The house is quieter than it used to be.
This is not a complaint, Rico has been careful, over the years, not to confuse quiet with empty. He has lived in both and he knows the difference, empty is the changing room after a heavy defeat, when the showers run cold and no one speaks, empty is the specific silence of a house where something has been lost, this is not that.
This is just quiet, the particular quiet of a home where someone has recently moved out and left the rooms with more air in them than you remember. Emma's room still has her things in it most of them, she said she would come back for the rest at the weekend, that was three weekends ago. Rico has stopped expecting her on any particular weekend and started expecting her when she arrives, which is how it works with Emma and how it has always worked.
He does not mind.
He minds a little.
But not in a way that requires doing anything about.
The house in Harwich is the same house it has always been, people ask, sometimes, what Ricardo Santos does with himself.
The question comes from journalists, from former teammates, from the parents at the school near his house who recognise him in the supermarket and then try to appear as though they haven't. What does he do? He's not coaching. He turned down three managerial roles and two punditry contracts and one offer to become an ambassador for a sportswear brand that would have required him to attend events and smile in photographs.
What he does is this:
He reads, he walks, he cooks, badly, and then eats what he has cooked without complaint because there is no one to complain to and anyway he cooked it so it would be ungrateful. He tends the garden on weekends, he watches football, he goes to the gym three times a week and works out at the pace of a man who is no longer trying to prove anything to his body but would like to remain on reasonable terms with it.
He talks to Klaus on Wednesdays.
He talks to Lucas on Sundays.
He talks to Emma whenever Emma calls, which is often and unpredictably and always at the exact moment he has sat down to eat something.
He does not consider this a small life.
He has had a large life. He knows the difference between that and a good one.
There are still two televisions in the living room, Emma teased him about this before she moved out, she said it made the room look like a sports bar, she said no normal person has two televisions side by side on the same wall, she said this while watching one of them, which Rico pointed out and she told him that was not the point.
He has not moved them.
He tells himself it is because rearranging the furniture is more effort than it is worth. The fuller truth is that the two televisions have been there since the season Klaus's league games and Lucas's league games started clashing on Saturday afternoons, and removing one of them would feel like choosing between them, which he will not do, which he has never done.
On most match days, the left television has Real Blanco and the right has Queensgate City, Rico watches both, he keeps the volume on the left slightly higher because Klaus plays in a quieter style and the commentary on spanish football tends toward the contemplative, while the Premier League broadcasts have a particular quality of controlled hysteria that Rico finds wearing after ninety minutes. He has developed opinions about football commentary the way retired people develop opinions about things they now have time to actually think about.
Emma moved out in August.
She did not move far forty minutes by train, which she reminded Rico of approximately seven times during the two weeks before she left, as though proximity was a form of reassurance. He told her he didn't need reassuring, she said she knew that, she moved her things out on a saturday in three trips and left a plant on the kitchen windowsill that he suspects she left deliberately because she knows he will feel obligated to keep it alive, the plant is doing well.
Emma is doing better.
She has been playing football seriously for two years now. Not the way her brothers play nothing will ever be the way her brothers play, and Emma is the first person to say so, cheerfully and without any apparent distress but seriously, properly. She trains four days a week and she is good enough that people who know the game notice when they watch her. She has her father's reading of the pitch, the ability to see where things are going before they get there and something of her own that is harder to name. A willingness to be in the difficult position, to receive the ball when the easier option was to move away from it.
Rico recognised it the first time he watched her play, he did not say anything at the time.
He just watched.
On a Tuesday evening in October, Rico sits in his usual chair with his coffee going cold on the table beside him and watches England Women play a friendly on the right-hand television.
Emma is on the bench.
She has been called up twice before but not played. Rico knows this is the kind of thing that can go either way, you can be called up six times and never get on, or the seventh call-up is the one where the manager turns to the bench in the 62nd minute and your name is the name he says. Rico has been on both sides of that decision in his career. He knows which one Emma wants.
The match is competitive but not electric. England are the better side in the first half, at half-time Rico gets up, makes another coffee, and comes back.
58th minute.
The England manager turns to the bench.
Rico sits forward in his chair.
Emma Santos stands up.
She pulls off her training top, she jogs to the touchline, does three quick lateral movements, receives the referee's signal, and runs onto the pitch.
The television commentator says her name for the first time.
COMMENTARY "And on comes Emma Santos, the younger sister of Klaus and Lucas Santos, making her senior international debut for England Women this evening."
Rico puts his coffee down.
He does not pick it up again for the rest of the match.
Emma plays thirty-two minutes, she does not score, she does not get an assist. What she does is receive the ball under pressure eleven times and lose it once, she makes two runs that don't result in anything but create the space for someone else's run that does. In the 78th minute she wins a header in her own box that the commentator doesn't mention because the ball has already moved on by the time they notice.
Rico notices.
England win 2-0. Emma jogs off at the final whistle and immediately looks for the camera, she finds it, she raises one finger not a celebration, just an acknowledgement. One cap. First one.
In the living room in Harwich, Rico Santos sits with a cold coffee and says nothing to no one.
He is thinking about a boy who used to sit on the stairs before matches and breathe.
He is thinking about another boy who felt everything first.
He is thinking about a girl who left a plant on his windowsill.
Three children.
All on the same wall.
Two days later his phone rings at the usual time.
Klaus.
They talk for twenty minutes. Real Blanco are three points clear at the top of La Liga. Klaus is unhurried on the phone, he asks about the garden, he asks about the plant Emma left, he asks whether Rico has eaten properly this week in the tone of a person who already suspects the answer.
RICO: "I eat perfectly well."
KLAUS: "You said that last week and then told me you had toast for dinner."
RICO: "Toast is a meal."
KLAUS: "Toast is not a meal."
They talk about Emma's debut. Klaus watched it, he says she looked composed, which from Klaus is the highest possible compliment and Rico tells him so.
KLAUS: "She's good, Dad."
RICO: "She is."
KLAUS: "She's really good."
Rico looks at the plant on the kitchen windowsill.
RICO: "I know."
On Sunday, Lucas calls.
The conversation is longer and louder and covers more ground in less time, the way Lucas's conversations always do. Queensgate drew at the weekend, a result Lucas is philosophical about in the way that he is philosophical about results that frustrate him, which is to say not very philosophical at all but trying.
LUCAS: "We had four clear chances,four and we drew."
RICO: "It's October, you have time."
LUCAS: "I know it's October."
RICO: "So."
LUCAS: "So what?"
RICO: "So you have time."
Lucas makes a sound that is not quite agreement and not quite disagreement. Rico has been listening to that sound for years. It means Lucas knows Rico is right and is not yet ready to say so.
They talk about Emma. Lucas watched the friendly from Sofia's flat. He says Emma was the best player on the pitch in the last twenty minutes.
LUCAS: "She's going to start next time, I know it, she has the thing."
RICO: "What thing?"
LUCAS: "The thing where she's not scared of the ball, when it gets difficult she wants it more, not everyone has that."
Rico is quiet for a moment.
RICO: "No, not everyone has that."
They say goodbye.
Outside the window the garden is going dark. The corner where the goal used to be is the last part to lose the light.
Three children. All with the thing.
He made that happen and he did not make that happen, both of those things are true at the same time.
This is the rhythm of Rico Santos's life now.
Wednesday and Sunday, coffee in the morning, the garden on weekends, the two televisions on match days, the plant on the windowsill that he waters on Tuesdays because Emma told him Tuesdays and he has not thought to question it.
He is fifty-eight years old, he played professional football for seventeen years, he won a league titles, two domestic cups and one Ballon d'Or, he presented the same award to his son in the Grand Palais in Paris and the photograph of that moment is still, almost a year later, the screensaver on his phone.
He has a good life, he knows he has a good life.
He does not spend a great deal of time thinking about what he might have missed, he is not that kind of person, he made his choices, the way everyone makes their choices, in the moment they had to be made with the information available at the time. He does not revisit them, he does not keep them in a drawer and take them out on quiet evenings to examine.
The quiet evenings come and go.
The drawer stays closed.
For now.
Somewhere else.
An airport.
A departure gate. Plastic seats. The ordinary noise of a place that exists only between things.
He is sitting with the envelope on his knee.
"Passengers for flight AZ254 to London Heathrow this is your final boarding call. Please make your way to gate fourteen immediately."
The voice fades into the noise of the terminal.
He looks down at the envelope one last time.
Then he places it carefully inside his bag.
He stands.
For a moment he is still one hand on the strap of his bag, the terminal moving around him, everything in motion except him.
Then he walks toward the gate.
And does not look back.
END OF CHAPTER 21