The photo that starts it is not even a good photo blurred, taken from too far away, a man in a grey coat standing near the tunnel at a Queensgate City match, clipboard under one arm, talking to nobody in particular. Nobody at the ground can place him. That, it turns out, is the entire story.
@FootballTwitter: "Unfamiliar face spotted at Queensgate's match yesterday, reportedly scouting for a La Liga club. No name confirmed yet but people are already putting two and two together given Lucas Santos's form this season."
Two and two, in this case, makes Real Blanco, because Klaus plays for Real Blanco, and because the internet has spent three years waiting for a sentence that lets it say the words Santos brothers and same pitch in the same breath.
@SantosWatch: "If this is who I think it might be, we could be looking at TWO Santos brothers on the same club within a year. I need everyone to stay calm."
@GlobalFutbol: "Lucas Santos to Klaus Santos's club. Somebody write the film rights now."
Nobody involved confirms anything. Nobody involved denies anything either, which in the absence of denial is enough.
Marco likes the post.
Klaus likes the post.
It is the first time all season Klaus has engaged with anything that has Lucas's name attached to it that is not, strictly, only about Lucas. People notice this within minutes, the way people notice everything about this family within minutes.
@FutebolPuro: "KLAUS LIKED THE LUCAS TO REAL BLANCO SPECULATION. He will like a rumour about his brother joining his club but won't like his other brother's promotion goal. The Santos family lore just keeps writing itself."
Lucas, for his part, does not confirm or deny anything either. He comments underneath the original post, forty minutes later, with the specific tone of a man who has read every reply and is enjoying himself enormously.
@LucasSantos: "if a club wanted to sign the better looking santos brother, i wouldn't blame them"
Nobody dismisses it. Nobody confirms it. The thread runs to nine thousand replies by evening, most of them some version of just tell us, none of them getting an answer.
Rico calls Lucas that night, not about football.
RICO: "Don't let the noise decide anything for you. Whatever this is, whoever that man was for take your time. Nobody else's excitement is a deadline."
LUCAS: "I know, Papa."
RICO: "I know you know. I'm saying it anyway."
Marco texts Lucas the same evening, a single line, no argument underneath it, no edge to it at all.
"Hope it's true. You deserve it."
Lucas replies almost immediately.
"You'd actually be happy about that? Even with everything going on with you right now?"
"Especially with everything going on with me right now."
Doyle comes back from his ACL rehabilitation in July looking, by his own admission, better than he did before it. Ten months of one deliberate exercise at a time will do that to a thirty-one-year-old who has nothing else to think about for ten months.
He and Marco train together the first week back with the polite, watchful respect of two men who both know exactly what the other one represents, and neither one says it out loud, because there's nothing to say that would help either of them.
DOYLE: "You did well while I was out. I watched most of it from the sofa. That header in the semi-final I thought that was going in."
MARCO: "So did I."
DOYLE: "It's my shirt, though. I want to be honest with you about that. Not because of anything you did. Just because it's mine and I want it back."
MARCO: "I'd want the same thing."
Briggs starts Doyle in the opening match of the season. It is not, by any reasonable reading, a controversial decision a fully fit, senior centre-back with six years at the club against a one-year rental with no long-term commitment attached to his name. Briggs explains it to Marco directly, in his office, without dressing it up.
BRIGGS: "Curtis has earned the shirt back. That's it. That's the whole reason. It's not about your contract, it's not about what happened with Riverport or Conwell, it's not a message to anybody. He's fit, he's been here longer, and right now he's slightly ahead of you. Stay ready. That's all I'm asking."
Marco nods. Says the right things. Trains the way he always trains first in, last out, the gap Briggs once described as closing now sitting exactly where it was a year ago, except this time there is no viral interview underneath him and no story about a man who climbed a gate to explain why anyone should be patient.
Rico watches from the touchline more than he used to.
He notices it before Marco says anything about it a change in the way Marco trains. Not less effort, more of it, in the wrong place. Marco wins duels in training he doesn't need to win, argues small decisions with the assistant coaches he would have let go a year ago, stays out after sessions doing extra reps nobody asked for, the specific kind of hard work that is trying to win an argument rather than play a sport.
RICO: "You're not enjoying it anymore."
MARCO: "I'm working."
RICO: "You're proving something. That's different from working, even if it looks the same from the outside."
MARCO: "Maybe I need to prove something. Maybe that's exactly what I need right now."
RICO: "To who? Doyle's not your enemy. Briggs isn't punishing you. The club is not sitting in a room somewhere plotting against you, Marco. Sometimes a door just closes because somebody else was standing closer to it."
MARCO: "Feels the same either way."
RICO: "It isn't. And you'll play worse football for as long as you can't tell the difference."
Marco doesn't answer that. He picks the ball up and goes back to the extra reps nobody asked for.
Rico watches him go, and doesn't follow him this time.
The contract talks, such as they were, stop happening without anyone deciding out loud to stop them.
Patrick chases twice in August. Once in September. Each time the answer is a version of the last one the board wants to see how the season shapes up first, there's no urgency on either side, plenty of time before it becomes a problem.
PATRICK: (to Rico, quietly, in the kitchen, the way he says the things he doesn't want repeated) "They're annoyed. Nobody will say it in those words, but they are. They watched two clubs circle him last spring and walked away with no fee, no comeback, nothing for the trouble. I think some part of the board decided, somewhere in a meeting nobody minuted properly, that they're not going to be embarrassed by getting attached to him again if it doesn't pay off this time."
RICO: "So they'll just let him sit."
PATRICK: "They'll let the season answer the question for them. If he plays well and someone comes calling, they get their fee this time. If he doesn't, they've lost nothing, because they never gave him the contract that would have made losing him cost them anything."
Rico says nothing to that for a long moment.
RICO: "That's a very tidy way for a football club to be cruel to somebody."
PATRICK: "It usually is."
Graystone open the season with three wins from five, Doyle solid and unspectacular at the back, the kind of form that makes headlines say nothing about anybody because there's nothing dramatic to report. Marco gets nine minutes off the bench in September, away at Halton Town, a match Graystone are already leading 2–0 when he comes on, and does nothing wrong and nothing memorable in the time he's given, which is its own kind of quiet erasure.
@SantosWatch: "Marco Santos: nine minutes in six weeks. last year he was carrying this club to promotion. Nobody's saying it out loud yet but it feels like the same story running backward."
By October he is not even that. Two matchdays pass with him not named in the squad at all not injured, not suspended, simply not selected, the exact sentence that described his entire first eleven weeks at the club a year earlier, except this time there is no debut waiting on the other side of it that anyone can promise him.
The fans still chant his name the one time he does warm up, in a home match against Vale United, a ripple of Marco! Marco! starting in the same section that unfurled the banner last spring, dying down slowly when he sits back on the bench without being brought on. Nobody in the directors' box reacts to it at all.
The contrast is not lost on the people who notice these things, and plenty of people notice these things.
@GraystoneUltras: "We're chanting for a player our own club won't play or negotiate with. Somebody upstairs needs to explain what exactly the plan is here, because from where we're sitting there isn't one."
Graystone travel to Croft FC on a wet Saturday in late October, a fixture that means nothing to the league table and less to anyone outside the two towns involved. Marco is an unused substitute again. He spends ninety minutes on the bench in a training bib, watching a match Graystone draw 1–1 without ever looking like winning or losing it, the kind of afternoon that exists in football purely to be forgotten by everyone who attends it.
Almost everyone.
In the stand opposite the dugouts, three rows back, a man in a dark coat writes something in a notebook twice during the match once just before half-time, once with about fifteen minutes left neither time in response to anything happening on the pitch that anybody else would think worth recording.
He does not stay for the final whistle.
Nobody at Croft FC knows who he is. Nobody at Graystone FC is looking for him. He leaves exactly the way he arrived, unremarked, and gets into a car with plates nobody thinks to photograph, because there is, on the face of it, nothing here worth photographing at all.
END OF CHAPTER 33