Chidi picked him up from training on Wednesday with the radio too loud and a takeaway bag on the backseat that filled the entire car with the smell of suya.
"From the new place on Märkische Strasse," Chidi said, before Richard had fully closed the door. "The one Ella recommended. I went past it this morning and I couldn't not."
Richard pulled his seatbelt on. "You went past it at what time?"
"Eleven."
"You were awake at eleven?"
"I'm always awake at eleven. I'm a morning person."
Richard looked at him.
"Eleven in the morning is morning," Chidi said firmly, and pulled out of the car park.
They ate at the kitchen table, the suya spread between them on the paper it had come wrapped in, neither of them bothering with plates. Chidi had also bought chin chin from somewhere, which he produced from his jacket pocket with the quiet satisfaction of a man who had been planning a surprise since before the conversation started.
"You're feeding me," Richard said.
"Someone has to. Amara's nutrition budget doesn't count as feeding."
Richard looked up.
Chidi kept his eyes on the food.
"I didn't tell you about a nutrition budget," Richard said.
"You mentioned it last week."
"I mentioned a financial plan."
"Which you said included nutrition." Chidi finally looked at him with an expression of complete innocence. "I have a good memory."
Richard said nothing and reached for the chin chin.
"She's thorough," Chidi offered. "That's a good quality in a financial planner."
"She's professional."
"Professionally thorough. Yes."
"Chidi."
"I'm eating," Chidi said, and ate.
The conversation moved on the way it always did between them — naturally, without needing direction. Chidi talked about a mutual friend from Lagos who had started playing semi-professionally and wanted advice on finding an agent. Richard listened properly, asked questions, gave honest answers. It was the most relaxed he had felt since the week began.
At some point Chidi set down what remained of his suya and looked at Richard with a directness that meant the easy part of the conversation was done.
"Seventeen," he said.
Richard looked up.
"Not a question," Chidi said. "Just — I keep thinking about it. You're seventeen. Sitting here in your own house in Germany. Playing in the Bundesliga. And you're just — " he gestured at Richard generally — "like this about it."
"Like what?"
"Normal. Calm. Like it's the next thing rather than the impossible thing."
Richard was quiet for a moment. "It was always the next thing. I just had to get here."
Chidi looked at him for a long moment. Then he nodded slowly, the way he did when something landed properly.
"Your dad would say that exact thing," he said. "Same words, same face."
Richard smiled despite himself. "Don't tell him that. He'll deny it."
"He absolutely will." Chidi gathered the empty wrappers. "How's your mum?"
"She called Sunday. She's been getting screenshots sent to her by everyone she knows. She doesn't fully understand the scale but she knows it's big."
"She knows," Chidi said. "She just doesn't want to make it bigger than the football. She raised you to be about the work first." He stood, taking the wrappers to the bin. "Both of them did."
Richard said nothing. But he stayed with it.
Thursday training was the hardest session of the week.
Schmidt had clearly decided that the run of good results was precisely the wrong moment to ease the workload. The session was long and physical — pressing triggers, defensive shape, transition sequences run at full match intensity until the movements stopped being decisions and became instincts.
During one sequence Richard's first touch was slightly heavy. A fraction of a second of lost control that in a match might cost nothing or might cost everything depending on the day. He recovered immediately, pressed, won it back. But Schmidt had already blown the whistle.
"Again," Schmidt said. No irritation. Just the expectation that the correct version existed and they were going to find it.
They ran it again. The touch was clean. The sequence completed.
Schmidt said nothing.
Which was the right language for correct.
At the water break Sabitzer came alongside him quietly, the way Sabitzer did everything — without announcement, without theater.
"You're reading the press," Sabitzer said.
Not an accusation. An observation.
"Some of it," Richard said.
"First touch in that sequence. You were half a thought somewhere else." He drank from his bottle. "The pitch doesn't know what they wrote about you. It only knows what you give it."
Richard looked at him. "Does it get easier to ignore?"
Sabitzer thought about it honestly. "No. But you get better at ignoring it. That's a different thing."
He walked back to the drill without waiting for a response.
That evening Richard sat at the table with his laptop open on the Bundesliga table. Chidi was in the kitchen attempting to make tea with the specific overcomplicated approach he brought to things that were not complicated.
Fifth. Thirty-four points.
Stuttgart had lost on Sunday. The gap to third was now four points with seventeen matches remaining.
Four points was not a gap. It was an invitation.
He closed the laptop and picked up his phone. A reminder had come in earlier that he had left unread:
Document signature due — Hesse Financial. Pension contribution setup.
He signed it, forwarded the confirmation, and added a line: Sorted. Anything else this week?
Her reply came nine minutes later.
That's the last one for now. You're actually quite organised for someone who nearly bought a watch worth more than a small car.
Richard typed back: I didn't buy the watch.
Because I told you not to.
Because it was the right decision.
Same thing.
He put the phone down.
From the kitchen Chidi called out: "Does your kettle have a specific setting or does it just — boil?"
"It just boils, Chidi."
"There are four buttons on here."
"Press the one that says on."
A pause. "They all say on in different ways."
Richard got up and went to the kitchen.
He sorted the kettle in twelve seconds, handed Chidi his tea, and went back to the table. His phone was face up. He read the exchange with Amara one more time without meaning to, then turned it face down.
Chidi came in, sat across from him, wrapped both hands around his mug. Said nothing.
Richard looked at him. "Not a word."
"I'm drinking tea," Chidi said peacefully.
He was still thinking about the Champions League draw later that night when the house was quiet and Chidi had gone to his room and the only sound was the faint tick of the hallway clock and the distant noise of a Dortmund street settling into evening.
He picked up his phone and opened the notification he had saved since Friday without fully sitting with it.
The Round of 16 draw.
He read the name of the opponent.
He read it again.
Then he set the phone down on the table and looked at the ceiling for a long time.
Seventeen years old.
Round of 16.
He thought about what Chidi had said at dinner — it was always the next thing, you just had to get here — and realized he had said those words about arriving in Dortmund and now Dortmund already felt like the ground beneath his feet rather than the destination ahead of him.
That was how it worked. Each impossible thing became the floor and then you looked up and found the next ceiling.
He picked the phone back up.
Opened his conversation with Chidi and typed: You awake?
Three seconds.
Always. What?
Richard typed: We drew Real Madrid.
The reply took longer than usual. Seven seconds, which for Chidi was practically geological.
Then: say that again
Richard smiled at his phone in the dark.
Real Madrid. Round of 16.
This time the reply was instant.
BRO.
Then, four seconds later:
SEVENTEEN.
Richard put the phone down.
Outside, Dortmund was quiet and cold and completely indifferent to all of it.
He sat in the dark of his living room for a little while longer.
Then he went to bed.
There was training in the morning.