The kitchen holds the silence.
Marco's words are still in the air "I want to play football" and nobody has moved to address them yet. Klaus is at the door with his arms at his sides now, no longer folded, which is not quite the same as being open but is at least different. Rico is looking at the table, Emma is looking at Marco.
Lucas speaks first.
LUCAS: "You're twenty-eight."
MARCO: "I know."
LUCAS: "I'm not trying to be cruel. I'm being honest with you. Twenty-eight with no professional experience, I don't know who takes that on. Even with —"
He stops himself before he says the name.
MARCO: "It doesn't have to be a big team. I'm not asking for the Champions League. I'm asking for a trial somewhere anywhere. Just someone who will look at me properly and tell me if I have something or not."
LUCAS: "And if they say you don't?"
Marco looks at him evenly.
MARCO: "Then I'll know and I'll find something else to do with my life but I have to know."
Rico lifts his head.
RICO: "I will see what I can do."
Klaus turns from the door.
KLAUS: "Papá."
RICO: "I will see what I can do."
He says it again. The same words. The same tone. The tone that means the conversation on this particular point is finished.
KLAUS: "You are going to call in favors for someone we don't know based on a letter and a story and —"
RICO: "Klaus."
KLAUS: "I'm saying this is not a small thing. You cannot just decide —"
RICO: "I owe it to him to try."
The kitchen goes quiet again.
Klaus looks at his father. Rico looks back at him between them is twenty-six years of the kind of understanding that does not require explanation and right now it is not helping either of them.
Klaus picks up his jacket from the back of the chair.
LUCAS: "Klaus "
KLAUS: "I need some air."
He goes out the front this time, not the garden, the front door,they hear it close.
Lucas looks at Rico. Rico looks at his hands.
Emma gets up from the table.
She goes to the counter, refills the kettle, sets it going. Then she turns and looks at Marco properly not the way she has been looking at him all evening, which was careful and measuring, but directly as herself.
EMMA: "Nice to meet you. Properly. I'm Emma."
Marco looks at her. Something in his face loosens slightly.
MARCO: "I know. I've seen you play."
EMMA: "Really."
MARCO: "You were on Italian television. The England game in September. You set up the second goal."
Emma blinks. Then makes a small sound that is almost a laugh.
EMMA: "That's , I did not expect that to be the first thing you will say."
MARCO: "I watch a lot of football."
A beat. Then Emma sits back down, slightly closer to him than before.
EMMA: "Do you believe you're telling the truth?"
It is a strange question and she knows it is a strange question but she asks it anyway because Emma has always asked the questions other people decide are too strange to ask.
MARCO: "Yes. I know what my mother told me. I know what the letter says. I have no reason to invent this."
EMMA: "I didn't ask if you were telling the truth. I asked if you believe you are."
Marco looks at her.
MARCO: "Yes. I do."
EMMA: "I don't know yet. Whether I believe it."
She says it honestly, without apology.
EMMA: "But I saw my father's face when you said her name and I know his face better than anyone. So."
She does not finish the sentence. She does not need to.
MARCO: "Thank you. For not throwing me out."
EMMA: "I didn't do anything."
MARCO: "You stayed in the room."
Emma looks at him for a moment.
EMMA: "I'll show you around tomorrow. It's not Milan but it's, it has its moments."
Marco nods.
LUCAS: (appearing in the doorway) "I'm going to get takeout. Does anyone have an opinion or am I deciding unilaterally."
EMMA: "Anything without coriander."
RICO: "Whatever you think."
Lucas looks at Marco.
LUCAS: "Any allergies? Anything you don't eat?"
Marco shakes his head.
LUCAS: "Good. Back in twenty."
He leaves. The front door opens and closes. A car starts.
The kitchen is quieter now. Just Rico and Emma and Marco. The letter still on the table. The clock on the wall.
The Santos house, which has always known how to hold difficult things, holds this one too.
The days that follow Marco stays.
The spare room at the end of the hall, the one that was never officially anyone's room but accumulated the things that had no other home,it is cleared out enough for a bed and a lamp and a small chest of drawers. Rico does it himself the morning after Marco arrives. He does not ask for help and nobody offers.
Klaus does not come back that night.
He calls Rico the following morning. The conversation is short. Rico does not tell the others what was said.
Lucas stays for two more days before his schedule pulls him back. In those two days he and Marco exist in a careful parallel not avoiding each other, not seeking each other out. Occasionally in the same room, occasionally exchanging a few words about football, which is the only territory that feels safe yet. Lucas watches Marco move and says nothing about what he sees but he watches.
Emma takes him around the town as promised. The high street, the park and the sports centre with the artificial pitch where Rico used to take Klaus and Lucas on Sunday mornings when they were children. Marco stands at the fence looking at the pitch for a long time.
In the mornings Rico finds Marco in the small gym in the back of the house. Every morning without fail. Running, working, the focused repetitive labour of someone who has not had access to proper facilities before and is treating every minute of it as something that might be taken away.
Rico watches him from the doorway once. Just for a moment. Then he goes back to the kitchen and makes coffee and picks up his phone.
He starts making calls.
THE DNA TEST
The DNA test is Rico's agent's idea, which is to say it is everyone's idea said out loud by the person whose job it is to say difficult things out loud.
His name is Patrick. He has been Rico's agent for nineteen years. He is not a man who is easily surprised and he is not easily surprised now, but he is very focused and very still in the way he gets when something requires all of his attention.
He comes to the house on a Thursday morning. The whole family is there even Klaus, who arrived the previous evening and has been in the house for fourteen hours without addressing Marco directly.
The test is processed through a private medical service Patrick arranged. Discreet, fast, no public record. The results come in a sealed document that Patrick brings in person.
They sit in the living room. Rico on the sofa, Emma beside him, Lucas in the armchair and Klaus standing by the window with his arms folded. Marco on the chair nearest to the door, the chair of someone who has not yet decided if he has the right to be comfortable.
Patrick opens the document.
He reads it.
He looks up.
PATRICK: "It's a match. Paternity confirmed."
The living room does what living rooms do when something irrevocable is said inside them.
Rico closes his eyes.
Emma exhales slowly.
Lucas looks at Marco.
Klaus looks at Rico.
Marco is very still. He does not look triumphant. He does not look relieved in the way people look when they have won something. He looks like a person who has just had confirmed something that was always true and is now trying to work out what that means for the rest of his life.
Patrick sets the document on the coffee table.
PATRICK: "So. Given the result I think we need to talk about what comes next. Specifically regarding Marco's football."
RICO: "I've been making calls. It's difficult, twenty-eight, no professional record. People are polite but —"
PATRICK: "That's what I want to address because there is another way to approach this. If we were to be open about who Marco is publicly. Rico Santos's son. The announcement itself would generate interest. Clubs that wouldn't look twice at an unknown twenty-eight-year-old might look very differently at —"
LUCAS: "You want to go public."
PATRICK: "I'm saying it's an option worth considering. If Marco has what he says he has , the bloodline alone doesn't prove it but it raises the conversation. A physical trial, properly organized, with the right people watching —"
MARCO: "I'm ready for a trial. Any time. I'm not afraid of being looked at."
PATRICK: "If the blood of Rico Santos runs through him and it shows on a pitch there will be interest. I'm certain of it."
KLAUS: "No."
Everyone looks at him.
KLAUS: "This is a horrible idea. You want to put this family's private business in the press to generate football interest for someone we have known for two weeks. That is what you are proposing."
PATRICK: "Klaus —"
LUCAS: "I'm not thrilled about it either. The moment this is public we lose control of the story completely."
EMMA: "But the test is positive."
She looks around the room.
EMMA: "It's confirmed. He is our brother. That's not an opinion anymore, it's a fact. So why are we still talking about this like it's a question?"
KLAUS: "He is not —"
He stops.
EMMA: "Finish the sentence, Klaus."
Klaus looks at her. Then at Marco. Then at the window.
KLAUS: "He is not mine."
He says it quietly. Not cruelly. But completely.
He picks up his jacket.
He leaves the room.
Rico watches him go.
He says nothing.
He can only watch.
She finds him in the hallway.
He has his jacket on and his keys in his hand but he has not opened the front door. He is standing in the hallway as if he got this far and then ran out of certainty.
EMMA: "Klaus."
He turns. His face is the face he shows the world when he does not want the world to know what is happening underneath. Emma has known this face her entire life and she has never once been fooled by it.
EMMA: "Tell me what this is actually about."
KLAUS: "You know what it's about."
EMMA: "I want you to say it."
Klaus is quiet for a moment.
KLAUS: "Mum."
The word sits between them.
KLAUS: "If this becomes public, if this is announced, if the whole world knows that dad had a son before us with someone else , what does that do to her? To her memory? She is not here to defend herself. She is not here to say how she feels about it and we are just going to what. Put it in the papers? Make it a story?"
Emma listens to all of it.
Then she speaks.
Klaus looks away.
EMMA: "Marco didn't choose this. He didn't choose to be born, he didn't choose his mother to be poor or sick or to die. He didn't choose to find out the way he found out. The only choice he made was to come here and try."
She takes a step toward him.
EMMA: "Accepting him is not forgetting Mum. It is not replacing her. It is not diminishing anything she was or anything she gave us. Those are two completely separate things and I think you know that."
Klaus does not respond.
But he has not opened the door.
EMMA: "I'm not asking you to love him. I'm not asking you to accept him overnight. I'm asking you to not leave. Just don't leave tonight."
Klaus looks at his keys.
Then at the front door.
Then at his sister.
He does not answer.
But he does not open the door.
END OF CHAPTER 25