Harbinger Of Glory

The following day in Dawson’s office wasn’t one he liked very much, but he had to go through it because that was why he was at the helm.

He sat at his desk with the ledger open, the one that tracked the squad movement, departures column fuller than it had been at the start of the summer and slowly, he went through them.

Cousins had joined Celtics in the Scottish league a while back.

European football, probably given where Celtic tended to finish, which was not a bad landing for a player who had spent the season feeling like a footnote.

He deserved the stage.

Another one of the departures too was Chris Sze to Middlesbrough, where he would get the central role the Championship could offer him and the consistency of minutes that hadn’t been available here.

”Right decision for him,” Dawson muttered since he knew he would rarely use him had he stayed.

Moving on, Broadhead, one of the old heads, joined Rennes in the Ligue 1, which suited his style, and in a club that would use him properly.

Jamie Jones, Ben Amos’s backup, had also joined Southampton, who had come down from the Premier League and needed experience in the squad they were building back up.

Ryan Nyambe, Darikwa’s backup right back who had also been spectacular for Wigan the previous season, had done enough to join Braga in the Portuguese league, after the latter side were looking for some reinforcement to compete with English sides in the Europa League they had qualified for.

Finally, Tom Naylor also joined a club in Saudi Arabia, which Dawson had nodded at when he heard it, because Naylor had given everything he had for this club for a long time, and if the money was there at this stage of his career, then nobody with any sense was going to argue with that.

After looking through the ledger and the many other names, he closed it and then pushed it away.

”Good luck to them,” he said to the room and then sat back before looking up at the wall where his calendar, as well as the new season schedule, was.

The Premier League started in eighteen days.

.....

Despite promising otherwise, the shoot had run long, and by the time Vittoria got back to her apartment, the evening had already decided what it wanted to be, which was quiet and slightly anticlimactic.

She dropped her bag by the door, crossed the room and fell back onto the couch, and then kept going, letting her head tip over the edge until she was looking at the ceiling from an angle that served no practical purpose but felt right somehow.

She stayed like that for a moment.

”It really doesn’t feel like my birthday,” she said to the ceiling, which had nothing useful to offer.

She brought her head back up, reached for her phone and opened WhatsApp.

The notifications had been coming in since the morning, a steady stream of messages from people she knew well and people she knew less well and a few she had genuinely forgotten she was connected to, all of them saying the right things in various ways.

But what her eyes settled on was the pinned contact at the top of the list, which said, Leo mio. (my Leo)

The only problem was that there was no message about her birthday from him.

She looked at it for a moment and then put the phone face down on the cushion beside her, rolled onto her stomach and pressed her face into the couch.’

”Did he actually forget?” she muttered into the fabric.

”Or is he that busy?”

The second option was possible as she knew how his days ran, but it didn’t take much if the person actually wanted to do it.

She picked her phone back up and checked Instagram, but there was nothing there from him either.

She switched the phone off and set it face down on the cushion.

Then she pressed her forehead against the couch and felt something threatening to build behind her eyes that she had no particular interest in letting out.

A second later, her doorbell sounded, but she didn’t move.

It went again and again, but she still lay.

”I’m not in the mood,” she said to the door, knowing full well that whoever was outside wasn’t going to hear it.

It went a third time, and then a fourth persistently until she pushed herself up off the couch and crossed the room.

She pulled the door open with the expression of someone who had a prepared statement ready about being tired, but Leo was standing in the doorway with a bag of groceries in each hand.

”Service for the birthday girl,” he said with a smile as his girlfriend appeared.

And for a few seconds, Vittoria just looked at him.

The something that had been threatening to build behind her eyes arrived all at once, and she closed the gap between them in one step and wrapped her arms around him.

Leo caught her, the groceries still in his hands, as her legs came up around his waist, and he held her there in the doorway of her apartment in Milan with the evening behind her and her face buried in his shoulder.

He managed to set one of the bags down against the doorframe and brought his arm around her properly.

”You can’t cry on your birthday,” he said, quietly, into her hair, but she said nothing and held on.

He stood there with her for a moment and then reached up and gently took her face in both hands, pulling it from his shoulder and holding it up so he could see her properly.

Her eyes were wet, and she was looking at him with the slightly embarrassed expression of someone who hadn’t planned to feel this much and was now dealing with the consequences.

Leo looked at her face and said nothing for a second.

Then he leaned forward and kissed her, soft and brief, and pulled back.

”Happy birthday,” he said as Vittoria nodded, still in his hands, with her eyes fluttering more than the wings of a hummingbird.

Then she pulled him back in and held on again, tighter this time, refusing to let go.

Leo closed his eyes and stood in the doorway holding her while the groceries finally lost footing and poured to the floor, but nothing mattered again.