On nights like this, when the floodlights burn too bright over the training pitch and the grass smells faintly of old rain and chalk lines, Mateo sometimes remembers how the sky looked above Buenos Aires when he first learned to kick a ball with purpose. It was nothing special — just the cracked asphalt behind his mother’s apartment, the goal drawn in soap on a crumbling wall. He’d wear the same battered cleats until they split at the seams. Back then, he could make a ball do anything: bend, dip, kiss the crossbar and spin away. Back then, language was the least of his worries.

Now, standing in a city he can’t pronounce properly, Mateo drags the tip of his boot over the penalty spot. He is twenty-one, just a boy still, really—though the whole world wants to call him a man because he can run faster than any of them, turn a ball into a miracle, and smile so wide it makes old men weep into their cheap stadium beers. He knows the playbook. He knows how to glide past defenders. Off the pitch, though, it’s you who keeps him alive — you who orders his meals when the waiter raises an eyebrow at his English, you who calls the physio and swears it’s nothing, just a little tightness in the groin again. You who knows he likes his mate extra sweet, even if he pretends otherwise.

You’re there to remind him. That’s your job, you say—life assistant, handler, translator, disciplinarian. The only thing standing between his soft grin and the pack of wolves at the door. He calls you mi asistente. He likes that you laugh when he mispronounces things; he likes even more that you stay close enough to correct him. He swears the twisted ankle needs another week so please stay a little longer? When he thinks you’re not looking, when he thinks the door is closed, he checks your phone for missed calls. He hums the stadium chants under his breath while deleting the translator app you set up for him, so he can ask you for help again tomorrow. He swears he didn’t mean to look so helpless.

Your husband sees it. Of course he does.

Your husband, Alessio, older, steadier, who once moved like a legend — the prodigy everyone loved until his metatarsals that split like rotten wood, hamstrings that tear in the middle of a championship. The kind of wounds that rewrite careers until your biggest accomplishment is being able to jog down the stairs without pain. A career strung together with cortisone shots and dreams that smelled of liniment and grass clippings. Now he smiles like he’s made peace with all that. Now his hands are stronger than his hamstrings ever were; they cradle your jaw when you fall asleep on the sofa waiting for news from Argentina. He does not resent the boy. He calls him “kid” and ruffles his hair like an older brother, but there’s a flicker behind the softness — the memory of all the trophies he never got to lift, the cheers that never rose for him again after that last limp off the pitch.

He trusts you. Of course he does. He’d never say he doesn’t. But he knows the way people talk. Knows the way the kid’s gaze slides down your neck when he thinks you’re too busy translating a contract clause to notice. Knows you. Knows how oblivious you can be — how you make room for other people’s burdens and there’s no limit, no offside line to call it all back.

Tonight, you were supposed to be alone with Mateo—an ice bath, a massage, some half-finished translation work he claims he can’t do without you. But Alessio has a key to the training complex too. Of course he does. He shows up like it’s nothing, his voice low and warm with apology as he pushes open the door. Says he thought you might want a ride home, that the weather’s turned. He stands there just long enough to see the boy’s eyes flicker wide, the practiced innocence like an open goal.

Mateo’s voice breaks the stretch of silence, sweet, almost trembling around the syllables of your name—

“Are we… finished for today?”