille didn't take the hand. She stood on her own.

"I'll read the file fully," she said. "And I'll meet with him before I agree to anything. If he can't work with me, none of this matters."

Moreau let his hand drop, unbothered. "He'll work with you. He doesn't have a choice."

She left the office with the file under her arm and walked to the physio room, closing the door behind her. Then she opened the file again and started from the beginning.

She read for forty minutes.

When she was done, she sat back, staring at the ceiling.

It wasn't just his knee. Or his back. Or his brain. It was the pattern of it—injuries sustained in games that had already mathematically been decided. Losing games. Pointless games at the end of lost seasons. Games that should have ended with him on the bench, protecting himself for the next year.

Instead he'd thrown his body into contact again and again. Like he was trying to punish himself.

She flipped to the back of the file. A final page. A name in the corner that made her pause.

*Emergency contact: Vincent Roussel.*

Same surname.

She thought of the equipment tech who had shown her around on day one, a wiry old man named Lafitte who'd pointed out the lockers and said *everything has a ghost around here, if you listen hard enough.*

She hadn't understood then.

She closed the file and looked at her own arm, where seven years ago she'd pulled a shard of glass from her own skin after a French federation official had thrown a celebratory bottle into a wall too close to where she was kneeling. Glass that could have severed a tendon. Glass that no one had apologized for.

She hadn't been trying to punish herself that night. She'd been trying to belong.

But she understood the instinct.

Camille set the file down, took out her phone, and dialed the number at the top of page one.

It rang three times before a voice answered, gruff and half-asleep.

"Fournier."

"It's Camille Roussel. The physiotherapist you met yesterday."

A pause. "The one who stopped me from bleeding on the changing room floor."

"That's me." She took a breath. "I've read your medical file. All of it. The real one."

"I don't know what you're talk—"

"Meet me at the club at six tonight," she cut in. "We need to talk about what you're actually asking your body to do."

Silence on the line. She could almost hear him weighing his options.

"If I say no?" His voice was low, a little rough.

"Then I walk away, and Moreau hires someone less careful." She paused. "And you finish out your last season on their schedule, not yours."

Another silence. Then: "Six o'clock."

He hung up.

Camille set the phone down and looked at the file. The weight of it felt like the grain of the enormous trunk that Julien carried when he walked onto the pitch—the burden of a man who had everything on the outside and nothing on the inside that quieted his own noise.

She didn't know what Vincent had meant to him.

But she was starting to understand the shape his grief had taken. And it was shaped exactly like a rugby pitch.