The Climb: Prologue

It arrived on a Monday.

No sender.
No logo.
No return address.
Just her name – K. Roberts – written in black ink on a plain envelope.

Kat wasn’t the kind of person who got mysterious letters. Most of her post was bills or takeaway menus. But this one felt different. She turned it over in her hands a few times before sliding a finger under the flap, inside was a single sheet.

She read it twice, then a third time. It didn’t make much sense, but it wouldn’t leave her alone. Because it wasn’t wrong – she did remember.

Not flashes or fragments – the whole thing.

The matches, the players, the nights under the lights.
The smell of wet grass and bad coffee.
She remembered shouting herself hoarse in the rain, drawing formations on the backs of Tesco receipts, and taking a team that shouldn’t have survived all the way to the top.

Sheffield FC, her club.
Starting at the bottom, winning promotion after promotion until they were Premier League and European Champions.

The problem wasn’t that it hadn’t happened.
It did – every match, every trophy, every moment.
The problem was, nobody else remembered.

According to every record, she’d never managed a team.
Never coached.
No badges.
No trace of her name anywhere in football.

Her friends called it stress.
Her GP called it burnout.

She’d tried laughing about it once – that kind of laugh that comes out too loud and too false. She’d been telling a friend in the pub about the missing records, the blank looks, how everyone acted like she’d made it all up.

Are you sure you’re not just thinking of a Football Manager save?

Her friend had smirked over his drink.
Kat smiled faintly.

Yeah, maybe it got corrupted.

He’d laughed. She hadn’t.

Now the letter sat on her kitchen table, and it was the only thing that made her think she wasn’t completely losing it.

The world forgot your climb – you never did.

The next few days dragged. Kat carried the letter everywhere. She told herself it was nothing – a prank, a mistake – but every time her fingers brushed against the envelope, she felt a jolt of nostalgia.

By Thursday afternoon, she’d promised herself she’d stop thinking about it. Then her phone rang.

And the line went dead.

That night, she checked her emails before bed.
At the top of her inbox was a new message.

Kat stared at the screen, waiting for it to feel like a scam.
It didn’t.
The email address looked official enough – @theassociation.org.uk. 
Whoever they were, they’d gone to a lot of effort.

She hovered over the reply button for a long time before finally typing:

She hit send before she could change her mind.
Almost immediately, a second email appeared.

Kat blinked. “Miley?” she said out loud.

She clicked the name. It was that Cyrus- apparently she was now involved in a “female empowerment through sport” initiative.

Kat laughed – a real one this time.
“Of course it’s Miley,” she said. “It’s always Miley.”

It had been their team anthem back in the day. Her captain used to belt it out every time they won promotion – completely off-key but loud enough to rattle the windows. The fact that it was now attached to an official email almost made sense in the weirdest way possible.

She closed the laptop, leaned back in her chair, and looked at the letter still sitting on the table. Maybe this wasn’t a prank. Maybe she really had done all this before. Or maybe she was just about to start again.

The next morning, she woke before her alarm. The flat was cold and quiet. She dressed without thinking, grabbed her keys, and slipped the letter into her pocket.

She had no badges.
No plan.
No idea what came next.
Just one clear thought.

There’s a mountain waiting.

Kat smiled.
“Alright then,” she said quietly. “Let’s climb.”