The Next Big Thing-Chapter 190: The Way He Looked Out There

"VISCA BARÇAAAAAAAA—"

Olivia winced.

The sound came from directly beside her — full volume, no warning, delivered with the complete conviction of a man who had clearly been waiting some time for the opportunity to do exactly this. She pulled her shoulder up instinctively, the way you do when something loud happens very close to your ear.

Aina reached over and hit her father's arm. "Dad — that's too loud—"

As if the stadium had been listening and had decided to make a point, the response came immediately from approximately ninety thousand directions at once.

"VISCA BARÇA!"

The sound rolled through Camp Nou in a wave — not the polite, scattered kind, but the full, physical kind that you feel in your chest before you process it as sound. Aina looked at her father. Her father looked at the pitch, beaming, entirely vindicated.

Olivia straightened up and looked around her properly for the first time since they had found their seats.

Getting the tickets had not been complicated. After the night at the apartment — after Pedri's suggestion and the look the girls had exchanged and the question that had been interrupted by Mateo screaming about Superman — it had been settled without much ceremony. Mateo had sorted the tickets easily, the way he sorted most things now, with a message and a short wait.

Oriol had needed no convincing at all. He had, by his own declaration made at the last match, decided that no home match was to be missed now that his ban was lifted — and not from the VIP area, from the stands, with the people, the way it was supposed to be felt. A shirt had been acquired. Then a second shirt in case the first one was in the wash. A scarf. Specific boots he had decided were his lucky ones. He was, by the time they reached their seats, dressed from collar to ankle in Barcelona colours and had already started a conversation with two strangers sitting to his left that appeared to be going extremely well.

Mateo's mother had a ticket too — she had headed to the bathroom just before the teams came out.

Olivia leaned toward Aina, raising her voice slightly over the noise of the stadium settling into its pre-match frequency.

"The boys were right," she said. "This is really different."

Aina opened her mouth to respond.

"AND HERE COME YOUR BARCELONA PLAYERS—"

The announcer's voice hit the stadium like a switch being thrown — the words barely out before the sound from the crowd swallowed them completely, ninety thousand people reacting before the sentence had time to finish, the noise building on itself in the way it only did here, in this specific place, when the teams came out and the reality of the match became immediate and physical and present.

Oriol — who had been mid-song with his new neighbours — abandoned the song entirely and simply started screaming. There was no other word for it. His hands went up, his voice went full, and he was suddenly a man entirely given over to something, all of the composure and gentleness of the father at the dinner table replaced by the pure, uncomplicated joy of a person whose team was walking out in front of them.

Aina looked at him. She winced once at the volume. Then she looked at the pitch, at the tunnel, at the players beginning to emerge into the light.

She shrugged.

"Well," she said. "When in Rome."

She turned to face the front and started shouting — her own voice joining the wall of sound around her, both hands raised, her face doing the thing faces do when the occasion has absorbed you and you have stopped thinking about what you look like.

Olivia looked at her for a moment, smiling at the sight of it. Then she looked at the pitch.

Then she turned to face the front and started shouting too.

The players came out in a line — the Barcelona kit vivid under the floodlights, the colours sharp against the green of the pitch, each player emerging from the tunnel and into the full volume of the stadium. The crowd responded to names — some with roars, some with songs already in progress, the particular noise for each player shaped by what that player meant to the people in these seats.

Olivia watched them come out one by one, taking it in, the whole spectacle of it — the scale, the sound, the way the light sat on the pitch and the players moved across it.

Then she saw him.

Mateo came out and she recognised him immediately — of course she did — but the recognition arrived differently than it had at the apartment door or across the kitchen counter or on the sofa with a controller in his hand. The same face. The same person. But standing in a line on a football pitch at Camp Nou while ninety thousand people made noise in the specific way they made noise for him, he looked — different. Not unrecognisable. Just different.

The images from the past few days moved through her mind briefly, unbidden — the kitchen, the dinner table, him laughing at something Aina said, the pan flip and the bow and the 20% — all of it sitting in her memory with the casual, accessible quality of things that had happened recently and were still close.

But the person standing on that pitch was not loose. Not carefree. Not mid-joke with a spatula in his hand. He was still, composed, his jaw set, his eyes tracking the ground in front of him with the focused, interior quality of someone who had gone somewhere inside themselves that was not accessible to anyone watching from the outside.

She looked at him properly.

And then — as if the stadium had asked him to — he looked up.

Not at her. At the crowd, at the whole of it, taking it in the way you take in something that belongs to you somehow, or that you belong to. And when his eyes moved across the stands and the noise of ninety thousand people was directed at him specifically — she saw his expression change.

The seriousness did not leave. But something underneath it shifted, a current moving through it — not the smile of the kitchen or the laugh of the dinner table, but something older and more settled than both of those. A confidence that sat so deep it did not need to announce itself. He looked like someone who had arrived somewhere he was supposed to be.

Olivia watched it cross his face.

Around her, people were calling his name. She could hear it specifically now — Mateo, Mateo — woven into the general noise, individual voices finding a common word. She looked at the crowd for a moment, at all of them pointing at the same person, and then looked back at him standing in the line.

Something moved through her that she did not immediately have a name for.

Then, quietly, without fully meaning to think it:

If only I could be like that.

The thought arrived and sat there — not bitter, not jealous, just wistful in the way that certain things are wistful when you see someone fully occupying something and you wonder what the equivalent version of that feels like for you. Whether you would ever stand somewhere and look the way he was looking right now.

She was still somewhere inside that thought when an angry sound arrived from very close by.

"Why didn't the coach play him."

She turned.

Aina was frowning at the pitch — not a casual frown, a proper one, both brows drawn together, her eyes scanning the Barcelona starting lineup with the expression of someone who had found something they objected to and were building a case about it.

Olivia looked at her best friend's face — the beautiful features pulled together in focused, furious concentration — and felt a grin arrive before she could do anything about it.

She shifted on her seat, leaning her shoulder into Aina's.

"What's wrong?" she said, in the careful tone of someone who already knew exactly what was wrong and was going to enjoy asking anyway. "Is your friend—" She stretched the word out slightly, just enough. "—not playing?"

Aina did not look at her. She had not even registered the tone. Her eyes were still moving across the pitch, then to the bench, then back.

"I checked online," she said, with the focused irritation of someone presenting evidence. "It says he's a regular starter and an important part of their midfield. So I don't know why he's not out there." Her frown deepened. "Aren't they in a title race? Isn't this an important match? Why aren't they starting him?"

Olivia had stopped listening to the second half of it entirely.

She was staring at Aina.

Her mouth had opened.

She mouthed the words silently, slowly, with the careful enunciation of someone confirming that they had heard correctly:

You Googled him?

Aina was still looking at the bench.

Oriol, who had finally emerged from his conversation with the strangers to his left, noticed his daughter's expression and leaned over — his smile enormous, his eyes still pulled toward the pitch as the players reached their positions, everything about him oriented toward the match except the small, parental portion still tracking his children.

"What's wrong, cariño?"

Aina looked at him. "Why isn't Pedri playing?"

Oriol blinked. Then he laughed — warm and easy, the laugh of a man who had an answer and had not expected the question. His eyes found the pitch again as he spoke.

"Champions League in a few days," he said, reassuringly. "Coach is resting him. Don't worry — we should handle Granada fine." He scanned the lineup, nodding to himself. "Good that Mateo and Messi are both out there. Three points should be secured." He patted her hand once, already back in his own world. "Don't worry."

He turned back to the pitch.

Aina looked at where he had been looking.

That was not what she had been worried about. Not remotely. But Oriol had already rejoined the atmosphere of ninety thousand people and was unavailable for follow-up questions.

"Ohhhhh—"

The sound came from everywhere at once — the collective wince of ninety thousand people watching something that had almost been something, the frustrated exhale of a crowd that had been leaning forward and now had to sit back again.

Olivia closed her eyes briefly, which she recognised was not a useful response to whatever had just happened on the pitch, but happened anyway.

She opened them and tried to reconstruct what she had seen.

Mateo had gotten the ball — that part she had followed. He had done something with it, some movement with his body that had left the player in front of him looking like he had forgotten how legs worked, just standing there while Mateo went past him as though he wasn't there. Then the kick — hard, driven, the ball flying forward to the player wearing number 11. And number 11 had — she wasn't entirely sure, it had happened fast — not done it right somehow, and the goalkeeper had caught it and the moment had ended and everyone around her had made this sound.

"Dembelé—" Oriol was already talking, loudly, at the pitch. "How can you miss that? Play better — that's your second chance today—"

"Why must you always be so negative?"

Oriol turned.

Isabella — Mateo's mother, who had returned from the bathroom approximately twenty minutes ago and had since established herself as the emotional counterpoint to everything her brother said — was looking at him with the patient expression of someone who had been dealing with this personality for decades and had long since stopped being surprised by it.

"Some people," she said, turning back to the pitch with great dignity, "function better with positive encouragement."

She cupped her hands around her mouth.

"Don't worry — you'll get the next one! Keep going!"

Oriol stared at his little sister.

He stared at her for a long moment — the stare of a man encountering something he could not fully process — as she continued clapping, entirely at peace with herself, her eyes bright and forward-facing, completely unbothered by his expression.

He opened his mouth.

Closed it.

Looked at the pitch.

Looked back at her. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝚠𝕖𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝕖𝚕.𝚌𝗼𝗺

Isabella clapped again.

From beside Olivia came a laugh — not from Aina, from the other direction. She turned.

A woman, middle-aged, comfortable in her seat the way people are comfortable in seats they have occupied many times, was looking between Oriol and Isabella with the undisguised delight of someone who had just witnessed something that had made her day measurably better.

She caught Olivia's eye.

"Are you two with them?" she asked, nodding toward Oriol who was still staring at Isabella, and Isabella who was still serenely ignoring him.

Aina made a sound beside her. Low. Pained.

"Just shoot me," she said, to the seat in front of her.

The woman laughed — a proper laugh, full and warm — and Olivia laughed with her, the shared moment of it dissolving the small distance between two strangers in adjacent seats the way shared laughter always does.

"I'm Marisol," the woman said, leaning slightly toward them.

"Olivia." She smiled. "This is Aina."

Aina had sufficiently recovered from her mortification to offer a small wave. "Hi."

Marisol looked at them both with the easy, appraising warmth of someone who had been coming to this stadium for many years and could identify a first-timer on sight. "First time in the stands?"

"That obvious?" Olivia said.

"You're looking at the atmosphere as much as the pitch." Marisol said it without any judgment, more fondly than anything. "Everyone does, the first time. You get used to the match. You never really get used to this." She gestured broadly at the stadium around them — the colour, the noise, the whole enormous living thing of it.

Olivia looked around at it again — really looked, the way she had been doing in small stolen moments since they sat down — and felt something that she didn't have a precise word for. The scale of it. The way ninety thousand people could make a sound that moved through you rather than just reaching your ears.

"No," she said. "I don't think you would."

The match continued.

Barcelona had the ball. Mostly, it seemed, consistently — it kept coming back to them, the patterns of play always resolving with the red and blue shirts in possession, the other team retreating and reorganising and waiting. The crowd around Olivia kept making sounds she was still learning the grammar of — groans at certain things, sharp intakes at others, a collective oh that seemed to mean something almost happened.

She leaned toward Marisol during a pause. "Why does everyone seem frustrated if their team has the ball all the time?"

Marisol smiled. "The other team is parking the bus."

Olivia looked at her.

"Sitting back," Marisol clarified. "Everyone behind the ball. Not trying to play — just trying to stop Barcelona from scoring. Ten men defending, waiting for a mistake." She nodded toward the far end. "It's hard to break down. Frustrating to watch, even when you're winning the possession."

Olivia looked at the pitch with this new information and the picture rearranged itself slightly — what had looked like Barcelona simply being good was also Granada being deliberately, systematically, infuriatingly difficult to get past.

"Ah," she said.

"Welcome to football," Marisol said.

Mateo was everywhere.

That was the only way Olivia could describe it to herself. Not literally — she understood he had a position, that he wasn't just wandering — but he appeared in her vision constantly, involved in things, receiving the ball and moving it and doing things with his body in small spaces that she didn't have the vocabulary to describe but could recognise as good because of what the crowd did when he did them.

He hadn't scored. She was tracking this without fully deciding to track it.

But the cheers when he touched the ball — the specific quality of the attention that followed him, the way the noise in the stadium shifted subtly when the ball found him — told her something that required no explanation. Even the woman who had never watched a football match could have stood in this stadium and understood, just from listening, that something was happening every time number nine touched the ball.

She didn't need Marisol to explain that part.

She also noticed — and filed this away with mild interest — a player in the middle of the pitch, number 5, who seemed to exist in a completely different dimension from everyone else. While everything around him moved quickly, urgently, with the compressed energy of a tight match, he moved slowly. Deliberately. Any time an opponent came at him he simply — turned. Calmly. And the opponent was no longer where they needed to be, somehow, having been moved around without any apparent effort on the slow player's part. He had the quality of water redirecting around a stone.

She watched him for a while.

"Who is number five?" she asked Marisol.

Marisol looked at her with gentle approval.

"Busquets," she said. "Sergio Busquets. Good eye."

Olivia watched him redirect another opponent without appearing to accelerate at any point.

"He doesn't seem fast," she said.

"He isn't," Marisol said. "He doesn't need to be. He's always already where he needs to be."

Olivia considered this. "That's more impressive than being fast, isn't it."

Marisol smiled. "Let's just say, some people spend their whole careers trying to understand what he does. They never quite get there."

Thirty-fourth minute.

It happened quickly — the way goals always seemed to happen quickly, a series of things connecting at speed until suddenly the ball was in the net and the stadium was detonating. Olivia was on her feet before she had decided to stand, the crowd pulling her up with it, the sound physically lifting her from her seat, and she was shouting at something she had not quite followed but was shouting at anyway because ninety thousand people were and the feeling of not joining it was impossible.

The announcer's voice rang across the entire ground —

"LIONEL MESSI—"

And then the chant started. Not organised, not signalled — it simply arrived, tens of thousands of voices finding the same word at the same moment.

Messi. Messi. Messi. Messi.

Olivia had heard the name before. She had seen him at many moments before the match during the warmups, standing quietly near a corner while everyone else orbited him at a respectful distance. She had watched enough of Mateo's matches over the past week to have started recognising him on the pitch. But hearing ninety thousand people say his name in unison, rhythmically, the whole stadium pulsing with it — that was something that existed at a different frequency than anything she had encountered before.

She looked at Aina, who was screaming beside her. At Oriol, who had his fist raised and was adding his voice to the chant without any self-consciousness whatsoever. At Isabella, who was clapping with the contained, radiant energy of a woman who was very happy and had decided to express it properly.

Olivia turned back to the pitch and kept cheering.

The match continued to move. Granada tried their counter — twice, quickly, both times making Olivia's stomach lurch as the ball came forward at pace — but the number 3 and number 23 were there each time, steady and physical, and the threats ended before they fully formed. She filed away the fact that the defenders were good the way she had filed away Busquets.

Forty-third minute.

This time she followed it better — saw Mateo receive the ball, saw the movement he made, saw the ball leave his foot and travel to number 11. And this time number 11 — Dembelé, who Oriol had already spoken to at length today about his performance — did not miss. The shot went in.

Olivia shouted.

Then she registered something and stopped shouting for a second.

Mateo had given him the ball. Mateo had been the one to kick it across. She was fairly certain — she was watching Mateo, she was almost always watching Mateo — that what she had just seen was him creating the goal rather than scoring it.

"Is that—" She turned to Oriol. "The first goal — the Messi one — wasn't that also Mateo who gave him the ball first?"

Oriol tilted his head. "Almost. A Granada player touched it between Mateo's pass and Messi collecting it. Tiny touch — barely anything — but it means Mateo doesn't get the assist officially." He paused. "Football can be unkind about the small details."

Olivia processed this. "So he basically set up both goals and gets credit for one."

"Welcome to football," Marisol said, with the same smile as before.

Olivia looked at the pitch.

She was mildly annoyed on his behalf, which surprised her slightly.

Then the announcer's voice cut through everything — not for a goal this time, for something else, the tone of it different, the kind of announcement that made the stadium pause and listen:

"WITH THIS ASSIST — TWENTY GOALS AND TEN ASSISTS — MATEO KING BREAKS TWO NEW RECORDS — THE FASTEST AND YOUNGEST PLAYER TO REGISTER DOUBLE DIGIT GOALS AND ASSISTS IN LA LIGA HISTORY—"

The stadium's response was not the explosion of a goal. It was something warmer and more sustained — a rising, rolling wave of appreciation, the kind that comes when ninety thousand people simultaneously understand that they are watching something that will not be repeated, a number that will stand in a record book long after this afternoon has become memory.

Olivia stood up.

She wasn't sure when she had decided to. She was just standing, clapping, and somewhere in the middle of it she felt her eyes go slightly warm and thought — with a private flicker of self-awareness — what is happening to me.

Beside her Aina was on her feet, both hands together, laughing and clapping simultaneously, her earlier frustration entirely dissolved.

Isabella stood absolutely still for a moment — not because she wasn't feeling it but because she was feeling too much of it, the kind of stillness that comes before something breaks through. Her eyes were bright and full and she pressed one hand briefly to her chest, the gesture of someone containing something that had no adequate outlet.

Then she clapped. Properly. Both hands, over and over, her chin up, her eyes on the pitch, on her son standing in the middle of all of it while ninety thousand people celebrated a number with his name attached to it.

Oriol said nothing.

He just smiled — enormous, uncontained, the smile of a man whose face had run out of room for everything he was feeling and had settled on the biggest version of one expression and left it there.

The whistle for half time arrived and the stadium exhaled.

Not fully — it was not that kind of exhale, not the release of something over, just the particular breath of ninety thousand people pausing in the middle of something. The noise dropped from its match frequency to the lower, warmer register of an interval, and around Olivia the seats began doing what seats do at half time, people standing and stretching and turning to each other.

Marisol stood, rolling her shoulders, and looked at Olivia and Aina with the expression of someone who had decided something.

"Come," she said simply.

She led them — through their row and up a few steps to where a cluster of supporters had gathered in the natural way supporters gather, the unofficial half-time congregation that Olivia quickly understood happened here every match, the same people in roughly the same spot, the same conversations picking up where they left off the week before.

Marisol introduced them. Not formally — just the easy, immediate way of someone bringing new people into a space that had room for them. Names came — Carmen, Toni, a man called Rubén who was wearing a scarf despite the temperature and appeared to have strong feelings about the first half that he was working through — and the introductions dissolved quickly into conversation, the way they do when the subject matter is shared and the feeling in the room is good.

"First time in the stands?" Rubén asked Olivia, with the same instinct Marisol had shown earlier.

"Is it that obvious?"

"You were looking at the stadium more than the match in the first fifteen minutes." He said it warmly, without any condescension. "Everyone does."

"She's learning fast though," Marisol said, in the tone of someone vouching for someone else, and Olivia felt the small, unreasonable pleasure of being approved of by someone whose approval meant something.

A woman — Carmen, the one with the red scarf and the voice that had been audible from three rows back throughout the first half — started something. Olivia wasn't sure what it was at first — a humming, then words, then the people around her joining it one by one, the way things build when everyone in a space already knows what comes next.

The Barcelona anthem.

Olivia looked at Aina.

Aina looked back at her.

Neither of them knew the words.

Carmen caught their expressions and laughed — not unkindly, delightedly — and moved closer. She sang a line slowly, pointing at the words like a teacher who had done this before and enjoyed it. Someone else joined her, the lesson becoming a small, warm, half-time class in a stadium corridor while people moved around them and the scoreboard showed 2-0.

They tried. Aina first — tentative, then less tentative, the melody coming before the words fully arrived, her voice finding the shape of the thing even when the syllables weren't quite right. Then Olivia, following, the sounds unfamiliar in her mouth but not unwelcome, the feeling of it — the collective feeling of it, the people around her singing and the anthem carrying across the corridor and the sense of being briefly inside something much larger than herself — arriving before she had expected it to.

Marisol was singing beside her, properly, the words carried with the ease of decades.

A few metres away, Oriol had stepped to the side. He was holding his phone up — recording, the screen pointed at Aina — and he was watching his daughter through the screen with an expression that had started as a smile and had gone somewhere else entirely. His chin had moved. His eyes had the particular brightness of someone trying to contain something and not fully managing it.

Isabella appeared beside him.

She looked at his face.

"Are you crying?" she said.

"No." The word came out slightly unsteadily.

Isabella looked at him. At Aina. Back at him.

"Oriol."

"It's beautiful," he said. His voice was completely sincere and only slightly embarrassing. "She's singing the anthem. My daughter is singing the Barça anthem."

Isabella pressed her lips together against a smile. She reached over and patted his arm once.

"Record it properly," she said. "You're shaking the phone."

The players came back out and the stadium came back to life — the half-time frequency replaced immediately by the match frequency, the shift happening in seconds, ninety thousand people remembering collectively what they were here for.

Olivia settled back into her seat and looked at the pitch.

Something was different. She scanned the players — the numbers, the positions — and found a discrepancy. A face she didn't recognise where a face she did recognise had been. Number 4, coming on. Number 20 going off, she thought — she wasn't entirely certain, the substitution had happened quickly and she had still been finding her seat.

She made a mental note to ask Marisol.

The second half began.

The shape of it was similar to the first — Barcelona with the ball, the opponents organised and compact, the crowd cycling through patience and frustration and back again. But something had shifted in Granada's approach. They were coming forward more. Not abandoning the defensive shape entirely, but probing, looking for the spaces that the first half had shown them might exist, the specific boldness that sometimes arrives in the second half of a match when a team has decided that sitting back is not going to be enough.

It paid off.

Fifty-seventh minute. A corner — she followed the ball into the box, the cluster of players, the confusion of bodies — and then the net moved and the Granada players were running and the Barcelona end of the stadium made a sound she hadn't heard it make before, low and sharp and collectively unhappy.

"They scored," Aina said, unnecessarily but understandably.

The score was 2-1.

The stadium was not panicking — she could feel the difference between what was happening and panic, could feel that the people around her were frustrated but not afraid — but the quality of the noise had changed, tightened slightly, the collective attention pulling forward with a new edge to it.

Seventy-third minute.

Olivia heard the change before she understood it — the stadium's tone shifting from the sustained focused noise of a close match to something warmer and rising, the particular sound of appreciation being offered. She looked at the touchline.

Messi was coming off.

The standing started at her section and moved outward — people getting to their feet, clapping as he walked toward the dugout, ninety thousand people offering something back for everything they had been given. He raised one hand briefly, barely — the small, understated acknowledgment of someone who had done this many times — and went to the bench.

The player coming on jogged to the touchline.

"PEDRI—"

Aina made a sound that was not a word.

She was already on her feet, both hands together, the clapping immediate and full, her face doing several things at once. Olivia stood with her, laughing at the expression on her best friend's face — the particular expression of someone who had been waiting for something to happen and had just watched it happen.

Around her, the reception for Pedri was warm and genuine — the crowd welcoming him back from whatever rest the manager had given him, the chant finding its shape quickly.

But underneath it, threading through the warmth, Olivia started catching something else. Voices nearby — not angry, but pointed, the specific register of fans who had a view and were going to share it.

Why isn't Koeman taking Mateo off?

He's been on since the start — he needs rest before the Champions League—

What is the coach doing—

She frowned slightly, looking at the pitch. Then at the people saying it. Then at the pitch again.

She leaned toward Marisol. "Are they — annoyed that Mateo isn't coming off?"

Marisol nodded, unsurprised. "Big Champions League match in a few days. People want him fresh."

"But he's playing well—"

"That's why they want to protect him."

Olivia looked at the voices around her — the people saying take him off, rest him, we need him for the bigger match — and understood, for the first time, that wanting your player removed from the pitch could be its own kind of love. That there was a version of caring about someone that looked, on the surface, exactly like wanting less of them.

She sat with that for a moment.

Then the eighty-first minute arrived.

She almost missed the beginning of it.

Mateo got the ball somewhere in his own half — she had tracked him enough now that she found him quickly — and then he ran.

Not a short run. Not a pass-and-move. He ran.

He went past the first player — a drop of the shoulder, a change of direction, the player's weight going the wrong way before he'd decided it — and kept going. The second player came across and Mateo went around him on the outside with a burst of pace that made the crowd noise lift by a register. A third player came in from the side and got nothing, Mateo through the gap before the tackle had finished forming. A fourth — somehow, from somewhere — and again, through, past, gone.

The stadium was no longer seated.

She was no longer seated.

She wasn't sure when she had stood up.

The keeper came out — big, committed, making himself large — and Mateo reached him and did something small and precise and completely unhurried, the ball leaving his foot in a short, sharp poke, the keeper going down and reaching and not reaching, the ball crossing the line.

The stadium came apart.

Not the rolling, building celebration of the first goal. This was immediate — like a physical force, a wall of sound arriving all at once, ninety thousand people and the scream and the release of everything that had been tightening since Granada's goal, since the manager hadn't made the substitution, since the eighty-one minutes of wanting and waiting all resolving in one moment.

KING. KING. KING. KING.

The chant was already there, already running, the name turned into a percussion, the stadium finding its rhythm and driving it. The people who had been asking for him to be taken off were the ones screaming loudest now — she could hear Rubén behind her, voice completely gone, shouting with everything he had left.

Olivia turned to Aina.

Aina turned to her.

They grabbed each other — not planned, both of them moving at the same moment, arms going around each other, both of them screaming into the noise of ninety thousand people, laughing and screaming at the same time, neither of them able to do either thing properly because the other thing kept interrupting.

On the pitch, Mateo had reached the side of the stadium nearest them.

He stopped.

He turned to face the stands — the full stands, the wall of noise, the thousands of people all directed at him — and spread both arms wide. Slowly. Completely. The gesture of someone receiving something enormous and deciding not to step back from it.

The noise doubled.

KING. KING. KING. KING.

Olivia looked at him standing there with his arms out and ninety thousand people screaming his name and the floodlights above and the green of the pitch below — and she felt something move through her that was too big and too fast for her to name before it passed.

She screamed his name with the rest of them.

It felt completely natural.

It felt like the most natural thing she had done all day.