The family settled into the living room; the evening was finding its own pace the way evenings do when nobody is trying to direct them. They talked about the Liverpool match, about the club, about what had been happening at home in the weeks Julien had been away.
Arnaud told a story from work that required him to stand up and demonstrate part of it, which made Les fall sideways off the sofa laughing and Clémence cover her face with her hands.
Loup and Les had their own line of questioning.
"Was Suárez actually that fast? Like in real?"
"What does the dressing room smell like after a match?"
"Has Gerrard ever actually lost his temper in training?"
Julien answered each question properly, without deflection, which was what they wanted.
Isabelle and Pierre moved in and out of the conversation at the edges, contributing when the moment took them, their eyes were carrying something that needed no description because it was visible in every glance they exchanged across the room when they thought Julien wasn't looking.
The lamplight was golden and soft across all of them.
The rain tapped steadily at the windows.
The laughter did not stop.
Late in the evening, Loup and Les had both gone under, Loup slumped against one end of the sofa with his mouth slightly open, Les curled at the other end with his knees drawn up, both of them were falling asleep without deciding to.
Élodie was fighting it from her corner of the sofa, yawning every thirty seconds, insisting with her eyes half-shut and her head drooping that she was absolutely fine.
Isabelle looked at Julien. "You should rest too, darling. It was a long journey. Your room's ready—I tidied it this morning."
He stood and pulled her into a hug.
"Thank you, Mum."
He said goodnight to his father, who clasped his hand and held it a beat. Said goodnight to Clémence, who was already reaching for a blanket to put over Les.
In his old room, with the familiar smell of it around him, he was asleep before he had finished the thought that was forming.
November in Paris was nothing like England. The following afternoon, sunlight broke through the clouds and settled warmly across the suburban pitch near the family's neighborhood.
Julien had barely finished changing when Arnaud appeared at the gate with Loup and Les behind him, both younger brothers were carrying footballs and wearing the expressions of people who have been planning this since they woke up and have already decided how it ends.
"Come on then." Arnaud spread his arms. "Today is the day we actually beat you."
"You've been saying that since you were twelve," Julien told him, and took one of the balls from Loup.
It had been weeks since he had touched a football without something depending on it. No scoreline, no crowd noise coming down through the stadium walls, no accumulated weight of what was being built at Melwood pressing against every touch.
Far from Anfield's obligations, this kind of pure, uncomplicated football felt like breathing clean air after a long time in a small room. He bounced the ball twice on the grass, just to feel it.
"Let's wait for Kylian and the others before we start."
A few minutes later, footsteps at the gate announced a new arrival. Kanté came through with a simple sports bag over one shoulder and his habitual expression of mild, slightly apologetic kindness as far from his reputation as an elite intercepting machine as it was possible to get while still being the same person.
He spotted Julien and gave a small, bashful wave.
"Sorry," he said, coming over. "I got on the wrong bus."
Julien looked at him. "N'Golo. Get a smartphone. You can use the maps to navigate."
"Maybe." Kanté scratched the back of his head. "I'll think about it."
Julien let it go. Kanté's indifference to material things was not a position he had adopted, it was simply how he was, as natural to him as his positioning in midfield, and pressing him about it produced the same result as trying to press him on a football pitch.
You ended up exactly where you started, and he always looked mildly apologetic about it.
The Mbappé family arrived not long after. Wilfrid came through the gate first, carrying bottles of water and a bag of snacks, Fayza beside him with her coat open despite the cold.
Kylian followed just behind them, alongside William Saliba, who had heard Julien was in Paris and come on the straightforward reasoning that this was not the kind of afternoon you missed. Ethan Mbappé came ahead of all of them at a dead sprint.
"Brother!"
"Welcome, all of you."
Julien embraced Kylian's parents, and Pierre and Isabelle came forward with their own greetings. The pitch took on the warmth of a gathering that had its own reasons for existing beyond the game.
Kylian fell into step beside Julien as everyone spread across the grass, and the admiration on his face was clear.
"I watched the 5–0." He shook his head. "That last goal, brother, the way you just hit it. I couldn't believe the velocity."
"Never mind me. How's the academy? You improving?"
Something lit up in Kylian's face that went past the usual eagerness. "Everything's going well, and thank you; the new coach has given me so much more freedom. He says I'll be stepping up to a higher level soon."
"Good. That's how it should go."
Julien said hello to William, and the game began.
Teams: Julien, Kanté, Loup, and Les on one side.
Arnaud, Saliba, Ethan, and Kylian on the other.
Wilfrid volunteered as referee. No goalkeepers, just open play and instinct. The others took seats on the benches along the side and served as an impromptu audience, clapping and cheering at the best moments.
It was only a kickabout but Kanté played exactly as he played at every other level. There was nothing showy about it, no slide tackles, no dramatic interceptions, no outward sign of anything remarkable being done.
He simply occupied the spaces that the ball was going to travel through before it got there. His opponents tried five different approaches and found the same result each time: the pass that had looked open wasn't, the channel that had seemed free already contained him, the second ball they had counted on arriving at their feet was already under his boot.
Kylian's pace, which tended to give even senior defenders serious problems, found no useful outlet against this quiet, immovable presence.
Kylian was quietly annoyed. He had wanted to put on a show in front of Julien. Instead, he found himself frozen out by this small, silent figure with the apparently supernatural talent for being exactly where the ball was going.
Julien played at half-his power, making sure Loup and Les got the ball often, making sure the afternoon stayed what it was meant to be.
Occasionally, when the instinct got the better of him, he would carry the ball past two or three people simply because the space was there and the pitch would go briefly quiet as everyone registered it, and then the noise would come back louder and Loup would try to describe what he had just seen to Les, who had also seen it and needed no description.
"Kylian!" Julien called across the pitch, watching him accelerate into open space. "Your movement before the ball, it's starting too late. You're reacting to the play instead of reading ahead of it."
He remembered being that age, burning with exactly that kind of urgency.
Kylian nodded once.
Kanté said nothing throughout, as he never did. But every time he won the ball, the way he won it said more than a full conversation could have.
After a while, Fayza called everyone in for a rest.
Water was passed around and snacks opened, players were dropping onto the benches. The conversations overlapped, Loup and Les were still in full debrief, Ethan was pressing Kanté with questions about what the Premier League was actually like, Arnaud and Saliba were arguing about something that had started on the pitch and continued off it.
Loup leaned against Julien from one side, Les from the other.
"Next time we have to be on your team," Les said firmly. "It's only fair. We're your brothers. N'Golo being on your team isn't fair either."
"N'Golo was on my team because you two asked for Kylian."
Les considered this. "Still."
Julien and Kylian sat a little apart from the others.
For a moment neither of them spoke.
Kylian turned a blade of grass between his fingers, looking out at the pitch, working something around in his head.
Then he said it straight: "Watching you at Liverpool, the football is just enchanting, brother. You look happy there. Properly happy." He looked at Julien. "I want to go to Liverpool one day."
Julien looked back at him. A broad grin crossed his face. He clapped Kylian's shoulder. "All right then. Once you've made your name at Monaco, I'll put your name forward to the club personally. Then we play side by side. Scoring together at Anfield."
Kylian's eyes went wide and bright, and he nodded vigorously. "Deal. One word, settled."
"Julien." From nearby, Wilfrid had caught the exchange and wandered over with a smile. "Don't go building castles in the air for him."
Julien shook his head, entirely sincere. "I mean it. Kylian has real gifts. He will definitely become a top player in the future."
Fayza laughed softly and agreed. "With you telling him that, his training effort doubles from tomorrow."
"Good," Julien said. "It should."
Kanté had been listening from a couple of meters away, fully present in the particular way he was always present giving his complete attention to things without drawing attention to giving it. He said nothing.
The sun moved across the pitch. No schedules on this grass. No analysis sessions, no match preparation, no fixture list pinned somewhere in the back of the mind. Just the sounds of the city around them and the laughter from the benches and Ethan still asking Kanté something that Kanté was still answering carefully.
They played another game after the rest.
As the sky began to go and the temperature dropped, everyone gathered their things and began to say goodbye.
At the gate, Kylian turned back.
When the Mbappé family left, Kylian repeated it one more time at the gate: "I'm going to come to Liverpool and find you, brother. That's a promise."
Julien answered him with a smile. "I'll be waiting."
He watched the family move down the street in the fading light, Wilfrid and Fayza side by side, Ethan bouncing between sentences, Kylian with his hands in his pockets, already somewhere else in his head. They turned the corner and were gone.
Beside him, Kanté stood with his bag, watching the empty street.
"He has real potential," Kanté said, after a moment.
"He does." Julien paused nodding. "I think he'll be our teammate someday. Club level, or international. Both, maybe."
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