Marco posts it the next morning. Not a highlight reel, not a caption written by anyone but him — just a single photo, taken from behind the goal at the exact instant the ball is a foot from the line, the keeper's fingertips a fraction too late, half the stadium already rising in the background.
@Marco_Santos: "Thirty yards. Still don't fully believe it."
Rico likes it in the first minute. Emma likes it in the second, and comments underneath it, because Emma always comments.
@EmSantos: "Told you. You can do this."
Lucas likes it four minutes later, which for Lucas — a man who reads his phone roughly nine times slower than everyone else in the family — counts as urgent.
Klaus does not like it.
Nobody in the family mentions this out loud. Nobody needs to. The people watching from the outside mention it enough for everyone.
@SantosWatch: "Rico, Lucas, Emma all liked Marco's goal post within the hour. Still nothing from Klaus. At this point it's not an oversight, it's a pattern."
@FutebolPuro: "Klaus Santos really out here refusing to press one button for his own brother. Incredible commitment to a bit."
What nobody expects is Lucas's second move.
Twenty minutes after his like, Lucas posts a video of his own — a free kick from Queensgate's match the previous weekend, twenty-four yards out, curled over a wall and in off the inside of the post, a goal that was, by any reasonable measure, also a very good goal, and which nobody had mentioned all week because it happened to be scored on the same weekend his brother won a promotion final with a rocket from six yards further out.
The caption:
@LucasSantos: "not the same distance i know. but i can do it too 🙂"
Marco replies within the hour.
@Marco_Santos: "mine won a promotion. yours won a corner count for the stats page. not the same thing at all 🙂"
Lucas replies to that.
@LucasSantos: "mine had a better wall to beat"
@Marco_Santos: "mine had a keeper who's actually good"
It goes on like this for eleven replies, in public, while several hundred thousand people watch two brothers who spent most of their lives on opposite sides of a story quietly enjoying the ordinary, stupid pleasure of needling each other about goals nobody made them score.
@GlobalFutbol: "The Santos brothers arguing about whose goal was better is the most normal thing either of them has ever posted and somehow the most heartwarming."
@FootballTwitter: "Marco: wins promotion with a screamer. Lucas: immediately tries to one-up him with a free kick from a league match nobody was watching. Brothers are so real for this."
Sofia comments last, underneath both posts, the same four words each time.
@SofiaCarvalho: "Boys. Both. Grow up."
Neither of them does.
The good mood does not survive the week.
Riverport's opening offer arrives on Thursday, and it is, in Patrick's words, delivered flat over the phone before Marco has even had coffee, "insulting in a way that's almost impressive."
A season-long loan. An option to make it permanent for Riverport, not for Marco, meaning they can walk away in June with no obligation and no cost if he doesn't play the way they hope, and if he does play that way, they buy him for a fee set now, at a price built for a player nobody has heard of six weeks ago. No signing bonus. Wages barely above what he already earns at Graystone.
PATRICK: "It's a bet with all the risk on your side and none of the reward. I've seen this kind of offer made to eighteen-year-olds from academies nobody's ever visited. Not to a man who just won a promotion final with a goal that's been on every back page in the country."
MARCO: "So they don't actually want me."
PATRICK: "They want the option to want you later, for free, if it turns out you're good. That's not the same thing."
Marco reads the terms once, on Patrick's laptop, at the kitchen table, with Rico across from him pretending to read something else.
MARCO: "No."
PATRICK: "You want to sit with it a day before —"
MARCO: "No, Patrick. Tell them no."
Patrick calls back within the hour. Word gets out within two.
@SantosWatch: "BREAKING: Marco Santos has rejected Riverport United's opening offer. Sources describe the proposed terms as 'not close' to what his camp expected."
The reaction is not what anyone in the Graystone dressing room predicts.
@TaktikFussball: "Marco Santos, 28, no professional football before this season, turning down a Premier League move. Bold. Or foolish. History will decide which."
@FootballTwitter: "He's going to look back on this and regret it. There's no way Conwell's terms are better and now Riverport walk away thinking he's got an ego."
@FutebolPuro: "Everyone panicking about Marco saying no to a bad deal like saying no to a bad deal is the crazy part and not the deal itself."
Conwell do not comment publicly. They also, over the following ten days, simply stop calling.
Patrick tries twice. Both times he is told the same thing in different words the club is reviewing its transfer priorities for the summer, nothing personal, they'll be in touch if anything changes. Nothing changes.
PATRICK: (on the phone, to Marco, trying to sound less concerned than he is) "I think Riverport turning it down spooked them. Or the budget moved somewhere else. Could be either. Could be both."
MARCO: "Or they just didn't want me that much to begin with."
PATRICK: "Maybe."
Neither of them says the other thing out loud that saying no once, publicly, to one club, can make every other club start wondering if you're worth the argument.
Graystone move fastest of anyone, which nobody expected from a club that spent eleven matchdays not playing him at all.
The offer comes from the chairman personally, not the secretary this time three years, first-team wages that are still modest by the standards of anywhere Marco could plausibly have gone, but real, guaranteed, secure in a way nothing else currently on the table is.
Patrick lays it out at the kitchen table with the same two-pages-read-three-times care he gave the first contract.
PATRICK: "This is the sensible thing, Marco. I'm going to say that plainly because normally I let you get there yourself, but I don't think we have time for that this week. Take Graystone's contract, or find out fast whether Conwell's silence means anything, because right now you've got two options closing and one staying open, and staying open isn't the same as staying good."
Marco doesn't answer right away. He looks at the contract. Then out the window, at the small pitch behind the house, dark at this hour, empty.
MARCO: "I'm not signing three years."
PATRICK: "Marco —"
MARCO: "I'm not leaving either. Not for a deal built to protect someone else's risk and not out of panic because a phone stopped ringing."
PATRICK: "Then what are you doing?"
Marco pushes the contract back across the table, not angrily. Just finished with it.
MARCO: "One year. Tell them I'll play another season here. No option, no extension clause, nothing beyond that. If somebody wants me after that, they can come and actually want me properly, with terms that don't insult anybody's intelligence. If nobody does, I'll have had one more year of professional football than I ever thought I'd get, and that's still more than I came here for."
Patrick sits back. Rubs his face with one hand.
PATRICK: "You understand you're betting your entire market on one more season of a second-division centre-back, coming off one very good final, with no guarantee it repeats."
MARCO: "I've been betting on worse odds than that since I was seventeen."
Patrick looks at him for a long moment. Then, for the first time in the whole conversation, something that isn't quite a smile but is close enough to count.
PATRICK: "Fine. One year. I'll tell them."
He gathers the contract, stands, and stops at the door.
PATRICK: "For what it's worth I think that's either the smartest thing you've done all year, or the most stubborn."
MARCO: "Why not both."
Graystone announce the one-year extension on a Tuesday morning, three lines, no fanfare, buried between an injury update and a note about season ticket renewals.
@GraystoneFC: "Marco Santos has signed a new one-year contract with the club."
@SantosWatch: "One year. Not three. Not a Riverport loan. Not a Conwell move. Marco Santos betting on himself, again. This man has never once taken the easy version of anything."
Somewhere in Manchester, Lucas reposts it with no caption at all — just three clapping emojis, which from Lucas, is the equivalent of a speech.
Klaus does not.
END OF CHAPTER 32