Page 52 of Offside

“He also says Mami is cooking for Saturday like it’s a wedding. Two kitchens now. She’s annexed the neighbor’s.” He watches me fold. “And you’ve said nine words since breakfast. Eleven now. I counted, because counting is catching, apparently, living with you.”

“Long season.”

“Thirteen.” He lets it sit. Then, gently, the way he does everything now: “You did this after Kyiv too. Went underwater for two days. Came up with a bit about border control and nobody ever knew where you’d been.” He’s quiet a second. “Whenever you surface, I’m around. That’s all. No appointment needed.”

My own method. Aimed back at me, secondhand, through a man who doesn’t know he’s holding it. The room is full of people leaving doors open and I’m over here reviewing hinges.

“Thanks, Dami.”

“Fifteen,” he says, satisfied. “Also the blog wants to know if you’re running your airport hug circuit on Sunday. He’s budgeting his goodbyes. He was very serious about it.”

“Tell the blog yes.”

“Nineteen words. A rally.” He lets me be.

Chapter 16: Tomáš

Iwake alone for the third morning in five days, and this time the room isn’t even corrected. He just went. Sometime before six, silent, thorough, gone.

At breakfast he’s there. Present, technically. A man keeping a promise the way you keep a receipt. He says nine words all morning.

“Your ten’s gone quiet,” Polášek says, next to me, low. Vice-captain register, nothing in his face.

“Loss does it.”

“Mm.” He doesn’t push it. “He’ll surface for the bronze. He always surfaces for fixtures.”

“He always surfaces,” I say, and put the conversation down gently, and add it to the day’s ledger.

Horak asks for the report and gets one line about eggs. The table laughs. I hear what’s in it. Nobody else does. Five years of fluency in this man, and I can read the blood through the bandage from ten meters.

Something is wrong. Something has been wrong since the shower, since the corridor, since before that. He’s managing it the way he manages everything. Alone, at volume, in plain sight.

I find Damián by the coffee at eleven, because there’s a question I need weighed and he’s the only man alive holding the scale.

“When you told everyone about you and my brother, told the team,” I say. “Were you sure?”

He looks at me for a second.

“I was sure of him and me,” he says. “I was never sure of the telling. Right up until my mouth opened I’d have bet against me.” He drinks his coffee. “Why?”

“Doing accounts. End of the summer.”

“Mm.” He lets it be, the way he lets everything be now. “For what it’s worth. It survived the telling. Everything I was protecting by keeping quiet, the quiet was what it needed protecting from.”

“And if it hadn’t survived?”

“Then it was always going to die, and I’d have spent my life feeding it in the dark.” He shrugs, easy, a man on the far shore of it. “In the end, it was cheaper to know.”

He walks off to physio with his coffee, a man with a lease, and doesn’t know he just co-signed anything.

I spend the rest of the day not making a plan.

That’s the work, actually. The not-planning. Every captain instinct I own wants to build this like a set piece, pick the ground, script the first line, control the variables. I did that once. I stood over my little brother’s whole heart at sixteen and made a ruling for his own good, and it cost him six years, and I swore on the drive home from Munich that I’d never decide for a person I love again.

So, no plan. No script. Just the thing Tobík said with crumbs on his lanyard.

You don’t have to say it well. You can say it badly. It still counts.