Read Chapter 3: The Old Kit Bag

The equipment room smelled of leather, sweat, and decades. Camille pushed through the heavy door and let it swing shut behind her, the click echoing in the narrow space. Rows of lockers lined the walls, each one tagged with a faded number, and shelves sagged under the weight of old boots and mismatched training cones. A single bulb hummed overhead, casting everything in jaundiced light.

She'd come looking for a cold pack. The kind she preferred, the gel ones, not the cheap instant-ice the staff used on the juniors. Moreau had given her a key card that opened most doors in the complex—"for discretion," he'd said—and this was the first time she'd used it for something other than the treatment room.

Three steps in, she tripped.

The bag was wedged between a broken tackling dummy and a stack of mildewed towels. Her foot caught its strap and she stumbled, catching herself on a shelf and sending a tin of strapping tape clattering to the floor. She cursed under her breath and looked down.

Old leather kit bag. Scuffed at the corners, the handle worn smooth in the middle where a hand had gripped it thousands of times. A small brass tag near the zip, tarnished green at the edges, engraved with a name.

Roussel.

Her own name. Her breath stopped.

For a moment she just stood there, one hand still braced against the shelf, staring at those seven letters. Roussel wasn't uncommon in the south—not like some names—but it wasn't Dupont either. Her father had been from Perpignan, her mother from Nîmes. There were Roussels scattered all through the rugby belt like seeds from a dandelion.

She knelt. The floor was cold through her trousers. She pulled the bag toward her, surprised by its weight, and unzipped the main compartment slowly, as if it might bite.

Inside, a scrum cap. Old style, the kind you didn't see anymore—thin foam, leather-strap chin buckle, faded to the color of weak tea. She lifted it out. The inside label bore a name in neat black marker: *V. Roussel*.

Beneath the cap, a folded envelope. Thick paper, the kind you bought in stationery shops, not the flimsy stuff from the supermarket. No stamp, no address. Just a name written on the front in an angular, forceful hand.

*Vincent.*

Her fingers hovered over it. She could read it. No one would know. The bag had been abandoned, stuffed behind a dummy and forgotten for god knows how long. But the words of the medical file surfaced in her mind—the emergency contact listed as *Vincent Roussel, brother*. And the name of the dead brother in Julien's file. Vincent.

She did not open the letter.

Instead she slid it back into the bag, folded the scrum cap on top of it, and zipped the whole thing shut. Then she looked around the room for somewhere to put it, somewhere safe. Her treatment room had a small closet with a lock. She could keep it there. Not for herself—she told herself this firmly—but until she could figure out who it belonged to, who had stored it here, why it still existed at all.

She hoisted the bag and carried it out without looking back.

---

Her office—she still wasn't used to calling it that—was a converted storage room off the main physio bay, barely big enough for a desk, a treatment bed, and the filing cabinet Moreau had installed. She cleared a shelf above the cabinet, wiped it down with antiseptic, and placed the kit bag there. Up close, like that, it seemed smaller. More tired.

She stood on her toes to look at it for a long moment. The brass tag caught the light.

"Later," she said aloud, to no one. "When I know more."

The clock on her desk read 17:42. Eighteen minutes until the meeting with Julien. She had time to review his file once more, but she'd read it enough times that she could have recited it from memory. The reconstructions. The degeneration. The repeated concussions, each one listed with clinical detachment that belied the horror of what they actually meant.

Instead, she sat down and checked her phone. One message, from her mother. *Your cousin in Montpellier says you've been seen at the stadium. Is it true?* Camille typed a quick reply—*Yes, but I'll explain later*—and set the phone face-down.

She looked at the bag again. What kind of man kept a dead brother's kit bag in the bowels of a rugby stadium? And what kind of man wrote letters he never sent?

---

Julien Fournier did not live in the team hotel like the younger players. He had an apartment in the old town, a narrow three-story building with yellow shutters and a door that opened directly onto the cobbled street. Camille stood outside it at six o'clock sharp, one finger on the buzzer, heart thumping harder than the situation warranted.

He buzzed her up without a word.

The apartment told her more than any medical file. Trophy cabinet in the hall, but the glass was dusty. Photographs on the wall—teams, podiums, a Test cap in a frame—all of them yellowing, like they belonged to a previous life. The living room she was led into was sparse. A leather sofa. A coffee table with old issues of *Midi Olympique* stacked irregularly. A single window looked out over the cathedral roof; the last of the afternoon light slanted through and cut the room in two.

Julien stood by the window, a glass of water in his hand. Not wine. She noticed that. His hand was bandaged cleanly—the dressings she'd applied earlier still in place, no blood seeping through. Good.

"Dr. Roussel." His voice was flat.

"Camille. Just Camille." She stayed by the door. "You know why Moreau offered me the job."

"I know he offered you money to keep me quiet." Julien set the glass down on the windowsill. "I can guess the rest."

"It's not about keeping you quiet. It's about keeping you—"

"Alive?" He looked at her directly, and in that moment the anger she'd seen in the locker room was entirely absent. Replaced by something older. Tired. She thought again about the letter in that bag. About Vincent. About the way he'd signed his name—his brother's name—as his emergency contact years after the man had died. "If I don't play this season, I lose everything. The house. The investors. The hotel I put my name on in Perpignan. My brother's kids need school fees. You understand?"

"The club will support you—"

"The club wants to drop me." He cut her off, not harshly, just factually. "Moreau didn't call you here to save my career. He called you here so that when I collapse on the pitch, he can say he did everything he could. It's a cover story. A very well-paid one."

Camille was quiet. He wasn't entirely wrong.

"I read your file," she said. "All of it."

Julien's eyebrow rose. "And you still came here."

"Your file says you should have retired three years ago." She took a step into the room. "I want to know why you didn't."

He looked at her for a long moment. Then he turned to the window and looked out, down the street where evening was settling into the cracks between the old stones.

"Because he never got to finish his season." His voice was low. Barely a whisper. "The least I can do is finish mine."

The words hung in the air. Camille felt something shift in her chest—a small, tectonic adjustment she didn't have a name for. She didn't ask who. She didn't need to.

"We'll start tomorrow," she said. "Pool. Seven a.m. Bring your oldest, baggiest shorts."

"What, no warm-up lap?" He almost smiled. Almost.

"You'll be lucky if you can stand after what I put you through." She turned toward the door. Stopped. "Julien."

He looked at her.

"I found an old kit bag today," she said. "In the equipment room. It had your family name on it."

The change in him was instant. The shoulder rolled forward, the jaw tightened, and his eyes went somewhere far away. When he spoke, his voice was a blade. "Where is it?"

"Safe. I'll return it when it's ready."

"There's a letter—"

"I didn't read it." She held his gaze. "It's not mine to read."

Julien opened his mouth, closed it. For the first time, she saw him at a loss. The captain, the wrecking ball, the man who shattered mirrors with medicine balls—reduced to silence by an old kit bag and the ghost of a brother who never got to finish.

---

At two in the morning, the screaming started.

It tore through the old apartment building like an animal caught in a trap, muffled by stone walls but unmistakable. Julien sat bolt upright in bed, drenched in sweat, the sheets twisted around his legs. His chest heaved. The tattoo over his heart—that scrum cap—seemed to pulse with every frantic beat.

In the dream, Vincent was still alive. He was twenty-four, grinning, standing on the pitch in the floodlights. And then he was gone, and Julien was left holding a scrum cap that had blood on it. Always the same dream. Always the same moment.

He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes and breathed until his heart stopped trying to escape his ribs.

On the nightstand, his phone glowed. A message.

*See you at seven.* — C.

Not from the physio. From Camille. He'd given her his number without thinking.

He looked at her name for a long time, then set the phone down, face-up, and did not sleep again.