The flight to Paris didn't feel like a victory lap; it felt like a deployment.
While the other juniors on the plane talked about sightseeing at the Eiffel Tower, I sat in seat 24C with my eyes closed, visualizing the red clay of Roland Garros. To them, the clay was "classic." To me, it was the color of the dust outside our old house. It was the color of the debt we were finally going to bury.
The French Open. The "Phillippe Chatrier" court was a cathedral of noise and heat.
I'm seventeen now. I've scraped through the qualifiers, my hands calloused and my heart hardened. My father is here, sitting in the player's box. He looks out of place in his cheap suit among the celebrities and sponsors, his eyes darting around as if the men in the green masks might jump over the stadium walls.
"Focus, Roki," I whisper to myself, bouncing the ball.
Across the net, the world #4, a mountain of a man named Ivanov, looks at me like I'm a bug he's about to squash. He's won three Grand Slams. I've won a handful of matches in front of fifty people.
The first two sets were a massacre. Ivanov's serve is a literal cannonade. Every time I touch the ball, my racquet vibrates so hard I think the strings will snap.
6–2, 6–3.
The crowd is starting to whisper, checking their watches, waiting for the "prodigy" to flame out.
I look at my father. He's gone pale. He's looking at the clock. That damn clock. The pressure starts to creep back in—the feeling that if I lose this, the apartment goes, the safety goes, the life we built on a lie collapses.
I sit on the changeover bench, my head under a towel.
I walk back to the baseline. Ivanov tosses the ball for his signature serve.
In that split second, I don't see a tennis pro. I see the gangsters. I see the struggle. I see the nine-year-old boy.
Ivanov fires. 135 mph.
I don't react—I anticipate. I step inside the baseline, meeting the ball at its peak, and I swing with every ounce of the rage I've bottled up since that night by the window.
CRACK.
The return screams past Ivanov before he can even bring his racquet down. The stadium goes silent for a heartbeat. Then, a roar.
The match turns into a war of attrition. We are five hours in. My legs are screaming, my lungs are on fire, and the red clay has stained my white socks a permanent, bloody orange.
4–4 in the fifth set. Deuce.
I look up into the stands. I don't see my father looking at the clock anymore. For the first time, he isn't looking at the time—he's looking at me. He's leaning forward, his hands gripped onto the railing. He isn't afraid of the debt. He's proud of the man I've become.
I serve. I volley. I dive into the clay, scraping my skin raw, just to keep the point alive.
Ivanov is shaking. He's never met someone who treats a tennis match like a life-or-death struggle.
I hit a cross-court forehand that nicks the very corner of the line.
"Game, set, and match—Roki."
I don't celebrate. I don't fall to my knees. I just walk to the net, shake Ivanov's hand, and look at the scoreboard.
I'm in the quarter-finals. The prize money alone will pay off everything. Every cent. Every favor.
I walk off the court, through the tunnel, and find my father waiting by the player's entrance. He doesn't say "Good job." He doesn't mention the noodles.
He just pulls out a small, tattered notebook—the one where he kept the names and the numbers of the men he owed. Slowly, deliberately, he tears the page out, crumbles it into a ball, and drops it into a trash can.
"It's over, Roki," he says, his voice cracking. "The time... it stopped."
I lean against the cold concrete wall, the adrenaline finally leaving my system.
"No, Father," I say, looking toward the bright light of the stadium exit where Luke Caine is standing, watching me from the shadows. "It didn't stop."
"It just started."