Updated Apr 10, 2026 • ~10 min read
Chapter 15: Penalty Kicks
Zoe
She had met Mia King approximately forty-seven times as Lucas’s PT, and Mia had been perfectly friendly each time in the way that children are friendly with adults who belong to their parent’s world — polite, occasionally curious, perfectly ready to move on. This was different.
This was being introduced.
Lucas had done it simply, in the kitchen of his house on a Saturday afternoon, Mia already in her cleats because she’d been informed there would be penalty kicks in the backyard and had been ready for twenty minutes. “Mia, you remember Zoe.” “Yeah, I know Zoe,” Mia had said, and then looked at her father for one very focused second and then back at Zoe with an expression of what could only be described as profound unsurprise — as though she’d been waiting, had filed the prediction away, and was now simply processing the confirmation.
“Hi,” Zoe said.
“Hi.” A pause. “Dad said we’re doing penalty kicks.”
“That’s the plan.”
“Do you know about the driven low shot? Because Dad showed me but I think he’s been doing it slightly wrong.”
Lucas, beside her, made a sound of offense.
“Show me what you’ve got,” Zoe said.
The backyard of Lucas’s house backed onto a strip of garden and then a fence, and he’d put up a small portable goal at some point — the goal Mia used for Sunday morning warm-ups, scuffed along the posts from heavy use and painted at the base with what appeared to be grass stain and ambition. Zoe stood at the edge of the penalty area — marked in chalk on the grass, Mia’s work, the lines approximate but the dimensions roughly correct, which was impressive for a seven-year-old — and watched Mia line up her first shot.
The ball was called Pelé Jr., and it was a size-three regulation ball with a felt-tip signature written on the panels in permanent marker. Mia had told her this on the walk from the kitchen door to the goal, along with the information that the original Pelé Jr. had been retired after a match incident involving a particularly enthusiastic header and a drainage gully. This was Pelé Jr. the Second.
Mia’s technique was good for her age — better than good, actually. She had her father’s natural body mechanics, the ease of movement that marked players who had learned the game before they learned to think about it. She struck the ball — a right-footed drive, low, aiming for the corner — and it went in cleanly.
“Good,” Zoe said.
Mia retrieved the ball with the air of someone who knows they’ve done well and is waiting for more specific feedback. “What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing’s wrong with it. Your plant foot is landing a little wide, which means you’re opening your hip too early. If you square it just a little more —” She came to stand behind Mia and adjusted the angle with her hands on the small shoulders. “Like that. Now the inside of your foot has a cleaner line to the corner.”
Mia processed this. She was exactly like her father in this way — she listened to technical information with complete attention and no performance of already knowing. She set the ball down, adjusted her approach, and struck again.
Bottom corner, clean.
She turned around with an expression of satisfaction so complete it was almost blinding. “That’s better.”
“That’s better,” Zoe agreed.
Lucas, leaning in the garden doorway with his arms crossed and his face doing the thing it did when he was being careful not to look too pleased about something, said: “See? I told you it was the plant foot.”
“You said the approach angle,” Mia said.
“Which affects the plant foot.”
“Those are different things, Dad.” She turned to Zoe with the absolute confidence of a child appealing to a correct authority. “They’re different things, right?”
“They’re related things,” Zoe said diplomatically.
“But separate.”
“But separate.”
Mia absorbed this verdict and turned back to the goal with the focused satisfaction of someone who has won a point and is moving on to the next one. They did twenty minutes of penalty kicks — Zoe adjusted Mia’s strike twice more, once on follow-through and once on her first touch of the ball from a standing position — and Mia scored three consecutive perfect driven low shots to the corners, alternating sides, with the precision of a girl who had been listening to the technical notes and putting them into immediate practice.
After the third one she turned around and stood in the mild May afternoon in her cleats and her Harbor FC training kit (child-sized, official, Lucas had gotten it for her birthday) and was completely, unashamedly triumphant.
“Three in a row,” she announced.
“Three in a row,” Zoe confirmed.
“I’m better than Dad.”
“You’re — getting there,” Zoe said carefully.
“I’m definitely better than Dad at penalties specifically,” Mia said, with the precision of a child who understood exactly how to calibrate a claim for maximum accuracy. “He gets in his head.”
“I don’t get in my head,” Lucas said.
“Mum’s Penalty Kicks are Dad’s most viewed YouTube video and it’s compilation of him missing penalties.”
Zoe pressed her lips together to prevent the smile from being too large.
“You’ve been watching that video,” Lucas said.
“Helen showed me.”
“Helen.” He said the name with the tone of someone making a mental note about an act of mutiny.
Mia retrieved Pelé Jr. from the back of the net and tucked it under her arm, and looked at Zoe with the direct assessment of a child deciding something. “You’re really good,” she said. “Like, good at explaining, not just good at soccer, because both of those are different.”
“Thank you.”
“Did you play?”
“I did. I played semi-professionally until I was twenty-two.”
Mia processed this. “What happened when you were twenty-two?”
“I hurt my knee. Same injury your dad had, actually.”
Mia looked at her father, then back at Zoe. “Is that why you knew how to fix his knee?”
“It’s one of the reasons, yeah.”
“So your bad thing turned into a way to do a different good thing.”
Zoe stood in the May afternoon with the smell of cut grass around her and the portable goal in the background and Lucas very still in the garden doorway, and she looked at this seven-year-old person with her ball called Pelé Jr. and her completely uncomplicated wisdom, and felt something expand in her chest without permission.
“Yeah,” she said. “That’s one way to look at it.”
Dinner was at Lucas’s kitchen table, which was larger than it needed to be for two people and had clearly been chosen with a child in mind — the kind of table where art projects spread out and soccer cards got organized and the general entropy of a seven-year-old life could be accommodated. Lucas made pasta, which Mia supervised with opinions about the garlic-to-everything ratio, and Zoe sat at the kitchen island and drank a glass of wine and felt, to her complete internal alarm, completely at home.
“Okay,” Mia said, appearing at the table with a small flat case that Zoe recognized as the kind serious card collectors used. “You have to tell me which one is best.”
She opened the case. Inside, protected by sleeves and organized with a system Zoe couldn’t immediately decode, were approximately sixty soccer cards — a mix of current players and vintage legends, some in perfect condition, some with the soft edges of a card handled frequently because it was a favorite.
Zoe pulled the case closer and looked properly. This was, she recognized, not a casual question. This was a test — not a hostile one, but a real one, the kind children give the people they are considering admitting to their lives. She gave it the attention it deserved.
She studied the collection in sections. Found a 2018 Marta card in extraordinary condition. A 2019 Alexia Putellas. A clearly prized 2022 Sam Kerr that had a small sticker on the back indicating it was acquired via trade, which meant Mia had negotiated for it. She found Lucas’s own card in there — Harbor FC, current season — in a premium sleeve, sitting beside a player card from the NWSL with a yellow Post-it note attached that read *researching* in Mia’s handwriting.
She set two cards on the table.
“The Marta,” she said, “because she redefined what a striker could look like in the women’s game and this is a clean example from the year she was at her peak. And the Sam Kerr because you clearly worked for it and you should trust your own eye.”
Mia looked at the two cards. Then at Zoe. Then back at the cards. “Most people say the Ronaldo.”
“Most people are looking at market value instead of the game.”
A very long pause. Then Mia picked up the Kerr card, looked at it, and set it back with the careful precision of someone settling a thing in the right place.
“Dad,” she said, “can Zoe come every Saturday?”
Lucas, at the stove, turned in a way that suggested he was trying not to show the full extent of his expression. “That’s up to Zoe.”
Mia turned to Zoe with complete directness. “Can you?”
Zoe looked across the kitchen table — the too-large table, the soccer cards, the pasta smell, the garden outside where Pelé Jr. was sitting in the goal net where Mia had left him. She looked at Lucas, who was watching her with warm attention and the complete absence of pressure.
She looked at Mia King, who had a felt-tip signature on her ball and had decided, at some point before tonight, that Zoe was her person — had simply known it the way children knew things, through some uncomplicated certainty that adults spent years burying under caution.
“I’d like that,” Zoe said.
Mia nodded as though this was the only sensible answer, and turned to her pasta, and Zoe looked at the soccer cards on the table and thought: I’m in love with both of them. The thought arrived clean and whole, not as a shock but as a recognition, something that had been true for a while and was only now finding its words.
She was in love with Lucas King and she was in love with his daughter and she was sitting at their too-large kitchen table on a Saturday evening in May, and the rules she’d built had not protected her from this at all.
She wasn’t sorry.
Lucas set a bowl of pasta in front of her and looked at her from close up, and she looked back, and something passed between them that they didn’t have a word for yet but that they both understood completely.
“The garlic ratio,” she said quietly.
“Mia supervised.”
“It’s perfect.”
He sat down across from her and she watched Mia organize her soccer cards with one hand while eating with the other and thought about penalty kicks and a seven-year-old’s wisdom about bad things becoming different good things, and decided that she could afford to believe, for a while, that some things went right.
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