The running stayed honest.

I kept to the park most evenings, slap, slap, wheeze, up the path by the bandstand and back round the duck pond, the knee by then a sulky lodger rather than an outright mutineer, the system’s protocol clicking along into its third week and the magic football panel itself ticking off milestones with the warm bedside manner of a cross consultant on a Friday night shift.

---

[SYSTEM] Week three. Left knee, fifty-seven percent integrity, improving. Pelvic tilt: reduced. The fact that you have stopped audibly swearing at me by the bandstand is, technically, progress.

[SYSTEM] Add walking lunges from tomorrow. Resistance bands when you can find one in a charity shop. Don’t, under any circumstances, try to impress the woman.

---

Cheeky panel.

And most evenings the woman with the ponytail and the Determination of 18 was there too, doing her drills, ignoring me with the polite professional thoroughness of a person who knows exactly when a man is sneaking a look and would rather not make a thing of it.

Over a fortnight we had built, between us, an entire relationship made of nothing but nods. The half nod on arrival.

The exhausted nod on the way out. The brief, almost-eye-contact nod when we both ended up at the water fountain at the same time and she waved me through first because I was the one wheezing loudest.

That, give or take, was the entire love story so far.

The panel still said Unknown. Of course it did.

Erol up at the kebab hatch was the next one to clock the change. "Sam," he leaned out one evening, chip oil spitting behind him. "Something’s going on with you, lad. You’re shinier. You’re walking different."

"I’m eating better, Erol."

"You’re not eating shinier off chicken and rice, son, don’t lie to me. I have, in my time, in the room behind this shop, taken a man’s last tenner off him in a card school. You learn to smell it on a fella." He squinted out at me. "Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. Just promise an old kebab man one thing."

"What’s that, Erol?"

"When you’re rich, you don’t forget the kebab shop."

"I will not forget the kebab shop, Erol."

"Good. Cause my Yasmin starts at Goldsmiths in September and she wants to be a graphic designer, and them tuition fees, Sam, them tuition fees do not pay themselves." He handed me a paper bag of chips I had not ordered. "On the house. Don’t argue."

I did not argue.

The hardest part of all that fortnight was Sportskit.

Because every morning I had to keep clocking in. The polo. The lanyard. The Dean. Guests over the tannoy.

Three thousand quid in cash under my mattress and growing, and his entire monthly salary on my person at any given time, and I had to keep folding tracksuits and smiling at six-year-olds and saying "lovely choice, that" to a man buying his lad the wrong-size shin pads, and I had to not say a single word.

For another nine working days, by my calendar. Because the second I quit too early, every till girl on the retail park was going to know I’d had a result come in, and the second they knew, the wrong people in this town would know an hour after that.

Some afternoons, in the stockroom, I’d put my forehead against a cool box of Adidas Predators, thump, and I’d say very quietly into the cardboard, "watch the space, son. Watch the space."

The boxes never said anything back. But they were patient with me, which is all you can really ask of a cardboard box.

By the second of July, the day before Argentina were about to find out very publicly that Germany did not love them, I had the better part of four thousand pounds in cash in a Sports Direct bag-for-life under my bed, four bookies who didn’t yet think I was anything worth phoning about, a mum who knew not to ask, a kebab man who knew not to ask, a minicab driver with two hundred quid in his inside pocket and a promise to drive me to Aberdeen, and a head still full of nine more matches and a final and a magic-bean idea sat at the back of my skull like a tooth pushing through.

The system pinged, once, soft and white in the corner of my eye, when I was lying on my carpet looking up at a damp patch on the ceiling that looked, if you squinted, a bit like Italy.

---

[SYSTEM] Four grand in a Sports Direct bag. Romantic.

[SYSTEM] I trust you have a plan for it that isn’t shoes.

[SYSTEM] Acquisition window opens in: 4 days.

---

Four days.

I lay there in the dark, the bag a soft warm lump under my mattress, the night warm, the city humming, brmm, brmm, somewhere outside, and I thought about a wonky T, and a covenant I didn’t yet know existed, and a man who’d once stood me on a milk crate and said watch the space, son.

Four days. Nine matches. One trophy. One magic-bean idea. One dead football club, waiting on me.

And then, because of course it did, the head went and did the thing the head always does the second it gets a quiet corner. It put her in there.

Karen.

Bloody Karen.

Twenty years old probably in West London on a warm July evening, in approximately no item of clothing my brain was capable of leaving alone for more than four seconds at a stretch, that backside of hers currently haunting some other postcode and ruining the entire day of every man within thirty yards of it without even putting the work in.

Karen, who I had not laid eyes on yet in this life. Karen, who had not laid eyes on me. Karen, who was, by every rule of the old life, supposed to be an entirely different Sam Mercer’s problem for a long time yet.

I turned the thought off. Stop it, Sam, I am starting to sound like a creep.

I had a football club to save. I had four days. I had nine matches and a final and a magic-bean idea and a knee on a protocol and an actual real future for the first time in two whole goes at it. Karen was not on the agenda. Karen could not be on the agenda. Karen was a for later job, not a now job.

Which was where I caught myself, in the dark, sliding sideways into the question I had not yet had the bottle to ask properly out loud, even just to a bag of cash and a damp ceiling.

Was for later even still a thing?

Was any of it, in this second go-round, still going to happen just because it had happened the first time?

Did the lorry on the A13 still have a driver sat behind its wheel with a phone in his hand at a particular minute in 2026, waiting on its cue?

Did the path I had walked the first time round still exist underneath my feet at all?

Or had the whole quiet pattern of my old life scattered the moment a bus driver swerved one inch wrong, the moment I’d put forty quid on a Swiss midfielder, the moment a magic football panel started talking back to me?

In which case Karen, my Karen, was either out there about to bump into me one day by an accident neither of us could engineer, or she wasn’t, and I was, from now until I died for the second time, as much in the dark about my own future as anyone else in Essex.

The system, if I’d asked, would either have ignored me or made a joke about it. So I did not ask. I just lay there in the dark with Karen still trying to elbow her way into the back of my brain, and I closed my eyes and pictured the wonky T at Marsh Road instead.

Mostly.

I went to sleep smiling, properly, deeply, for what was very probably the first time in two whole lifetimes.