“Good,” he says, fierce and quiet. “Don’t you dare go easy on me in front of seventy thousand people. Whatever this is, it doesn’t step on the pitch.”
“Promise the not-easy back, then. You owe me a ruined afternoon too.”
“On my career,” he says, and means it like a vow.
He looks at me, and the room gets very still around what comes next. “It isn’t staying,” he says. “Tonight can’t be staying. You know the words.”
“I know the words. It isn’t staying. Tonight I still go.”
“Twice now,” he says. “The same goodbye, word for word.”
“Third time we retire it. One way or the other.”
The words come out worn smooth, and neither of us fixes them. The sentence that would replace them isn’t allowed out until daylight.
“Then go slow enough that I don’t mistake it for the old way.”
“Sleep four hours at least,” I say, finding my shirt. “You’re playing a fast man in a few days.”
“I hear his opponent is slow in the last twenty minutes.”
“He saves something for the last twenty minutes.”
I go slow enough. I find my clothes in the dark at a speed that would have embarrassed the man I was a year ago. At the door I stop, one hand on the frame. The old me stands in a stairwell holding his shoes, and I finally see him clearly. It was never the neighbor. It was never the dog. Getting caught was never the danger, getting caught was the exit I wanted and couldn’t allow,because an accident absolves you and a choice does not. I ran from the version where it was my fault on purpose. Kindness never entered the building.
“After the match,” I say from the doorway. “Whatever the score does. The sentence finds its daylight.”
“Don’t schedule what you can’t survive, Marek.”
“I’m not scheduling it. I’m promising it. There’s a difference.”
At the door, he catches my sleeve. “Text me when you’re back at the hotel.”
“Since when do we text?”
“Since tonight. One word, Marek.”
“You’ll get two.”
“Go,” he says then, and the warmth gets loose around the edges of it, and the last thing I see before the door closes is him standing in his dark kitchen, barefoot, not guarding any of it.
The walk back is quick. The night smells like rain that hasn’t committed, and the city hums its one flat note over a man walking home with a promise in his mouth instead of an exit. I could draw this route with my eyes closed, and I am done needing to.
Inside the room, I send one word.Inside.The reply is a single thumbs-up, and then, a second later, the picture of a moka pot, which is either goodnight or a threat of coffee, and I don’t decide which.
In the room, Novotný graciously concedes a point to Roman in his sleep. I stretch out in the dark on top of the covers, and somewhere between the pillow and the ceiling the decision finishes making itself. Quietly. No announcement. The way the real ones apparently arrive.
I want to try. Not the wanting. The trying. The noon, the sun, the witnesses, all of it at the stated price. There’s no procedure for becoming someone else, and I’m going to attempt it anyway, and somewhere in the early steps, there’s a coffee I owe Damián.Somewhere past that, eventually, in some city, in daylight, there’s a market with favas in it. I’m not ready to look directly at that one. It’s enough that it’s on the list.
Step one, play the quarterfinal. Step two exists. That is already more steps than the old plan ever had.
The second alarm sits on the nightstand, already working before it goes off, keeping watch for a man who has to wake up twice today. Once for the match.
Once for the rest of it.
Chapter 11: Enzo
The text is waiting when I wake up.