Monday morning, two days after the Tottenham draw was a strange, suspended moment in time, a quiet interlude between the chaos of the match and the relentless grind of the season ahead.
I woke early, not to the alarm, but to the soft, golden light filtering through the curtains, and for the first time in what felt like a lifetime, I didn't immediately reach to check the system notifications, the league table, or the endless stream of messages on my phone that had become the background noise of my life. Instead, I just lay there, Emma's head resting on my chest, her breathing slow and steady, and I allowed myself, just for a moment, to simply exist.
The first quarter of the season was almost over. One more match, away at Norwich, and we would have completed the first major checkpoint of the campaign, a brutal, beautiful, heartbreaking six-match gauntlet that had tested us in ways I could never have imagined.
