T

he road that leads to Hope Solo's house in Kirkland, Washington, is imposingly steep. It winds sharply for miles through damp green woods, the pitch severe enough that any snowfall threatens to make it impassable. At the top, overlooking the seductive mist of Lake Washington, sits the home that Solo, 33, shares with her husband, former Seahawks tight end Jerramy Stevens, 35, and their two Dobermans, Sasha and Onyx. As you approach the property, a sign in the drive advises, warning: we don't dial 911, the image of a Doberman underneath. A placard above the front door proclaims, follow your heart.

Today is game day for Solo and her National Women's Soccer League team, the Seattle Reign. Some friends and members of her extended family have traveled to town to watch her play. They lounge on the plush beige couches in Solo's tasteful living room, sipping French press coffee and watching Manchester United on the flat-screen, a platter of freshly warmed cinnamon toast on the table. The space is tidy, inviting. Throw blankets are draped over armrests. Several candles flicker.

"He's the neat freak," Solo says, side-eyeing Stevens, who played nine seasons in the NFL, as she takes a seat beside him. In person, Solo is tinier than you imagine. Lean, compact. The planes in her angular face catch what little light Seattle has to offer, her hair a Breck-girl wonder, her teeth white as the queen's gloves.

"I can't even leave anything on the stairs," she continues, as Stevens shrugs, explaining he doesn't like clutter, especially on the floor. Solo watches his eyes as he talks, places her hand on the round of his shoulder. Stevens leans into his wife, the two pressed close as slices of sandwich bread.

On-screen, the goalkeeper misses a block. The room fills with Oooohs. Solo winces. "That's the thing about goalkeeping. You don't win the game. You save the game." She sips her tea, cups the mug in her hands. "Only two choices. You're the hero. Or the goat."

A few minutes later, in the kitchen, Stevens starts cooking an omelet for Solo's breakfast using eggs from the chickens they keep on the property. Out back, behind their garage, his wife gives a tour of the coop. Stevens warned her she should never name her food, but Solo ignored his advice. She points out some of her brood of six. French Fry, Penny, Cruella. She scoops Penny into her arms, pulls the bird to her neck.

"Thanks for the eggs," she whispers, before gently setting the chicken down.

Passing through a gate, Solo greets her dogs, who circle with eager affection. She explains she's left the Dobies on the deck because one of her visiting friends is afraid of them.

"They look terrifying. But they aren't," Solo says, stroking the tops of their heads as the dogs nuzzle into her hand. "They have this reputation they don't deserve. Like they are bred to be evil or something." She smiles wanly. "People don't see. Inside they are just the sweetest things."

BY ANY MEASURE, the 911 recording was shocking.

Hope Solo is going psychotic.

She's f---ing beating people up.

We need help.

The call was placed on June 21, 2014, by Solo's nephew, then 17, after an altercation in his house involving him, Solo and her half sister, Teresa Obert (his mother), escalated into assault. A Washington statute requires that on any domestic violence call, no matter how muddled the scene, reporting officers must use their best judgment as to who is the "primary physical aggressor" and arrest that person. On that June evening, the police believed they had probable cause to arrest Solo. She would later plead not guilty to two counts of fourth-degree domestic violence.

When asked what happened, Solo does not hesitate. She says that she and her nephew have a fraught relationship, that the two exchanged words and then he "lost control and his mother tried to protect him." In Solo's retelling, her nephew told her, "'Get the f--- out of my house, you c--t,' and I was like, 'I don't take orders from a 17-year-old.'" She insists that she was "the victim" and, with frustration, says of the fight: "He's 6-foot-8, 270 pounds. The media acted like he was some 5-year-old kid."

While all parties agree that Solo's nephew beat her over the head with a broomstick at some point, and that he drew a gun, that is where the stories diverge. The Oberts maintain it was a broken BB gun, while Solo says the gun was his father's. (In 2012, Teresa's husband, Jeffrey, was arrested and convicted of "reckless endangerment" for firing a .357 Ruger Blackhawk in the house. The handgun was released back to the Oberts on April 11, 2014.)

Police accounts collected that night also reflect warring stories, with Solo insisting she never behaved aggressively and the Oberts asserting that it was an intoxicated Solo who jumped her nephew, calling him a "p---y," later claiming that she slammed his head into the floor, Teresa entering the fray to shield her son.

"Hope told him he was too fat and overweight and crazy to ever be an athlete," recounts one officer's report. Her nephew shot back that Solo, "and particularly her father, were the crazy ones," after which Solo "'charged' and took a swing at him." He then "grabbed [Solo] by the hair, took her to the ground and held her there until she calmed down." Once she seemed calm, "he let her go and she immediately grabbed his hair, pulled his head down and started punching him in the face repeatedly."

"My son and I have had the worst year of our lives," says Obert, 43, a seasoned yoga instructor, adding that while she knew her sister could be volatile, she was nonetheless shocked and traumatized by what happened that night. "She had always yelled at me. But that's Hope," Obert says wistfully of her sister and their years together. "Hope had never been physical with us before."

Soccer was what I leaned on, my way out. I think as I got older, that worked against me. - Hope Solo

When Solo was 7, a teenage Obert would braid Solo's hair, drive her to her softball games. Obert remembers her sister as being the finest athlete on the field. When the two of them ran together, Solo would always run faster, even if she was wearing flip-flops instead of sneakers.

"I felt motherly toward her," Obert says. "My son always said she was like my first child. All of my friends thought she treated me so sh---y, but I loved her. I always loved her so much." Obert's voice grows small. "She and my son are my everything. I mean, she was."

She clears her throat, saying she still has dreams about her sister where they talk and walk their dogs together and everything is like it used to be.

No one, not even Solo's lawyer, argues that Solo does herself any favors. It's no secret that her personality can be off-putting, belligerent.

Still, the truth of what happened that night might never be fully exposed. At a pretrial deposition, the Oberts adjusted their story. The supposed gun went missing. They burned the broomstick.

"That had nothing to do with the case," explains Mary Gaston, the Oberts' attorney, of what the family called a "séance." "They also got rid of everything else that reminded them of Hope. They literally burned her soccer shirts in the barbecue in an effort to move on and to heal."

On Jan. 13, 2015, a judge cited the prosecution's witnesses' failure to cooperate before dismissing all charges; the Oberts had shown up to one deposition but missed several appointments for a second. The Kirkland prosecutor announced a rare appeal and must file a legal brief to restart the case by July.

Solo considers the dismissal a vindication, even if for her, it came too late. "My name was completely smeared. I had already been compared to Ray Rice, to Adrian Peterson," she says of the media swirl around the charges. "From here on out, no matter what happens, I'll forever be associated with domestic violence."

As she revisits the night and its protracted aftermath, Solo begins to cry. She feels stupid, she says, palming tears from her cheeks. For what happened, yes, but more for trusting people she now views as poisonous. "It was hell," she says. And then, "I should have known."

Solo is not ashamed of her roots, but her jagged past is not something she likes to dwell on, dark as it was, starting with her conception in prison during a conjugal visit between her father, whom she knew as "Gerry," a lifelong grifter whose real name was Jeffrey, and her mother, Judy, an alcoholic -- the inauspicious launch of a childhood that unfolded exactly as one might expect given those pertinent details.

Solo was raised alongside her older brother, Marcus, a kid she says "never backed down from a confrontation" and used to attack his sister for sport, making the house "a war zone." It was a dynamic that Judy says she was "wearing blinders to" at the time. Solo came to find her father had a second family, including half sister Teresa and half brother David, with whom Solo was then reared sporadically.

In addition to these bewildering family dynamics, there was poverty, neglect, familial mental illness, chronic deception and a whole host of attendant challenges that conspired to hone Solo into a reflexive, unforgiving fighter who fiercely defended the few morsels of comfort she could collect. Chief among them was soccer, a sport she liked as well as any other but one she was clever enough to recognize would provide for her in ways that nothing else in her life ever could.

"Soccer was what I leaned on, my way out," she says. "I think as I got older, that worked against me. I continued to rely on soccer to get through things, and the reality was my life had gotten so much more complicated. It wasn't as simple as it was when I was a little girl. The pain wasn't going away when I kicked a ball."

Instead of coping, Solo compartmentalized. She piled the past into a box and buried it, left it unexamined, along with her own collateral damage. Better to press ahead, run up the hill, win the game, the tournament, the Olympic medals, eclipse the ugliness with an ability so grand any moral failing would pale in its shadow.

For the most part, the strategy worked. Until last summer, when some of the family's dirty laundry was hung out to dry.

After her arrest, Solo was put in jail for three days. "I didn't think I could last," she says, weeping more now, dropping her head as she does.

Once in custody, Solo asked whether there was anything available to read, and the guards rolled in the jail's portable bookshelf. It was stuffed with well-worn romance novels and easy readers. Disappointed, Solo spun the shelf to the other side and there, in the bottom, snug and pristine, was a copy of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. Solo grabbed the novel and clutched it to her chest, heart pounding. Rand had been her favorite author for years. She feels a kinship with a woman "most people think of as selfish." Someone whose message is "misconstrued."

Solo read all day and night. "And at my lowest point in my life," she says, her voice hitching, "it saved me."

Solo views the book as a sign. She believes in signs. Always has, though she has only recently allowed herself to embrace them, enlisting a spiritual healer, whom she credits with helping her to "feel lighter."

Post-arrest, Solo also sought the aid of a psychologist for the first time. Until this year, she felt she didn't need help. More precisely, she believed she couldn't trust anyone with the truth of who she was, not even herself.

Solo concedes when she talks about her family dynamics out loud that they "sound crazy and more than a little bit unhealthy." But she insists she didn't grasp the extent of the damage until now, says she didn't even register how much she "was filled with anger and pain." Nor how she was "broken inside."

"I was telling my therapist about how Marcus used to beat me up, and she said, 'You didn't think that was weird?' And you know, looking back, I really didn't."

And then Solo says something that should surprise no one: "I didn't know at what point it crossed the line."

IT'S TWO HOURS before the start of the game. In the Reign locker room, players are suiting up, stretching, some hydrating, others snacking on bananas and nuts. A whiteboard filled with plays and strategy poses the questions: "Who do we want to be? How do we make that happen?"

Head coach Laura Harvey stands, begins her pregame pep talk. Solo nods along, a heating pad strapped across her lap, nursing a groin pull, her thick hair slicked into a neat ponytail. Minutes later, on the field during the warm-up, Solo doesn't hold back. She grunts, rolls. She likes action. Even warm-up action. Her return kicks sail to midfield with precision, as if she can read the breeze and harness it like a sail. In the background, the emcee tests the microphone, hollers, "Let it Reign!" the sound echoing across the soggy field.

"I love this team more than any other I've had," Solo says of Seattle, explaining that she used to compete in this very arena when she was in high school. Back then, she'd gaze at the Space Needle looming above the stadium and nearly gasp with awe. That Needle meant that she'd made it, that she'd escaped her hardscrabble, hick beginnings, the crazy house with its constant hum of uncertainty, its ceaseless reflection of her worthlessness -- because her father left, because her mother drank, because her brother smacked her senseless -- and yes, all of that came to mean love, and because of this she would never know who she was, never know she even existed, without the feeling of conflict, without hurling herself against something, without the sensation of her body crashing into the immovable, the very ground itself, and it is this as much as anything that keeps her reaching and plunging and chasing a ball shot right at her head in a cage, a place most of us would be terrified to stand, let alone choose to stay.

Say what you will about Solo, but she doesn't flinch.

During the game, which the Reign win handily, Solo is the only player who merits her own cheer from the crowd of more than 2,600, who break into a long howl of "Hooooooope Solo!" every time she kicks the ball. Solo is also the only player featured on a handmade banner, her face drawn big as a semi tire.

In the friends and family section, Reign owner Bill Predmore's 7-year-old daughter, Cady, leaps from seat to seat, restless, wearing a "Hope" T-shirt above her skirt. Solo's mother, Judy, observes the child in the stands. "When people would ask Hopey who her favorite character was as a kid, she'd answer, 'A ball,'" she says. "Even back then, I always let her make her own choices. About her father. About soccer. About everything."

Judy shifts in her seat, her legs bobbing up and down. She and Solo remain close, regardless of the challenges. "I know I failed as a mom in some ways," Judy says plainly. Her eyes travel to the field, where Solo nimbly blocks a goal. "But Hopey was always tough. She fell off her bike and split open her chin when she was 5. When we went to get her stitches, she just stuck her chin out, like, 'Sew it up, doc, I gotta get back to business.'"

Judy remembers other things too: young Hope beating up a bully at school, doing her homework without any help, adoring her birth father even after he was exposed as a con artist, a career criminal, even when he lived on the streets, even after he abducted Hope at age 7, driving her and Marcus to the Space Needle, then keeping the kids until, days later, he was swarmed by cops while trying to cash a check at a bank, a terrified, confused Hope at his side.

For her part, Solo says she forgave her dad a long time ago. She salvaged the best relationship she could with him until his death of a heart attack, three months before the 2007 Women's World Cup. (She sprinkled her father's ashes in the goal box before each start.) Solo realized the man who taught her how to play soccer would never get his life together in a way that others would tolerate, but for her, that failure didn't silence his humanity. He was a broken man. He would always be a broken man. She chose to love him anyway. And when, throughout the years, they sat hip to hip, watching planes circle in the sky, him urging her to drink in the beauty of that moment, the sailing grace of the seemingly impossible, Solo felt right and known in a way she rarely did.

A father can do that to a girl.