The weeks after Bissoni don't make for dramatic reading, and that's exactly the point.
Marco doesn't stop making mistakes. Nobody does, not at this level, not over a full season. There's a heavy touch against Ferrano that nearly invites pressure he has to sprint back to smother. There's a misjudged header against Costiera that drops to the wrong feet for a half-second before Conti mops it up. There's one against Aversano where he's caught square and has to recover with a last-ditch tackle that draws a yellow card and a lecture from the referee.
None of it ends up in a net. That's the difference now, and it's the only difference that matters.
COMMENTATOR (broadcast, translated): "Another recovery from Santos. He's not perfect back there nobody watching would tell you he's perfect but he's not costing them anymore, and at this stage of the season, that's worth more than a clean sheet on its own."
Rinaldi starts talking more on the pitch, taking cues off him instead of the other way around. Conti, who was never much of a talker to begin with, starts drifting into positions that assume Marco will be where he's supposed to be, because lately he always is. It isn't chemistry that announces itself. It's the kind you only notice by its absence the fact that nobody's shouting corrections at each other anymore, because there's nothing left to correct.
The press narrative turns slowly, the way these things always do not with an apology, just with a quieter tone replacing the loud one.
GAZZETTA (translated): "It is worth revisiting, six months on, the summer question that dominated back pages: was Vittoria Milano's gamble on an unproven centre-back a reckless one? The evidence on the pitch has started to answer for itself."
PANELIST 2 (post-match, translated): "I said in October I had doubts. I'll say it now he is calmer than half the back lines in this league. Credit where it's due."
@SantosWatch: "okay okay he's actually good good. didn't think I'd be typing this but here we are."
Somewhere in among the punditry, a smaller item runs the kind of paragraph that would've been invisible and isn't anymore.
CORRIERE (translated, transfer notes column): "Sources close to one of Serie A's traditional powerhouses have described initial, informal interest in Vittoria Milano's centre-back Santos, though it is understood no contact has been made with the player's representatives. Too early to call it anything more than admiration from a distance for now."
No club named, no official anything. Just enough ink to make Patrick's phone start ringing differently than it used to.
Patrick brings it up over video call, the way he brings up most things no preamble, straight into it, like the conversation started five minutes before Marco actually picked up.
PATRICK: "You've seen the Corriere piece."
MARCO: "I've seen it."
PATRICK: "Doesn't say much. But it doesn't need to say much, not this early in the season this is how it always starts. A line in a transfer column, no name attached, and then in three months it's a name attached, and then it's a phone call. I want us ahead of it, not behind it."
MARCO: "Ahead of what, exactly?"
PATRICK: "You. Your value. Right now, this club is paying you what they paid for a gamble. You're not a gamble anymore, you've spent weeks proving that in front of everyone who was ready to write you off. By the start of next season, we should be sitting down with Vittoria Milano and having a very different conversation about your contract. A number that reflects what you actually are to that back line now, not what you were on the day you signed."
Marco doesn't answer right away. Patrick's used to that by now Marco thinks in silences the way other people think out loud.
MARCO: "I don't want to start that yet."
PATRICK: "Why not? This is the leverage moment, Marco. You wait too long, the noise dies down, you're negotiating from nothing again."
MARCO: "Because there's a version of this where the reports are real and something else happens before any of that matters. I don't want to sit across from Greco asking for more money while I'm quietly hoping I won't be here to spend it. Let's see where the interest goes first. If it's nothing, it's nothing, and we have the contract conversation in the summer like normal. If it's something—"
PATRICK: "If it's something, you want to already be somewhere else instead of holding out for a raise from a team you're about to leave."
Marco doesn't say yes to that outright. He doesn't have to.
PATRICK: (after a pause, the sound of him already resigned to it) "Alright. It's probably nothing, anyway one paragraph, no name, could be an agent planting a story for reasons that have nothing to do with you. But I'll look into it properly. Quietly. No calls that leave a trail, nothing that gets back to Vittoria Milano before we know what we're actually looking at." A beat. "You understand if it turns out to be real, we won't have forever to decide."
MARCO: "I know."
PATRICK: "Alright. Then let's just win football matches for now and let me handle the parts that aren't football matches."
Marco almost smiles at that it's the closest thing to a truce the two of them ever really need.
The season keeps drawing itself toward its close the way seasons do, not in one dramatic swing, but in a hundred ordinary Sundays stacking up into something that, looked at all at once, resembles a story. Vittoria Milano sit comfortably enough in mid-table to have stopped being anyone's cautionary tale and started being, in the quieter corners of the football conversation, something closer to an example.
Nobody's said the word interest out loud to Marco directly. Not yet. But he notices, the way you notice weather changing before anyone bothers to mention it, that his name gets asked about in press conferences differently now than it did in October less "can he do this job," more "how much longer will he be doing it here."
He doesn't chase the question. He just keeps playing, and lets the rest of it find him whenever it's ready to.
END OF CHAPTER 37