The transfer window opens on the first of January the way it always does, a month of speculation dressed up as news, most of it about players who will end up going nowhere.
Marco's name is not in any of it.
@SantosWatch: "Not a single outlet linking Marco Santos anywhere this window. Not even a throwaway 'admirer' story. Genuinely didn't think we'd get here."
@GlobalFutbol: "The market has just quietly stopped asking about him. That might be worse than being linked somewhere and it falling through."
Patrick makes calls anyway, the way he always does in January, testing doors that were closed in the summer to see if a new year has changed anyone's mind. It hasn't. Two clubs who circled last spring don't return a second call. A Championship side enquires, gets told the number Graystone want, and doesn't enquire again.
PATRICK: (to Rico, second week of January) "Nobody's rushing to overpay for a player his own club won't use. I keep having to explain that the lack of minutes isn't a red flag on him, it's a red flag on them, and nobody wants to hear the distinction. They just see the stat."
Training continues exactly as it has since October. Marco is not selected for the League Cup tie against Halworth Rovers, a game Graystone lose on penalties, a game that means nothing, a game he isn't even asked to travel for.
He is named among the substitutes for the visit of Millbrook Town three days later, and when Doyle picks up a knock in the warm-up, twelve minutes before kickoff, in front of a stadium that has already seen the team sheet, the ground does something Briggs cannot coach out of it. It roars his name before anyone has confirmed he's coming on.
He plays well. Better than well two clean interceptions inside the first twenty minutes, one raking ball out to the wing that starts the move for Graystone's second, a header cleared off the line in the final ten that has three different commentators using the word composed within a minute of each other.
Briggs takes him off in the eighty-fourth minute.
Nobody watching the match can explain why. Graystone are 2–0 up. There's no injury, no yellow card, no tactical shape being protected that Marco's positioning is threatening. He is simply substituted, for a midfielder, in a match his side is already winning comfortably, and the board he walks past on his way to the tunnel does not applaud him the way it applauds every other change that afternoon.
He does not slam anything. He does not throw his gloves down, doesn't say a word to the fourth official, doesn't even look at Briggs on the way past him. He just stops walking, for about two seconds, directly in front of the dugout, and looks at his manager the way you look at someone once you've stopped being able to pretend you don't understand what's happening.
@GraystoneUltras: "Why do you take off your best player in the 84th minute of a game you're already winning. Someone explain the football reason for that, because there isn't one."
The row happens after, in the corridor outside the changing room, where Briggs catches him before he reaches the door.
BRIGGS: "Walk it off before you go in there."
MARCO: "Walk what off. I did nothing wrong out there."
BRIGGS: "I didn't say you did."
MARCO: "Then why did I come off. Two clean interceptions, an assist, a goal-line clearance, and you take me off with the game won and no reason on the sheet. What was that."
BRIGGS: "It was a squad decision."
MARCO: "Everything's a squad decision. Not playing me is a squad decision. Playing me for seventy-two minutes when I've done nothing to deserve coming off is a squad decision. At some point that stops being a decision and it's just a message, and I'm sick of being the only one in this building who's supposed to pretend I can't read it."
It is the loudest he has ever been with anyone at the club. A kit man in the corridor hears it. So does a physio, and a young winger from the development squad who says nothing about it to anyone that isn't already common knowledge by training the next morning.
BRIGGS: (quieter, after a pause) "Careful."
MARCO: "Of what."
BRIGGS: "Of turning into someone who thinks the club owes him something. I've seen that player before. He's never as good as he thinks he is once the chip's on his shoulder."
MARCO: "Maybe I already am that player. Maybe you made me into him."
He doesn't wait for an answer. He goes in, showers, leaves without talking to anyone, and doesn't call Rico that night the way he calls Rico most nights, win or lose.
Rico calls him instead, close to midnight.
RICO: "I heard."
MARCO: "From who."
RICO: "Doesn't matter from who. Everybody hears everything eventually, you know that better than anyone in this family."
MARCO: "I'm not sorry for it."
RICO: "I'm not asking you to be. I'm asking how you're doing."
MARCO: "I'm done, Papa. Not angry-done. Not going to say something stupid to a reporter-done. Just done. I don't feel anything for this club anymore except tired."
Rico doesn't try to talk him out of the feeling. He's learned better than that by now.
RICO: "Then let the feeling sit. Don't make a decision out of it tonight. Decisions made at midnight after a bad conversation are usually just the conversation talking."
MARCO: "I hear you. I still mean it in the morning, though. I already know that."
He does mean it in the morning. He means it for the two weeks after that too, weeks that pass with training, silence, no minutes, and a growing, settled certainty that has nothing frantic left in it at all it is simply a fact he carries around now, the way you carry around your own height.
Six hundred miles away, in a city that has spent the better part of a decade being politely disappointed by itself, Vittoria Milano's technical director is looking at a spreadsheet he does not like.
Bianchi is gone sold in the first week of January to a mid-table Bundesliga side for a fee the board is calling sensible and everyone in the building privately calls what we could get. He is thirty-two, in the last six months of his contract, and the alternative to selling him now was watching him leave in the summer for nothing. Nobody at the club is happy about it. Everybody at the club agrees it was the only version of this that didn't end with them getting nothing at all.
What it leaves them with is a back four missing its most experienced defender, six months into a season already complicated by two long-term injuries at centre-back, and a transfer budget that could not, under any version of the club's finances, stretch to a proven replacement in January. The kind of number a good centre-back costs in the middle of a season the number clubs charge specifically because they know you're desperate is not a number Vittoria Milano can spend without selling someone else first, and there is no time left in the window to do both.
DIRETTORE TECNICO (to the room): "We need a body in that position who can start immediately, who costs nothing close to what the market wants for it, and who won't need six weeks to understand how we play. I don't love our options."
Ferri has been saying one name for three months, quietly, in the reports nobody outside the scouting department reads carefully enough.
FERRI: "Santos. Graystone. English second division."
DIRETTORE TECNICO: "The one who hasn't played since October?"
FERRI: "Because his club has a contract dispute with him, not because there's anything wrong with how he plays. I've watched every minute he's had this season and every minute he had last season. He trains like the audience is always there even when it isn't. That tells me more than the minutes would have."
DIRETTORE TECNICO: "A player his own club won't use is either a problem or an opportunity. There's no third option."
FERRI: "I don't think he's the problem. I think the problem is whoever's deciding not to play him."
It is, everyone in the room understands without needing it said aloud, an unusual thing to do sign a player permanently in the middle of a season, mid-contract, from a club with no obvious reason to want him gone quickly. Clubs almost never let a player leave in January unless the player has forced it or the money is too good to argue with. Nobody expects Graystone to be the second kind of club and nobody Vittoria Milano has spoken to believes Marco is the first.
But the fee they can offer barely registers against what Graystone paid for players half as good, and the board that has spent all season refusing to negotiate a new contract has already shown, with painful clarity, exactly what it will do the moment a number appears on the table.
DIRETTORE TECNICO: "Make the call. Today. If this is real, we don't have the luxury of doing it slowly."
The call comes to Patrick's office on the morning of the thirtieth of January, thirty-six hours before the window closes.
FERRI: "Mr Whitfield. I need to be direct with you about the timeline, because I don't have room to be anything else. We want Marco Santos. We can move today. We need an answer by tomorrow evening, because after that the window is shut and we've had to solve this problem a different way, and I don't think either solution helps him."
Patrick calls Rico first, the way he has all season.
PATRICK: "It's real this time. Vittoria Milano. Serie A. They need a centre-back now, not in the summer, and they've picked him."
RICO: "How real."
PATRICK: "Real enough that they want an answer inside a day. Good fee. Multi-year deal. First-team football, immediately not a promise of it, an actual need for it. They lost a defender and they're short. This isn't charity, Rico. This is a club that needs exactly what he is."
Rico tells Marco himself, that evening, in person.
RICO: "It's a big decision to make in a day, Marco. A permanent move. A different league entirely, and you'd be doing it with almost no time to sit with any of it. I'm not telling you not to. I'm telling you it's fair to want longer than a day to think about something this size."
MARCO: "I don't need longer."
RICO: "You might feel that way tonight and feel differently in a week, once you're actually there and it's real."
MARCO: "I've had eleven months to feel differently about this club, Rico. Eleven months of exactly this it's not enough, wait, we'll see how the season looks, it's a squad decision. I'm not doing one more day of it. Whatever the fee is, whatever the deal is, the answer is yes before I even hear the number."
RICO: "You're allowed to be sure. I just want you sure for the right reason. Not sure because you're angry at Graystone. Sure because it's genuinely the right move for you."
MARCO: "Both things can be true at once. I think they are true at once. I'm not running away from anything I'm running toward a club that actually wants me right now, today, not in six months if things go well. That's the whole difference."
Rico looks at him for a long moment the same look from the touchline in October, except there's nothing left in it to correct.
RICO: "Then I'm with you. All the way."
Graystone's board approves the sale before lunch the following day. There is, again, no argument from their side, no attempt to hold out for a better number, no meeting that runs longer than the fee requires them to sit in a room together. The same organisation that let a contract lapse for nearly a year signs off on his exit in under four hours.
PATRICK: (to Rico, watching the paperwork move) "I've stopped being surprised by how fast they move once there's a fee attached. I don't think I'll ever stop being annoyed by it."
The medical is done same-day, over video with a clinic Vittoria Milano trust, followed up in person the moment he lands. The contract is three years, a release clause built in that both sides privately expect to matter sooner rather than later, and wages that make Patrick read the sheet twice before he says anything at all.
Marco signs it in a hotel room outside Milan at eleven that night, an hour and forty minutes before the window closes, Rico on a video call in the corner of the screen the whole time, saying nothing, just watching his son do it.
The Graystone statement goes up the next morning, brief and procedural, the kind of announcement clubs write about players they were never emotionally attached to in the first place. Vittoria Milano's is longer, and uses the word excited twice.
Marco does the interview himself, in English, sitting in a training-ground media room he has been inside for less than a day, still visibly tired from the flight.
REPORTER: "Any final message for the Graystone fans?"
MARCO: "Just thank you. They chanted my name in matches I wasn't even playing in, all season, and that's not something every fan base does for a player their own club has more or less put away. I won't pretend the last few months there were the best of my career they weren't, and everyone watching knows that as well as I do. But Graystone gave me my actual chance, the first one, when nobody else was offering it. I don't forget that just because it ended the way it ended. I hope they have a good rest of the season."
He doesn't mention Briggs. Doesn't mention the board, the corridor, the eighty-fourth minute, any of it. When a second reporter tries a version of the question angled to get him to say something sharper, he says the same thing again, almost word for word, patient the second time the way he wasn't patient in a Graystone corridor two weeks earlier, and lets that be the whole answer.
@GraystoneUltras: "Class from Marco there. Didn't have to be that gracious about it and he was anyway. Good luck to him. Genuinely."
@SantosWatch: "From nine minutes in six weeks to Serie A in the space of one transfer window. Football finds a way to make you feel stupid for ever thinking you understood it."
END OF CHAPTER 34