I’m quiet.
“You’ve been sleeping with him.”
“Yes.”
“Christ. Christ, Damián.” He’s pacing across the tiny room now, and the pain in his voice is real. It fills the room. This is a man whose version of reality just broke.
Tomáš sits on Šíma’s bed. He puts his face in his hands. He stays like that. Five seconds. Ten. When he looks up his eyes are wet.
“Do you understand what you’ve done. He’s twenty-two. He just made the league. He just built a life in this city. He’s been so happy here and I thought it was the city and it was you. It’s been you. While I was sitting at dinners not knowing my brother was…Christ, Damián.”
And there it is. The voice I’ve been hearing for twenty-seven years. Not the sensible version. Not the operating systemrunning its reasonable calculations. My father’s voice. Clear and direct and familiar in a way that sits in my chest like something I swallowed years ago that never dissolved.
The voice says: this is what happens. This is what the discipline prevents. You had a career and a structure and a life that worked and you let it go offline for a man who pets dogs and has dinners with friends he posts about and you are watching everything dissolve because you wanted something you were told was off-limits. The captaincy. The Bundesliga. Twenty-seven years. What else is there? What else was there ever going to be?
“Tomáš. I made a mistake.”
He looks up.
“It was a poor decision. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have started it. It’s over.”
“It’s over?”
“Yes.”
“When did you decide it’s over?”
“Last night. After the restaurant. I’m signing the contract today. I’m calling Peter this morning. I’m leaving Atlanta when the tournament ends. He and I won’t see each other after that.”
“Does he know?”
“Not yet.”
“But you’re going to tell him?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Today.”
“Damián, look at me.”
I look at him.
“If you’re going to do this, you do it cleanly. You don’t leave it open. You don’t text him ‘we should talk’ and disappear. You give him the answer and you let him have what comes after.”
“I know.”
“He’s my brother.”
“I know, Tomáš.”
The silence.
Tomáš stands. He looks at me for a long beat. His face is doing something I’ve known him ten years and haven’t seen. The anger is there. The hurt is there. And underneath both, something else. Something like the recognition that the man standing in front of him is his best friend of a decade and his best friend is suffering too, and this is not just a covenant broken but a thing with three people in it and all three of them are losing.
“I don’t know what we are after this,” he says finally. “You and me. I need to figure that out. He needs to figure it out. You need to figure it out. Right now I can’t be in this room with you anymore.”
