Emma noticed it before I did.
We were lying in bed on Thursday night, the night before the Burnley match, her laptop open on her knees, my head resting against her shoulder, her fingers absently tracing circles on my forearm while she read something on the screen. The apartment was warm and quiet, the November rain streaking the windows, the city a smudge of light beyond the glass.
"You're smiling," she said, not looking up.
"Am I?"
"You've been smiling for twenty minutes. You're reading the Burnley tactical analysis and you're smiling like a child who's been told he can have two puddings."
She was right. I was reading the Burnley analysis, and I was smiling because I was about to do something I had been waiting to do for months: start Pato and Bojan together.
I had been watching them in training, not the way I watched the other players, but with the private fascination of a man who had stumbled onto something extraordinary. They were opposites in every measurable way.
