Six o'clock becomes a habit again, the way it always does Tuesday, Thursday, sometimes a Saturday when both their schedules allow it. The weeks turn over the way weeks do once a player stops being a question mark and starts being a habit.
It happens without ceremony. In October, Briggs moves Danny Pryce back into midfield his actual position, the one he never should have left and Marco starts in his place. Nobody calls it a promotion. Briggs just reads out the team sheet on a Thursday morning the way he reads out every team sheet, and Marco's name is in the back four, and that's that.
PRYCE: "Took you long enough."
He says it lightly, hand out, and Marco takes it. It is the kind of sentence men say to each other once the truth in it has stopped being painful.
Matchday 13 Graystone 2-1 Whitfield Town Marco: 90 minutes — one block off the line
Matchday 14 Calder Rovers 0-0 Graystone Marco: 90 minutes — first clean sheet as a starter
Matchday 15 Graystone 1-1 Ridgeway Athletic Marco: booked — the equaliser comes from a ball he should have won
Matchday 16 Stanbury Town 1-2 Graystone Marco: 90 minutes — the winning corner starts with his clearance
Matchday 17 Graystone 2-0 Easton Vale Marco: 90 minutes — his first senior goal
Easton Vale are second in the table when they come to Graystone, unbeaten in eleven matches, a training ground that costs more than Graystone's entire wage budget. Nobody outside the building gives Graystone a chance.
Marco doesn't think about any of that. He has mostly stopped thinking, full stop which is, Hadley keeps telling him, the whole point.
HADLEY: "You used to think too much out there. Now you just play. Keep doing that."
In the second half, Graystone win a corner. Marco goes up the same run, the same leap he made months ago against Marshgate, when the ball clipped the outside of the post and the whole ground held its breath for nothing.
This time it doesn't clip anything.
The ball goes in off his head, past a goalkeeper who has kept three straight clean sheets, and for a second Marco doesn't know what to do with his own body the way you don't know what to do with a thing you've imagined so many times that the real version feels like a copy of the rehearsal.
Then his teammates are on top of him, and somewhere behind the goal four thousand people are making a noise that isn't a chant this time, just noise, just pure noise, and it is, by some distance, the best sound he has ever heard.
@SantosWatch: "Marco Santos. First senior goal. Away from home, against the second-place team, with everyone watching. Write that down."
@TaktikFussball: "Three months ago people were asking why he was even in the squad. Now he's the reason Graystone's back four has stopped looking makeshift."
By December he is organising the back four without anyone asking him to shouting lines, pointing, the same instructions Hadley used to give him now coming out of his own mouth, in an accent that has picked up something of South Yorkshire he didn't arrive with.
In a meaningless February fixture away at a club already safe from relegation, nowhere near the play-offs, fewer than two hundred people in the away end Hadley goes off injured in the eighty-fifth minute. Without making anything of it, he pulls the armband over his head and hands it to Marco on his way past.
Nobody writes about it. It is the smallest, least noticed moment of Marco's season. It is also, though neither of them says so, one of the most important.
@GlobalFutbol: "Hearing Conwell City have had a scout watching Marco Santos for six weeks now. Graystone fans enjoy him while you can."
Patrick mentions it over the phone, carefully, the way he mentions anything that might turn out to be nothing or everything.
PATRICK: "It's a name on a list right now. Don't build anything on it."
MARCO: "I'm not building anything. I'm trying to win games."
PATRICK: "Good. Keep doing that."
GRAYSTONE FC — THE FINAL DAY
By the final day of the season Graystone are seventh level on points with Calder Rovers in sixth, behind only on goal difference. Seventh stays home for the summer. Sixth goes into the play-offs. There is no draw that helps them. They need the win.
Calder Rovers arrive at Graystone on a Saturday in May with their away end painted yellow and a small enclosure of suits in the main stand that has nothing to do with either club's season ticket holders.
He looks anyway, once, on his way out for the warm-up. A man in a blue coat with a notebook he isn't writing in yet.
Rico is in the stand for the first time all season not watching from a laptop, not listening to a feed that buffers every few minutes, actually there, three rows behind the dugout with Emma beside him, both of them trying and failing to look like people who do this every week.
Rico has not missed a Saturday morning session in nine months. He has missed almost every match. Today he made an exception.
The first half is the kind of half that decides nothing and exhausts everybody anyway both sides too aware of what losing means to risk much in pursuit of winning. It stays goalless to the break.
Graystone go ahead just after the hour. A scrappy move down the right, a cross nobody quite times, and somehow it falls for their striker at the back post with more time than he deserves. He doesn't waste it. 1–0.
Calder Rovers spend the next twenty-five minutes doing what teams with nothing left to lose do throwing bodies forward, abandoning shape, betting everything on one moment. Graystone spend it doing what Marco has spent a season learning how to do. Absorbing it.
In the eighty-second minute Hadley goes down with cramp, both hands on the back of his thigh, the body of a thirty-four-year-old finally presenting its bill on the one day it absolutely cannot afford to.
He is helped off. At the touchline, before he goes down the tunnel, he stops, pulls the armband over his head, and puts it into Marco's hands.
HADLEY: "It's yours. You've been doing the job since February might as well wear the thing."
Marco doesn't say anything. He puts it on.
The last eight minutes, plus four of stoppage time, are the longest of Marco's life. Calder Rovers win three corners in a row. On the third, the ball breaks loose in a goalmouth scramble bodies everywhere, no clean sight of it and it is Marco who throws himself across the six-yard box and gets enough of a boot on it to send it behind for a fourth corner instead of into the net.
That one comes to nothing. The referee checks his watch. Looks at his assistant. Blows the whistle.
1–0. Graystone, sixth. Play-offs.
The pitch is invaded within seconds not a riot, just relief, several thousand people who have spent a Saturday afternoon needing this and now suddenly having it, and somewhere in the middle of it Marco is on his knees with the armband still on his arm and his hands over his face.
He finds Rico afterward, by the tunnel, both of them still inside the strange adrenaline of it, neither one quite sure what to do with their hands. Rico doesn't say anything either. He just pulls his son into him, the way he didn't get to for twenty-eight years, and holds on a moment longer than either of them planned.
Over Rico's shoulder, a man in a blue coat closes his notebook and writes nothing down, because he has already seen what he came to see.
Patrick finds Marco twenty minutes later, in the corridor outside the changing room, still half in his kit, the armband finally off and folded in his hand like something he isn't ready to put down yet.
PATRICK: "Conwell want to talk. Nothing's decided. But they want to talk."
Marco looks at the armband in his hand. Then down the corridor, where Hadley is sitting on a treatment table with ice strapped to his leg, laughing at something one of the younger players has said.
MARCO: "Not today."
Patrick nods the closest thing to a smile he allows himself on a working day.
PATRICK: "Not today."
The play-offs are still to come. Conwell City is still just a name on a list. Tonight, none of that is the point.
Tonight the point is a number on a table, a son in his father's arms, and a flat grey little ground that, for one Saturday in May, sounded like somewhere much bigger than it is.
END OF CHAPTER 30