Chapter 12: No One Will Want You

Aurora's POV

No one answered me. The whole rink was dead silent.

I don't know how long I'd been kneeling — long enough that both my knees had gone numb — when Vivienne's voice sounded above my head.

"Aurora, I only told you to kneel for a moment. Why are you still down there?"

"I heard your knees are injured. If my little joke makes your old injury flare up, people will think I did it on purpose to torment you."

She bent over and offered me her hand, dripping with false sympathy. "Get up."

I stared at her fake, pitying face, dodged her hand, and pushed myself up on legs prickling with pins and needles. Then my eyes found Liam.

"Liam. My mother's medical bills."

His expression tightened. He pulled out his phone and made a call. "Put a hundred thousand yuan into Lucy's medical account."

Lucy was my mother's name.

The moment he hung up, I called her attending physician. When I confirmed the hundred thousand really had landed in her account, I finally let out the breath I'd been holding.

"Liam, that money is mine by right. If you ever zero out my mother's medical fund again, I'll tear you apart with my bare hands."

He stared at me, his eyes going dark. He was just about to speak when Vivienne's voice cut in again.

"Liam, you promised to watch the game with me tonight. Don't break your word."

He pulled his gaze away and curved his lips at her. "I never break my word with you."

By the time I left the BRC club, it was already dark outside.

I stood at the corner, watching the traffic stream past, the injured knee throbbing. Slowly I bent it and crouched down in a corner of the street, and then the tears came and I couldn't stop them.

I had swallowed the worst humiliation imaginable and agreed to be Vivienne's practice partner. So why was he still treating me like this?

He knew every word out of Vivienne's mouth was a lie, and he still took her side. For one of her whining little pleas, he'd threatened my mother's life to make me kneel to her in front of everyone.

But the Liam who chased me back then had treated me like a princess. He wouldn't even speak a harsh word to me. He'd have gone to war with the whole world for my sake.

Ten years was all it had taken for him to dare do this to me.

Was it really because I'd gotten old, gotten ugly, because I had nothing left worth using?

I slowly straightened up and looked at my reflection in the glass.

At thirty I'd kept myself well. Apart from a few fine lines at the corners of my eyes, my cheeks were still smooth and full. My figure wasn't as perfect as it had been in my twenties, but it hadn't gone badly out of shape either — still light, still elegant.

Maybe Liam hadn't cheated because I wasn't good enough. Maybe he simply was never faithful to begin with. He'd acted the part for ten years and finally couldn't keep it up, so he used my shortcomings as his excuse to gaslight me and cover the fact that he's filth.

A woman's only loyal partners are her career and her money.

Liam doesn't want me back on the ice? Then I'll go back to the ice, and I'll stand at the very top and laugh down at the garbage he is.

With that thought I wiped the tears off my face hard, opened my phone, and sent my résumé out to the bigger ice-hockey clubs.

There are so many clubs out there — I can't lose out on every single backup spot.

It was past midnight when I got home. Liam wasn't back. The nanny had already gotten Ethan to sleep.

I lay in bed and refreshed my inbox over and over, nervous. A dozen or so applications. Not one reply.

"It's only because I just sent them. Give it a few days. Someone will get back to me."

"I only want a backup slot. It can't be that hard."

For the next three days, every résumé I sent out was a stone dropped into the sea. Not a single sound.

Panic set in. Anxiety swallowed me.

Liam watched me with a sneer, elegantly cutting the steak on his plate.

He'd come home half an hour ago. He seemed to have forgotten forcing me to kneel to Vivienne in front of the whole club. He sat across from me, perfectly at ease, enjoying the steak he'd brought home from somewhere.

There wasn't any for me.

He must have known I was struggling, because his first words were, "Give it up, Aurora. No club is going to take a thirty-year-old athlete. Not even as a backup."

My head snapped up. My hand clenched into a fist at my side.

"The last time, at BKL, it was you pulling strings. You did it again this time, didn't you? Otherwise it's been three days and I haven't even gotten a rejection email."

Liam gave me a cold look. "Aurora, do you have persecution delusions? You're thirty. Do I need to lift a finger?"

"If I really wanted to sabotage you, I'd use my connections to place you with a rival club. That would improve my own club's odds."

Such vicious words, to hide his guilty conscience. He was the one who'd done it, and he wouldn't admit it to his grave. It made me sick.

I was glaring at him, about to speak, when my inbox chimed.

I snatched up my phone and looked at him triumphantly. "You know what you did, Liam. But I'm telling you, I will sign with a club. Look — someone wrote back."

Liam's mouth twisted. "Did you read it? What makes you so sure it isn't a rejection?"

I opened it nervously. What I saw was exactly that: a rejection. The reply was blunt — I was too old for ice hockey.

Word for word, the same as Liam's mockery.

He watched my face go from sunshine to storm and rose gracefully. "Give it up, Aurora. No one will want you."

No one will want me?

I don't believe it.

The big clubs have no shortage of players, which is why even their backup requirements are absurd. But the small ones?

I shot up out of my chair, ran into the bedroom, and opened my laptop to search for small clubs — ones without much size but with a real place in official competition.

I spent the whole night confidently sending applications to a dozen of them. My dreams were all interview invitations.

Reality is the opposite of a dream.

Every one of those small clubs wrote back to say no.

I stared at the words on the screen, desperate, and the blood running hot in me went cold all at once.

Am I really never going to get back on the ice?

Then my phone chimed again, and I muttered, mocking myself, "Another rejection. Another club that thinks I'm too old."

But even as I said it, my hand was opening it.

When I saw the words inviting me to an interview, the tears came and I couldn't hold them back.

Finally. Finally, a club was willing to give me a chance.