My Ultimate Gacha System-Chapter 332 - 6: Florence I

Thursday, May 25, 2023 Santa Maria Novella Station, Florence 6:28 PM

The train from Bergamo came in on time and the platform at Santa Maria Novella was busy with the tail end of commuter traffic, people moving in both directions with bags and phones and the particular purposeful tiredness of a Thursday evening, and Demien stepped off with his overnight bag over one shoulder while the crowd thinned around the exit barriers.

Isabella was on the other side of the barrier in a grey coat with her bag over one arm, and she saw him before he reached her and her face did the thing it always did — relief arriving before everything else, the same expression she’d worn at every airport and station since Bergamo, as though each arrival required a moment of confirmation that he was actually there and actually fine.

He went through the barrier and she put both arms around him and held on for a moment.

"You look tired," she said when she stepped back.

"I’m fine," he said.

"You look tired," she said again, and she took the overnight bag off his shoulder before he could object, and they walked toward the exit together while the station moved around them.

Isabella’s Apartment, Florence 7:15 PM

The smell reached him before the door was fully open — pasta sauce and something in the oven and bread, the specific combination that had belonged to this apartment for as long as he could remember it, and Isabella was already moving back to the kitchen before he’d set his bag down in the hallway.

The table was set for two and the kitchen was warm from cooking, and she moved through it with the efficiency of someone who had decided exactly what the evening required and had been working toward it since the afternoon, and he sat at the table while she finished the pasta and the noise of the kitchen filled the space.

She served it without ceremony — pasta first, then the chicken parmigiana from the oven, bread already on the board in the center of the table — and sat down across from him and poured water into both glasses, and for the first few minutes they ate without talking because the food was good and she’d made enough of it.

"How was the train?" she asked.

"Fine. Quiet."

"Did you eat anything before you left?"

"Coffee," he said.

She made a face but didn’t comment, and passed him more bread.

The conversation stayed light through most of the pasta — her week, a colleague at the school where she worked, a problem with the building’s water pressure that had apparently been ongoing for three weeks and the landlord was handling with his usual pace, which was to say slowly. He listened and contributed where she wanted response and let the rest of it settle around him the way the sounds of this apartment always had, which was without pressure.

It was when she was clearing the pasta plates and bringing the second course that her voice changed register — she kept her back to him while she spoke, which he recognised as the way she approached things she’d been thinking about rather than things she wanted to debate.

"Are you really thinking about going?" she asked.

He set his fork down.

She turned and brought the chicken to the table and sat back down, and her eyes were direct but her hands were busy with the serving spoon because the business of food gave conversations somewhere to go that didn’t require constant eye contact.

"The clubs that want you," she said. "England. Manchester. Liverpool. Are you actually considering it?"

"I don’t know yet," he said. "Genuinely."

She nodded once as though that was the expected answer, and served him a portion before serving herself, and the quiet lasted long enough that he knew she wasn’t finished.

"If you get hurt," she said, and her voice had dropped to the register that meant she was choosing each word, "and you’re in England — Manchester or wherever — I can’t just get in a car. It’s not a two-hour drive. It’s a flight, airports, connections." She paused. "Last time when it was Spezia, I was on a train inside an hour. If you’re in England I find out on the news same as everyone else and then I try to book something while my hands are shaking."

"I know," he said.

"You’re nineteen," she said. "I know that’s not a reason. I know other nineteen-year-olds have moved countries and been fine. I know that." She looked at him. "But I raised you alone, Demien. It’s been you and me since you were small, and I know you’re not small anymore and I know that’s not your problem to solve." She picked up her glass. "I just need you to know that when I say I’m worried, it’s not because I think you can’t handle it. It’s because I’m your mother and I can’t make myself feel differently about it."

He didn’t answer immediately because she wasn’t asking him to and because she’d said what was true rather than what was convenient, and the honest thing was to let it land rather than deflect it.

"I know," he said again, and he meant it differently from the first time.

She looked at him steadily. "Do you want to go?"

He held that for a moment. "Part of me does," he said. "The Premier League is — it’s the biggest thing in football for a midfielder. The intensity, the level, the visibility. Part of me wants to know what I’m capable of against that standard." He looked at the table briefly. "And part of me doesn’t want to be far from you. Doesn’t want to leave a place where I know how everything works, where I have Gasperini’s system that I understand inside out, where the club actually trusts me." He paused. "I don’t know which part is right yet."

She was quiet for a moment and the kitchen made its small sounds — the extractor fan still running, the windows damp from the cooking.

"That’s an honest answer," she said.

"You asked an honest question."

She looked at him with an expression that was more sad than anything else, but not the heavy kind — the kind that comes from loving someone past the point where you can protect them from what comes next. "Don’t rush it," she said. "Go to England for the camp. Play the matches. Think while you’re there — properly, without Marco’s briefing documents and transfer deadlines and all of it." She leaned forward slightly. "Marco works for you. Not the other way around. Remember that."

"I know," he said.

"I mean it." A pause. "Whatever you decide, I’ll be here. That doesn’t change." She reached across and put her hand on his briefly before pulling back. "Now eat the chicken before it gets cold."