Tuesday, May 23, 2023Demien's Apartment, Bergamo6:47 AM
The phone had been vibrating for long enough that the sound had worked its way into his sleep before he was properly awake, and when he opened his eyes the room was bright with early morning light and the screen on the nightstand was lit with a column of notifications that had stacked so high the display had stopped showing individual names and was counting in batches.
He picked it up.
Two hundred and forty-seven notifications in the last hour.
He unlocked it and opened Twitter first because that was always where the shape of something appeared before the detail did, and the England Football official account had posted at six AM.
@England:🏴 Gareth Southgate names his squad for our UEFA EURO 2024 qualifying matches against Malta and North Macedonia. First senior call-ups for: Demien Walter (Atalanta)...
The tweet had 890K likes. He read the number twice.
