The season closes the way most seasons close for a team with nothing left to play for and nothing left to lose mid-table, safe, forgettable to everyone except the people living inside it.
No transfer ever comes. The paragraph that made Patrick's phone ring differently never grows a second sentence. No name gets attached to the "sources close to" line, no follow-up runs, no call ever arrives that isn't just noise. By April it's stopped being a live question and started being the kind of thing pundits mention only to say it never happened.
@GlobalFutbol: "Whatever that January links story was, it's gone quiet. Sometimes 'interest' just means someone's scout had a slow week."
Patrick calls it correctly before Marco even has to ask.
PATRICK: "It's dead. Whatever it was, it's dead. Which means it's time we stopped waiting on a ghost and had the conversation we were always going to have anyway."
MARCO: "The contract."
PATRICK: "The contract. You've had a full season proving what you are to that back line. There's no reason left to hold off."
This time Marco doesn't push back. Vittoria Milano, for their part, don't need convincing either the opening numbers come back from the club within two week, closer to what Patrick asked for than either of them expected, and by the time preseason training documents start landing in players' inboxes, there's a framework sitting on the table that both sides seem, for once, genuinely happy to be discussing.
PATRICK: "They want this done before the season starts. No dragging it into September, no using it as leverage against form. I think that tells you something."
MARCO: "It tells me they don't want a repeat of last summer's headlines."
PATRICK: "That too."
Preseason fixtures get announced the way they always do a press release nobody reads closely until somebody circles one line of it.
@VittoriaMilano: "Preseason friendlies confirmed. Details below. "
The list is unremarkable for most of the match up but at the bottom of the list Real Blanco.
It takes the internet about four minutes to do the arithmetic.
@SantosWatch: "WAIT. Vittoria Milano vs Real Blanco in preseason. That's Marco's club. That's KLAUS'S club. Is this actually happening. Is this real."
@GlobalFutbol: "Three years of people asking if we'd ever see it and it's a preseason friendly of all things that delivers it. Football doesn't care about the venue, apparently."
@FootballTwitter: "Best striker in the world vs. his own brother who's been a professional for what, two years? This isn't a matchup, this is a mismatch with a family tree attached."
Within a day it stops being a preseason friendly and starts being an event ticket resale prices for a meaningless fixture climbing into territory usually reserved for cup finals, broadcasters in four countries suddenly discovering room in the schedule they hadn't had for this fixture in previous years. Nobody involved asked for this. Nobody involved can stop it either.
PANELIST 1 (broadcast, translated): "I have covered this sport for twenty years and I cannot remember a friendly generating this kind of interest for reasons that have nothing to do with either team."
The predictions split down predictable lines.
@GlobalFutbol: "Realistically? Klaus ends this in twenty minutes. He's the best in the world at exactly the thing Marco's job is to stop. I love the story, I don't believe in the upset."
@SantosWatch: "Everyone sleeping on the fact that Marco hasn't been beaten cleanly in open play since February. This isn't a nobody standing in front of Klaus. Watch the tape before you call it easy."
PANELIST 3 (broadcast, translated): "I don't think the result matters as much as the moment. This is two brothers who, by every account, have not spoken in years, about to share a pitch for the first time in their professional lives. That's the story, not the scoreline."
A reporter gets ninety seconds with Klaus at Real Blanco's preseason media day, and it's enough for the whole cycle to spin up again.
REPORTER: "Where do you see the team finishing this season?"
KLAUS: "Winning everything. We're ready. That's all there is to say about it."
REPORTER: "You face your brother next week first time you've shared a pitch professionally. Can we expect anything different from you in training this week? Maybe something extra, head-to-head, given who it is?"
KLAUS: "It's a normal match. I'm not doing anything different for it and I'm not planning to. I'll play my game, the way I play every match. People should not expect fireworks or some occasion out of it. It's a game that means nothing to me."
REPORTER: "And Marco anything you'd like to say to him, knowing this is likely the first time you two will ever be on the same pitch?"
KLAUS: "No. Nothing." (a beat, already turning) "Thank you."
He's gone before the next question can be asked.
It goes everywhere within the hour, clipped down to eleven seconds, captioned a dozen different ways by a dozen different accounts, all of them circling the same detail not what Klaus said, but how little of it he was willing to spend on his own brother.
@SantosWatch: "'No. Nothing.' Two words. His own brother. I don't think Klaus understands how that's going to read to everyone watching this."
@GlobalFutbol: "Whatever's actually going on in that family, Klaus just told the entire world he doesn't think about it at all. Either the coldest thing I've seen a footballer say this summer, or the most honest."
Patrick raises the contract again on the Tuesday of match week, more out of habit than urgency a scheduling question, nothing that needs an answer today.
PATRICK: "Club wants to sit down Thursday if you're free. Nothing that can't move if you'd rather—"
MARCO: "Not this week."
PATRICK: "It's a conversation, Marco, not a signature. Thirty minutes."
MARCO: "I know what it is. I still don't want it in my head this week. I want one thing in my head this week, and it isn't a number on a page." A pause. "After the match. Whatever happens, after."
Patrick doesn't argue. He's known Marco long enough to recognise when a no is really a not yet, and long enough to know the two aren't worth fighting over the same week.
Marco's teammates notice something shift before anyone says a word about it out loud. Training sharpens. Recovery sessions get less small talk. Rinaldi mentions to Conti, quietly, in the changing room, that he's never seen Marco arrive this early for a session that doesn't matter for points.
RINALDI: "It's preseason. It's nothing."
CONTI: "Tell him that."
Nobody does.
Real Blanco's team sheet drops an hour before kickoff, and the internet does what the internet does with team sheets now reads every name twice, looking for one in particular.
It isn't there. Klaus starts on the bench.
@SantosWatch: "KLAUS NOT STARTING. Rotation, probably, it's preseason. But the whole world just exhaled at once."
The match, for a while, behaves like the friendly it technically is. Vittoria Milano control the tempo without ever threatening to run away with it, Marco organising the back line with the same quiet authority he's carried since March a shape here, a gesture there, nothing that needs raising his voice. In the twenty-third minute he nearly writes the story himself, meeting a corner clean at the near post, the header dipping just enough to beat the goalkeeper before clipping the outside of the far post and away.
COMMENTATOR (broadcast, translated): "So close! Santos almost the unlikely name on the scoresheet here that's inches away from being the moment everyone remembers this match for."
It stays 0–0. The crowd, half of it there for the football and half of it there for a name that hasn't appeared yet, waits.
They don't have to wait long.
Twenty-six minutes in, Real Blanco's starting striker goes down clutching the back of his leg, cramp in July heat catching him early, and the fourth official's board goes up before he's even fully off the pitch.
Number 9.
The stadium makes a sound that has nothing to do with the football being played up to that point a single, rising roar, the sound of forty thousand people getting the thing they actually came for.
Klaus jogs on, rolls his shoulders once, and doesn't look toward the Vittoria Milano end of the pitch at all.
Marco knows, watching him cross the white line, that the match everyone paid for has only just started.
For the rest of the first half, Klaus barely touches the ball clean.
It isn't accident. It's Marco, positioned a half-step tighter than the coaching staff drew it up, cutting off every ball that arrives to feet before Klaus can properly receive it, shepherding him wide whenever he does get a touch, refusing to give him the half-yard he's spent his career turning into goals. Twice Klaus checks his run and finds Marco already there, already facing him, already between him and anything useful.
The third time, Klaus is quicker than the plan accounts for receives on the half-turn, spins away clean, half a stride of daylight opening up toward goal and Marco, with nothing else left to do about it, grabs a fistful of shirt and drags him back down.
The referee's whistle goes. The caution stays in his pocket a stern word instead, a finger pointed, a warning that carries the full weight of next time it's a card.
COMMENTATOR (broadcast, translated): "That's as close as it gets to a yellow without being one. Santos knows exactly how far he can push it and so far, tonight, he's pushed it about as far as it goes."
Half-time arrives with the scoreline untouched and the story already written by everyone watching.
PANELIST 2 (halftime, translated): "I did not believe this coming in. Marco Santos is pocketing Klaus Santos. I want to say that sentence again slower because I still don't quite believe it he is pocketing him."
@GlobalFutbol: "Genuinely stunned. Klaus has three touches in the box all half and Marco's been within a yard of him for every single one."
@SantosWatch: "TOLD YOU. Watch the tape before you call it easy, I said. I SAID."
Both benches use the fifteen minutes the way benches always do quiet instructions, water, a manager crouched low in front of his players saying things the cameras can't hear. Nobody on either side needs to say what everyone already knows: the second half is when this either changes or it doesn't.
It starts the way the first half ended Marco still tight, still patient, still exactly where he needs to be, and Vittoria Milano still doing more with the ball than any one would have suggested. In the fifty-third minute a low drive from the edge of the box cracks off the base of the post, the goalkeeper beaten and grateful for the width of a goalpost, and for a moment it looks like the story of the night might end up being written by somebody else's chapter entirely.
Then, on the hour mark, Real Blanco win a free kick just outside the box the kind of distance that makes most players think twice, close enough to punish a wall that's a half-step out of position, far enough that it should, by any reasonable measure, be a low-percentage shot.
Klaus doesn't think twice.
He's done this before, more times than anyone standing in that wall has attempted it in their careers combined, and everyone in the stadium who has ever seen him play knows exactly what that means.
He places the ball. He takes three steps back.
He stands over it.
END OF CHAPTER 38