Chapter Text
Emily Charlton woke to the sound of a home invasion.
This was not an exaggeration. She had spent enough nights in cities to know precisely what a break-in sounded like, and the noise currently rising through the floorboards of her own townhouse, a Manhattan townhouse she had chosen for its light, its quiet, and its distance from anything resembling a stadium, was unmistakably the sound of a large male person being violently overpowered in her living room. There was a roar. Then a second roar, deeper, as though the first had summoned reinforcements. Then a crash that she would later learn was a bowl of popcorn achieving orbit.
She sat up so fast that the silk of her dressing gown slid off one shoulder. Beside her, the space where a reasonable partner might have been sleeping was empty and cold, the duvet thrown back in the specific chaotic manner of someone who had leaped out of bed at an hour no one intended for leaping. Emily's heart performed one full, undignified somersault before her brain caught up and supplied context, which arrived, as context so often did these days, in the shape of a single exhausted syllable.
“Oh,” she said aloud to no one. “Oh, of course.”
The World Cup.
She lay back down for exactly four seconds, staring at the ceiling, attempting through sheer force of will to fall back into a life where her mornings were her own, and her living room was a room in which one lived rather than a theater of war. It did not work. From below came a sound that peeled the ambition clean off her, two voices, rising together in a note of such raw, feral triumph that it seemed to physically enter the mattress.
“GOOOOOAAAAAAALLLLL!”
It went on. It went on far past the point at which a goal, if a goal it was, could reasonably be celebrated. It developed harmonies. And then, cutting cleanly across the top of it, came the outraged tenor of a fourteen-year-old who had opinions.
“THAT WAS OFFSIDE!”
“I DON'T CARE!”
“It was clearly—”
“I DON'T CARE, ROARK, IT COUNTS, THE MAN IS RUNNING, LOOK AT HIM RUN—”
Emily closed her eyes. She permitted herself one long exhale, the exhale of a woman who arrived at a life in which she was woken by the phrase the man is running. Then she rose, belted her dressing gown, preparing to issue consequences, and went downstairs to survey the damage.
The damage was considerable.
The living room, her living room, the one photographed for a magazine two years ago, the one with the pale gray sofa and the single perfect orchid and the framed Avedon that she had waited eight years to be able to afford, had been converted, wholesale and without planning permission, into World Cup Headquarters. The television, ordinarily a discreet dark rectangle she was able to pretend did not exist, now dominated the entire far wall, blazing with a green pitch and small sprinting men and a scoreline in the corner that meant nothing to her and everything to the two people on her sofa. Bowls of popcorn sat abandoned at every elevation, several of them tipped, fine crumbs of crushed chips ground into the wool of a rug she was fairly certain had cost more than a car. And there, on her sofa, arranged like the aftermath of some minor sporting apocalypse, were the residents of her townhouse.
Andy, Andrea technically, though no one on earth had ever called her that except Emily, who reached for it only as a weapon and gave her the soft, ordinary Andy the rest of the time, was wearing a United States national team jersey. Not a subtle one. A loud, star-spangled, aggressively optimistic garment that she had apparently slept in, because her hair was doing something on the left side that defied both gravity and explanation. She was perched on the very edge of the sofa cushion with the posture of a woman who had not sat back in some time, both hands pressed to her mouth, her eyes fixed on the screen with the intensity of a hostage negotiator.
Beside her was Roark. Fourteen years old, wearing a white England shirt with the sleeves shoved up, gesturing at the television with the weary authority of a man who had been personally betrayed by officiating. He actually played the sport, which meant he watched it the way a surgeon watches an operating theater, wincing, muttering, alive to a hundred small crimes invisible to everyone else in the room.
And draped sideways across the good armchair, upside down in a way that could not have been comfortable, one leg hooked over the armrest and her phone held six inches above her face, was Bronwyn. She was wearing enormous noise-canceling headphones. She did not appear to be listening to anything through them. She was, Emily understood at once, simply wearing them, the way one might wear a raincoat indoors during a flood one had given up trying to stop.
Bronwyn lifted one hand in a small, doomed wave without looking up. “Morning, Mum. There's coffee. Don't sit anywhere.”
Emily did not sit anywhere. Emily stood in the doorway of her own destroyed living room and took a look with a slow, dangerous calm. And then her eyes reached the far wall, and the slow calm curdled into something colder, because there, taped, crookedly, with what she sincerely hoped was not permanent adhesive, directly beside the framed Avedon photograph that was the single most valuable object she owned, was a World Cup bracket.
A bracket. On paper. Fixed to her wall. Beside her Avedon.
“No,” Emily said.
Neither of them heard her. On screen something was happening. Andy had begun making a low, keening noise of anticipation, like a kettle deciding whether or not to boil.
Emily crossed the room, plucked the bracket from the wall with two fingers, and set it face down on the coffee table. She felt marginally better. She had restored, in one small corner of her home, the rule of law.
This feeling lasted eleven seconds.
Without breaking eye contact with the television, without so much as a glance in Emily's direction, Andy reached out, retrieved the bracket, and taped it back to the wall.
Emily removed it again.
Andy put it back.
“Andrea.”
“It's the run of play,” Andy said, which was not an answer to anything.
“It is a piece of paper. Beside a photograph. Worth more than—”
“Shh, shh, shh, corner, corner, it's a corner—”
Emily removed the bracket a third time and held it against her chest like a hostage, and it was in this posture, wild-haired, silk-clad, clutching a laminated tournament schedule to her sternum at seven in the morning, that she failed entirely to notice Roark. Who, with the quiet efficiency of a child raised by people who argued for a living, had risen from the sofa, crossed to the opposite wall, and was calmly taping a second bracket (he had a spare, of course he had a spare) to a completely different surface, well out of his mother's immediate reach.
By the time Emily turned and saw it, it was done. He met her eye with the serene expression of a boy who had learned diplomacy at the highest possible level and simply retook his seat.
“There are two of them now,” Emily said, to the room.
“Redundancy,” said Bronwyn from the armchair. “It's good governance, honestly.”
Emily looked at the bracket in her arms. She looked at the bracket on the wall. She looked at her family, none of whom were looking at her, all of whom were once again fixed on the television as though it contained the meaning of life rather than twenty-two men and a ball. Something in her recognized defeat when it was this comprehensively arranged, and she set the bracket down on the coffee table with the dignity of a diplomat conceding a border.
“Would someone,” she said, in the voice she had once used to make grown editors cry, “explain to me why I have been woken, in my own home, at an hour I did not agree to?”
“It's the USA's biggest match yet,” Andy said, without turning.
“That means nothing to me.”
“Group stage. Win or we're basically, no. No no no, get back, get BACK—” She surged half off the cushion, one hand outstretched toward the screen as though she might reach into wherever the game was, and physically reposition a defender. “Why is he all the way up there? Why would you leave him all the way up there—”
And Emily, who had come downstairs with the sole and pure intention of restoring order and then returning to bed, who did not care about football, who had spent a year telling anyone who would listen that she did not care about football, heard herself say, in a tone of mild professional exasperation, before her brain could stop her mouth.
“Why on earth hasn't their manager taken off the man in the centre? He's been walking for ten minutes. He's finished. Anyone can see he's finished.”
The room went very quiet.
On the screen, a whistle blew. In the living room, three heads turned toward Emily with the slow, unified horror of a family witnessing a statue speak.
Andy turned last, and turned fully, twisting around on the cushion, and the expression spreading across her face was so delighted, so triumphant, that Emily wanted to leave the country.
“You,” Andy said, “know which midfielder is tired.”
“I know nothing of the sort.”
“You said he's been walking for ten minutes.”
“Anyone can see—”
“You said he's finished. You said take him off.” Andy was rising now, coming toward her across the wrecked living room with the menace of a woman about to be affectionate in public. “Em. You have opinions about substitutions.”
“I absorb information against my will,” Emily said, with as much frost as she could summon while retreating toward the kitchen. “It is not the same as caring. You play these matches at a volume that constitutes an environmental hazard. I have simply been exposed over the course of several weeks. The way one is exposed to asbestos.”
“You compared soccer to asbestos, and you still know who's tired.”
“I am going to make coffee,” Emily announced, “and when I return I expect the crisps removed from my rug and that—” she pointed at the nearer bracket without looking at it “—nowhere near the Avedon.”
“Love you,” Andy called after her, already turning back to the game.
“Football,” said Roark to the television.
“What?” said Andy.
“Nothing. Sit down, they're taking the corner.”
From the kitchen came the sound of a very expensive coffee machine being operated with the controlled fury of someone who did not care about football, and who could not, for reasons she declined to examine, stop listening for the next goal.
It had not happened all at once. That was the sly thing about it, Emily thought. The way a civilization is never conquered in a single afternoon but wakes one morning to find the barbarians have been living in the spare room for a fortnight and have opinions about the thermostat. There had been a first match, watched politely. Then a second, watched less politely. And then, somewhere in the third week of July, the household had crossed a threshold from which Emily now understood there would be no return until a trophy was lifted on a state she had no intention of visiting.
The mornings had a shape now. Emily would come down to find Andy and Roark already at the kitchen island, heads bent together over their phones like conspirators, conducting the daily ritual of predictions.
“Brazil tops the group,” Roark would say, buttering toast. “France second. It's not complicated.”
“I've got a feeling about Morocco,” Andy would counter.
“A feeling isn't a prediction.”
“It's the most important kind of prediction. It comes from here.” She would tap her chest. Roark would look at her chest with open contempt and return to his toast.
Emily learned the offside rule against her will, the way she learned everything now, through proximity and volume. Roark had attempted, over one memorable breakfast, to teach it to Andy using the condiments, arranging the salt and pepper and a jar of marmalade into a defensive line and sliding a single blueberry forward across the marble to represent a striker making a run.
“Okay,” he said. “The blueberry is the attacker. The salt is the last defender. The marmalade passes the ball. The blueberry is level with the salt when the marmalade passes. Onside or offside?”
Andy stared at the tableau with the ferocious concentration of a person defusing a bomb. “Offside.”
“It's level. Level is onside.”
“That's insane. Why would level be onside? He's right there.”
“Because the rule says level is onside, that's just the rule—”
“Onside,” said Emily, from the far side of the kitchen, not looking up from her phone. “It's onside, Andy. He needs to be beyond the last defender at the moment of the pass, not level with him. Move the blueberry a centimetre and it's a foul.”
Two heads turned toward her. Emily continued scrolling as though she had said nothing, as though she had not just adjudicated a marmalade offense with complete confidence at half past eight in the morning, and did not so much as glance up to acknowledge the silence she had created. Roark ate the blueberry. It seemed, in the moment, like the only reasonable response.
The allegiances had sorted themselves out along lines that told you everything you needed to know about the people involved.
Roark supported England because he played football and therefore had standards. His support was a serious, almost somber thing, the loyalty of a boy who had watched enough of his team's history to expect heartbreak and turn up for it anyway. He could name the whole squad. He had opinions about the formation that he delivered in complete, grammatical sentences. When England played, he sat forward with his forearms on his knees and did not speak unless something had gone wrong, which, being England, it frequently had.
Andy supported the United States with intense, entirely irrational patriotism. She acted like she was emotionally invested in international sport precisely once every four years and then treated the intervening period as if it had never happened. She could not have told you the name of a single American player in March. By late July, she wept at the anthem. She had, at some point, Emily had failed to prevent, acquired a small foam finger.
Bronwyn supported whichever team had the best-looking players and, failing that, the nicest kit, and she pursued this policy with a consistency the others could only envy. She had chosen Norway for the tournament, and when Roark had demanded to know her tactical reasoning, she had held up her phone with a photograph of the Norwegian striker on it and said, with the calm of complete conviction, “Because Haaland looks like a haunted Viking, and I respect that in a man.”
And Emily supported silence. Emily supported the radical, increasingly theoretical proposition that a person might sit in her own living room and hear nothing but the ordinary sounds of an evening. She was aware it was a losing position. She held it anyway, on principle, the way one continues to write strongly worded letters to a council that will never reply.
Andy's fixation on Jude Bellingham developed the way all of Andy's fixations developed, suddenly, completely, and with no apparent memory of a time before it existed. One evening, she did not know who he was. The next, she was pausing the television to gesture at him.
“Look at him, Em. Look at his little face. He's a star. That is a star.”
“He plays for England,” Roark pointed out, without heat. “You support the USA. You can't have both.”
“I contain multitudes.”
“That's not— those aren't the same tournament allegiance, you can't—”
“Watch me contain them.”
Emily, from the doorway, holding a glass of wine she had poured specifically in order to survive the evening, offered the observation that felt, to her, purely factual. “Bellingham plays for England. I am English. If you insist on adoring him, you are, technically, supporting my country. Which I find distasteful in you and would prefer you stop.”
Andy's whole face changed. A smile slowly taking up space across her face. She turned from the television with slow, dawning delight. “Wait. Wait. Does this mean you finally care? Are you telling me you have a horse in this? Em. Em, do you support England?”
Emily left the room.
“THAT'S A YES!” Andy shouted after her. “WALKING AWAY IS A YES, EVERYONE KNOWS THAT—”
The division of expertise had settled into something almost functional. Roark supplied the tactics. He had real knowledge, earned on real pitches in real rain, and he dispensed it with the flat authority of a boy who found the adults around him charmingly uninformed. Andy supplied everything else, which was to say she supplied feelings, continuously, whether or not feelings were required.
“They need to stop leaving so much space in midfield,” Roark said one evening, watching a team Emily could not identify concede a goal. “They're getting overrun through the middle. Two players can't cover that whole zone, someone has to drop.”
“They need to believe in themselves,” said Andy, with total sincerity.
Roark looked at her the way one looks at a smaller child who has said something well-meant and completely useless. “That isn't tactics.”
“It is in American sports movies.”
“This isn't an American sports movie.”
“Everything is an American sports movie if you believe hard enough.”
And Emily, passing through with a second glass of wine, said, “That is the single most frightening sentence I have ever heard you say, and you once told me you enjoyed jury duty,” and kept walking, and did not admit, to anyone, that she had already begun, privately, silently, and with a growing sense of personal betrayal, to know exactly which referee had made the terrible call in England's last match. She had been, as she would later put it, unfortunately in the room. It was not the same as caring.
It was absolutely not the same as caring.
Andy had been hyping herself up for days. This was, in Emily's experience, always the most dangerous phase. The round of sixteen. The United States against Belgium. Andy spoke of it in the reverent, doom-laden tones like someone describing a battle her ancestors had died in.
She had prepared. This was the part Emily found genuinely alarming. Andy had acquired face paint, red, white, and blue, in little pots, arranged on the bathroom counter beside Emily's serums like a threat. She had bought a packet of tiny American flags on cocktail sticks, the sort of thing that ordinarily garnished a cupcake, and had distributed them around the living room with the solemnity of a general planting standards. And she had, that morning, attempted to paint a flag on Emily's cheek.
“Absolutely not,” Emily had said, leaning away from the approaching sponge with her whole spine.
“Just a little one. Just a tiny one. On the cheekbone. It'll be cute.”
“I am English.”
“Okay, but for one afternoon—”
“I am English, I have dignity, and I believe face paint on an adult should be grounds for arrest. On any adult. In any circumstance. I would testify.”
“You'd look so patriotic.”
“To a country that is not mine. Andrea, put the sponge down. Put it down. I will pour that pot of blue paint into your handbag, and I will not feel a thing.”
So Andy had painted her own face instead, two neat stripes under each eye, like an American footballer, or a woman going to war, and had settled onto the sofa flanked by her flags and her foam finger and Roark, who wore his England shirt out of loyalty but had agreed, generously, to support the USA for the afternoon as a diplomatic gesture. Bronwyn had wandered in, assessed the emotional weather, and elected to remain, mostly, she said, for the content.
And then the United States lost to Belgium.
It was not even especially close in the end, which somehow made it worse. There was no cruel late goal to rage against, no disallowed winner, no villain to name. There was simply a better team, playing better, and a scoreline that grew and then settled, and a final whistle that arrived like a door closing in a distant room.
Emily had expected noise. She had braced for it, for the yelling, the theatrical grief, the flags flung to the floor, the eulogy delivered to the ceiling. She had, if she was honest, prepared several dry remarks in advance and arranged them in her mind way before the match.
What she got was worse. What she got was quiet.
Andy did not sob. Andy did not perform. Andy simply went very, very still, sitting on the edge of the sofa with the little flags drooping around her and the face paint smudging at the corner of one eye, staring at the screen as the Belgian players embraced each other and the American players did not, and she did not say anything at all. It was the silence that frightened Emily. The yelling she understood. The yelling was Andy at full volume, Andy being Andy. This muted, deflated, hands-in-her-lap stillness was something else entirely, and it reached across the room and took hold of Emily somewhere beneath the ribs, in a place she did not have a dry remark for.
Roark noticed too. He shifted along the sofa until he was pressed against Andy's side and said, in the careful voice of a boy who had clearly rehearsed being kind, “They had a good run, though. Group stage and everything. That's further than loads of people thought. It was a good tournament for them, honestly.”
Andy nodded without really moving.
Bronwyn, who did not do sincerity if she could possibly avoid it, appeared silently at Andy's other side and held out a single square of chocolate on the flat of her palm, like a keeper offering food to an animal it was not certain of. “Here,” she said. “It's the good one. From the tin I hide.”
It was, Emily understood, an enormous concession. Andy took the chocolate. She did not eat it. She held it.
And Emily, who had come into the room armed with several excellent lines about supporting a nation with a functioning football program, found that she could not deploy a single one of them. She crossed the room instead, and stood behind the sofa, and looked down at the smudged paint and the drooping flags and the woman she had somehow ended up building a life around, and she reached out and stroked Andy's hair, once, from the crown to the nape, the way you might soothe a child who had woken from a dream.
“Well,” she said, and her voice came out gentler than she meant it to, so she corrected course before it could betray her entirely. “Now you can support a country with a realistic chance of winning.”
Andy tipped her head back against the sofa and looked up at her, upside down, her painted face absurd and wounded and dear. “Are you asking me…” she said slowly, “to support England?”
“Absolutely not.” Emily withdrew her hand as though the sofa had grown hot. “I am merely suggesting that if you insist upon continuing this deeply unattractive behaviour, the yelling, the flags, the paint you are currently transferring onto my upholstery, you might as well do it correctly. In the direction of a team that will still be playing next week. It is a purely practical observation. It has nothing to do with sentiment.”
For a moment nothing happened. Then Andy's whole devastated face began, slowly, to rearrange itself into something brighter, and Emily realized her error approximately one second too late.
“Oh no,” Emily said.
Andy sat up. She twisted around. She reached over the back of the sofa and got both arms around Emily's waist and held on. “You want me,” she said, into Emily's dressing gown, “to cheer for your team.”
“Remove yourself from me.”
“You're a patriot. You've been a patriot this whole time. You've been sitting on it.”
“Andrea.”
“Say it's coming home.”
“I would rather leave my own home. I would rather live in New Jersey. Let go of me, you are getting the flag of a foreign nation on a garment that cost more than your car.”
“Say it. Three little words. It's. Coming. Home.”
“I am going to bed,” Emily announced, with tremendous dignity, prying a still-grinning Andy off her waist finger by finger, “and I am taking my dignity, my country, and my rug with me.” She swept toward the stairs. At the doorway, she paused because she could not help herself, because she had never in her life been able to help herself. “And he,” she added, nodding at the television where the analysis droned on, “the number nine. He was your best player all tournament, and they left him isolated up front for ninety minutes. That is not a run of bad luck. That is a coaching failure. Goodnight.”
She went up the stairs.
Behind her, in the wrecked and darkening living room, she heard Andy say, very softly and very happily, to the children. “She knows the number nine.”
And Roark, exhausted, delighted, betraying every principle he claimed to hold. “She's so far gone.”
The dark living room was where Emily found the second stage of grief.
She had come down for water and found the room lit only by the streetlight through the curtains, and in the middle of it, on the sofa, in the dark, sat Andy. She was wearing a jersey Emily had not seen before, a red one, with a name across the back that Emily could not read in the gloom and did not need to. She had absorbed enough, against her will, to know a Pulisic shirt when she saw one. Andy was not crying. Andy was simply sitting, in the dark, in the same spot, in the jersey of a defeated nation, in a silence that had a texture to it. And beside her, in his pajamas, sat Roark, who had evidently come down for the same reason Emily had and been unable to leave. He had one hand on Andy's shoulder and was patting it, slowly, solemnly, at intervals, the way one pats a coffin.
Emily stood in the doorway and took in the scene, the darkness, the jersey, the fourteen-year-old administering grief counseling in the small hours, and thought, with a species of relief that surprised her. Good. It's over. The nightmare is over. They have mourned. Tomorrow the brackets come down, the crisps are gone from the rug, and my living room is returned to me under the terms of the armistice. She went back to bed almost cheerful.
She was wrong, of course. She was so completely wrong that she would look back on that moment of relief as the last innocent thought of her old life.
Because two days later, Andy gathered everyone in the living room and announced that she had a surprise.
“No,” said Emily, on reflex, before anything else could happen.
“You don't even know what it is.”
“I know that when you use that voice, that specific bright voice, something arrives in my home. You have that voice when you buy televisions. Is it a television? We have a television. It is the largest object in this townhouse. It can be seen from the street.”
“It's not a television.”
“Then it is worse than a television.”
But Andy was already crossing the room, already bending down, already producing from behind the armchair a plain white envelope, and she did not hand it to Emily. She handed it to Roark. And something in the way she did it, the care of it, the slight tremor of held-back delight in her hands, made Emily go quiet, and made Roark go still, and made even Bronwyn look up from her phone.
Roark opened the envelope. He looked inside. He did not react for a full second, which was, for Roark, an eternity, and then his face performed a sequence of expressions in rapid succession, confusion, comprehension, disbelief, and then something so enormous it did not have a name, and he pulled the contents out with both hands and stared at them and said, in a voice that cracked clean down the middle.
“These are real???”
“They're real,” said Andy.
“These are, Andy. Andy. These are tickets. These are tickets to—” He couldn't finish. He turned them over as though the back might contradict the front. “England. England versus Norway. The quarter-final. At MetLife. This is, these are for the quarter-final—”
And then he was up off the sofa and he had thrown himself at Andy so hard she staggered, both arms locked around her neck, and he was talking without pause or punctuation, a flood of it, England and Bellingham and Kane and the formation and were these really their seats and how had she got them and we're going to see Haaland, we're actually going to see Haaland play, he's the best striker in the world and we're going to be in the same building as him, Andy, we're going to be there, and he checked the tickets a third time, mid-sentence, because he still could not believe they would not vanish.
Andy was hugging him back just as hard, matching him note for note, her own voice climbing to meet his, “I know, I KNOW, and we're going to be right there, and I checked the seats twice, they're so good, they're SO good,” the two of them a single unit of pure noise in the middle of the living room, and Emily watched them and felt something move in her chest that she elected, for the moment, not to name.
Bronwyn examined her ticket with detachment. “Is the lighting good at this stadium? For photos. Because if it's all fluorescent and floodlights, I'm going to look like a hostage in every single one, and I'd rather know now.”
“The lighting is great Wynnie,” said Andy, over Roark's shoulder. “Golden hour kick-off. You'll be radiant.”
“Then I'm in.” Bronwyn returned to her phone, satisfied.
And it was in this moment, with Roark still attached to Andy like a limpet, with Bronwyn already photographing her own ticket for reasons known only to her, that Emily took in the view before her. She looked at the envelope. She looked at Roark's ticket, and Bronwyn's ticket, and the two that remained in Andy's hand.
Four. There were four tickets.
“No,” said Emily.
“You don't even know what I'm asking.”
“You've purchased me a football ticket.”
“Technically,” said Andy, disentangling herself from Roark and straightening up with the careful expression of a woman walking onto thin ice, “I've purchased us a family experience.”
“You have purchased me several hours sitting in traffic to New Jersey.”
“I've purchased you a memory.”
“You have purchased me the indignity of sitting through traffic, a queue for a lavatory shared with forty thousand strangers, and food served in cardboard. I know what a football ticket is, Andrea. I have been living in this townhouse.”
And then Andy, who had clearly planned this, who had clearly been holding it in reserve for precisely this moment, reached once more behind the armchair, the armchair was apparently bottomless, and produced, with both hands, unfolding it, holding it up against her own body, a white England jersey. And across the back of it, in the official lettering, in the proper font, above a number, was printed a single word.
CHARLTON.
Emily looked at it the way one looks at a package left unattended in an airport.
“You had my name,” she said slowly, “printed. On polyester.”
“I had your name printed on an official England quarter-final jersey, which is a completely different and much more beautiful thing.”
“It is polyester with my surname on it.”
“It's an heirloom.”
“It is not an heirloom, it is a hazard. I will overheat and die in it—”
And here Andy deployed her final and most devastating weapon, which was not the jersey and not the tickets but her face, arranged into an expression of such enormous, wobbling, hopeful pleading that it should have been illegal, and beside her Bronwyn, Bronwyn, who cared about nothing, lowered her phone and produced an identical expression, the two of them side by side, a matched set of weaponized puppy eyes aimed directly at Emily's remaining resolve. And Roark, sensing the tide, tried to join them, tried to make his own face do the pleading thing, but Roark had never once in his life successfully looked pathetic on purpose and the result was so uncanny, so profoundly wrong, a fourteen-year-old attempting to appear adorable and achieving only the expression of a boy passing a kidney stone, that Emily had to look away from him.
“Ro, stop that,” she told him. “Immediately. Whatever you are doing with your face, stop. You look unwell.”
“I'm doing the eyes.”
“You are not. Andy and Wynnie are doing the eyes. You are having a medical event. Sit down.”
But it was hopeless, and Emily knew it was hopeless, because there was no defense in the world that Emily Charlton had ever been able to mount against the specific weapon of Andy and the children conspiring together, arrayed against her, wanting the same thing, wanting her. She had been undone by lesser combinations. She had once agreed to a camping trip. Well, glamping of course. She looked at the jersey with her own name on it, and at the four tickets, and at the three faces, two hopeful and one alarming, turned toward her in the wreckage of her once-elegant living room, and she let out the long, defeated breath of someone signing something against her better judgment.
“I will not wear it on the ride over,” she said.
Roark's face detonated. Andy made a sound that no adult should make. Bronwyn said, “We'll see,” under her breath, and then the living room simply erupted, and Emily stood in the middle of it holding a polyester jersey with her name on the back and understood, with the clarity of the truly doomed, that she was going to New Jersey.
Andy took the whole thing extremely seriously, which was how Emily knew, finally and for certain, that this was never really about football at all.
The jerseys had been laid out the night before, across the spare bed, like vestments. There was one for Roark, an England shirt with BELLINGHAM across the back, which Andy had chosen after what Emily gathered had been a private and emotional decision-making process. There was one for Bronwyn, an ordinary England shirt that Bronwyn had taken one look at, declared “unwearable as issued,” and altered overnight with a pair of scissors and a needle into something cropped and knotted and vaguely, infuriatingly stylish, so that it now looked less like a football shirt and more like something a person might be photographed in outside a show. There was one for Andy herself, a KANE shirt, which had prompted a great deal of comment.
“You fangirl about Bellingham every single day,” Roark had pointed out, holding up her Kane shirt with an expression of profound betrayal. “Every day. You have a favourite. Your favourite is Bellingham. And you got a Kane shirt.”
“I contain multitudes.”
“You keep saying that. It keeps not being an answer.”
“Kane is the captain. It felt disrespectful to the institution not to.”
“You don't know what that means.”
“I know exactly what that means.” She did not know what that meant. Roark could see that she did not know what that meant. He let it go, the way he was learning to let a great many things go, because he had also seen her cry a little while ironing the shirt flat, and there are some victories a person declines out of mercy.
And then there was Emily's. The CHARLTON jersey, hanging alone on the back of the bedroom door where Andy had placed it the night before, like a stocking on a mantel.
Emily came downstairs wearing it.
She had, however, made adjustments to preserve what could be preserved of her self-respect. She wore the jersey beneath a blazer, a beautiful, structured, white blazer that probably cost more than the tickets, buttoned once, so that only a triangle of white showed at the collar and a suggestion of it beneath the hem, so that the overall effect was less football supporter and more a woman who had suffered a wardrobe emergency and improvised with great composure. She had done her hair. She was wearing earrings. She came down the stairs like a barrister arriving at a crime scene, and she stopped on the bottom step, and she said, “Well?” in a tone that dared anyone to enjoy it.
Andy nearly cried. It was very close. She stood at the bottom of the stairs with a hand over her mouth and her eyes doing something wet and shining, and she said, muffled, “Oh my god,” and then, “you look—” and then she couldn't finish it.
“Don't,” Emily warned. “It is a garment. I am wearing a garment. There will be no ceremony.”
Andy took forty photographs. There was, in the end, a great deal of ceremony.
“Stop photographing me. Andrea. Every one of those is the same photograph. I am making the same face. It is a face that says stop photographing me.”
“They're all different. In this one you're annoyed and in this one you're MORE annoyed. It's a range. It's a gallery. I'm going to have them printed.”
Roark circled her once, assessing, and delivered his verdict with the grave neutrality of a man who understood exactly what he was doing. “The blazer's good, actually. With the shirt. You look like you manage England Mum.”
Emily considered this. It was, she decided, the first acceptable thing anyone had said all morning. “I would make better substitutions than the current one,” she said, and picked up her handbag, and that, as far as she was concerned, was that.
The argument about transport began at the front door and did not fully resolve until New Jersey.
“We are not driving,” Andy said, herding everyone toward the door with the flags. “The parking will be a nightmare. It'll take three hours to get out afterward and everyone says the same thing, you sit in the car park for two hours after the final whistle listening to strangers honk. We take the train. It's what everyone does. It's part of it.”
“The train,” Emily repeated, in the voice of a woman being asked to travel by mule. Which was technically the same thing to Emily.
“The train.”
“A public train. To a football match. Which is to say, a public train packed to its structural limits with football supporters, in July, in polyester.”
“Yes.”
“Andrea, I have spent a considerable portion of my life ensuring I would never again have to stand in a crowd of strangers who are all going to the same place as me. That was the whole ambition.”
“And today we're undoing it,” said Andy brightly, and took her hand, and that was the end of the discussion.
The station was worse than Emily had feared and precisely as bad as Andy had promised. It was a sea of white shirts and red crosses, punctuated here and there by the deep red of Norway, everyone loud, everyone early, everyone in the specific elevated mood of people traveling toward something they had wanted for a long time. The heat came up off the platform in a haze. Somewhere, a drum was being played, badly, by a man who believed in it.
They had barely reached the platform when a cluster of England fans clocked the jerseys, Roark's BELLINGHAM, Andy's KANE, the triangle of white at Emily's collar, and a chant went up, spontaneous, three men and then eight and then a whole section of the platform, some anthem of belonging that Emily half-recognized and could not have reproduced. Andy joined in instantly. She did not know the words. This did not stop her for a moment. She knew, generously, perhaps sixty per cent of the words, and she sang those sixty per cent at full volume and covered the remaining forty with enthusiastic vowel sounds and the occasional confident shout of a name, and the men around her loved her for it, and Roark stood beside her vibrating with a joy so total he had forgotten to be embarrassed by his mother's girlfriend.
The England crowd sang it through once, and then again, louder, the chant rolling in waves down the platform toward the end of the track, and it was somewhere in the middle of the third time through that the answer came from the far end.
It did not sound like the England chant. It was lower, and slower, and it had a weight to it, a heavy communal pulse that Emily felt arrive somewhere behind her sternum a half-second before she understood what she was looking at. The red shirts had begun to crouch. A whole block of them, forty or fifty deep in Norway red, were lowering themselves toward the concrete in ragged rows, one behind another, and then, in a unison that was frankly unsettling in people who had presumably never rehearsed, they began to row.
They gripped invisible oars. They leaned back as one, hauled, leaned forward, reached, hauled again, a great slow heaving stroke passing down the rows in time with a deep, three-beat chant that built on itself with every pull. thump, thump, "RO!" It was ludicrous. It was also, somehow, magnificent. There was no boat. There was very clearly, in the shared and total conviction of fifty grown Norwegians, a boat.
“They're doing the row,” Roark said, in the hushed voice of a boy witnessing in the flesh something he had only ever seen through a screen. “The Norwegians do the row. They pretend to row a longship, and it gets faster, and faster, and faster, until somebody wipes out.”
“I have,” Emily said, watching a middle-aged man in a Haaland shirt throw his entire body into a stroke, “made a number of choices in my life. I would like to revisit several of them. Quietly. Beginning now.”
Thump, thump, "RO!"
But Andy had already seized her arm. “Em. Em. They are rowing a boat. There is no boat. They are rowing an imaginary Viking longship on a commuter platform in New Jersey, and it is the single most beautiful thing I have ever witnessed.” Her face had gone luminous. “This explains everything. This is where he's from. This is the natural habitat of the Norse experiment, they row him to the stadium, Em, I was right, I was right about the whole thing—”
Thump, thump, "RO!"
Bronwyn had her phone up and level, filming with the steady hands of a professional. “This is going in the folder,” she said, to no one, with quiet reverence. “This is going straight to the top of the folder.” She had, at some point during the tournament, quietly and without announcement, gone team Norway, and no one had had the heart to formally acknowledge it.
Thump, thump, "RO!"
The stroke was speeding up now.
Thump, thump, "RO!"
The coxswain, whoever he was, wherever he was, was calling the time faster, and the rows were heaving in double time, the chant rising toward something frenzied, and Andy, who had never in her life encountered a communal activity she was willing to merely observe, dropped into a crouch on the platform and began to row along with them.
Thump, thump, "RO!"
Thump, thump, "RO!"
She rowed with tremendous commitment and absolutely no rhythm. She rowed on the pull when the boat was reaching and reached when it was pulling, a one-woman mutiny in the middle of an otherwise disciplined crew, until Roark, appalled on a technical level, crouched beside her and hissed, “No. NO. With the boat. You have to go with the boat,” and took her through it, stroke by stroke, his hand chopping the air to keep her time.
Thump, thump, "RO!"
Thump, thump, "RO!"
And then the whole Norway end hit ramming speed.
Thump, thump, "RO!"
Thump, thump, "RO!"
Thump, thump, "RO!"
The chant broke into a roar and the imaginary longship, by every visible indication, capsized, and fifty Norwegians and one American collapsed sideways into each other in a heap of red and helpless laughter, and Andy toppled into Roark, and Roark, laughing too hard to hold her, let them both go down.
For a second the two ends of the platform simply regarded each other across the wreckage of the imaginary boat. And then the England fans, who had watched the whole performance with the pure delight of people being thoroughly upstaged by the opposition, answered the only way they knew how, which was to throw themselves back into their own song, louder than before, reclaiming the platform line by line until the whole place was once again one long wall of white-shirted noise, and Andy scrambled up off the concrete and flung herself back into it mid-verse, as though she had never left.
Because maybe, you're gonna be the one that saves meeeee
Emily refused to participate for five full minutes. She stood at the eye of the singing with her handbag held before her like a shield and an expression of endurance, and she did not sing, and she wanted it noted, by history, that she did not sing.
And after all, you're my wonderwallllllll
What she did instead, what she could not, it transpired, prevent herself from doing, was correct Andy's pronunciation. “It's not that word,” she said, into Andy's ear, over the noise. “You're singing a word that isn't in it. The line is, no, don't sing it louder?? Singing it louder does not make it correct, it makes it wrongly, at volume—”
“Teach me the words then.”
“I will not.”
“You know them.”
“I know many things and I have the good sense not to sing on a train platform that is going to New Jersey.”
Bronwyn filmed all of it. She held her phone up and panned slowly across the scene, the chanting men, Andy at full throat, Roark glowing, and Emily in the center of it correcting a football chant like a woman marking an examination paper, and she narrated, softly, for the record. “Documenting the fall of Emily Charlton. Day one. Subject claims she isn't singing. Subject knows the words.”
On the train, wedged into a carriage past all reasonable capacity, a large and cheerful Englishman hanging from the overhead rail looked down at Emily's collar, clocked the accent when she told Andy for the third time to mind her elbow, and beamed. “Oi. You're one of us. Go on then, love, you reckon it's coming home?”
The whole carriage, sensing a countrywoman, turned to hear the answer.
Emily considered the question with seriousness it did not deserve. “Statistically,” she answered in a clear British accent, “unlikely. You have not kept a clean sheet against a serious side all tournament, your midfield is a man short of a shape, and you concede the first goal in roughly half your knockout matches as a matter of national tradition. I would put it at one in six. Perhaps one in five if the Norwegian keeper has an unusually poor evening.”
There was a silence. And then the entire carriage booed her. Booed her. The only genuine English person among them, roundly, joyfully, a chorus of good-natured outrage, while Andy laughed so hard she had to hold the rail with both hands and Roark shouted “ONE IN FIVE?!” in a tone of personal injury and Bronwyn got all of it on film.
“Em, you're supposed to say it's coming home,” Andy told her, wiping her eyes. “That's the whole thing. That's the only line. You're English, you're literally the only actual English person on this train, and you got booed.”
“I told them the truth. If they wanted a fantasy, they should have asked an American.”
Andy kept hold of her hand the entire way. It began as practicality, the crush of the carriage, the very real risk of being separated and swept out at the wrong stop into a river of strangers, and Emily complained about it on exactly those grounds.
“I am not a child, Andy, I am not going to wander off, you may release my hand, people are looking, they think you've abducted a manager—”
But she did not, at any point, let go. And when the train lurched, and the crowd surged, and for one moment the flow of bodies threatened to pull them apart, it was Emily's hand that tightened first.
Roark stopped talking.
This, more than anything, more than the tickets, more than the jerseys, more than the two-hour pilgrimage through the heat, was how Andy knew they had arrived somewhere that mattered. Because Roark had not stopped talking since the envelope. He had narrated the entire journey, a rolling commentary on formations and fitness and the referee they'd been assigned and whether Norway would sit deep or press, and Andy had agreed with every word of it, and then they came up out of the concourse and into the bowl of the stadium and Roark simply stopped, mid-sentence, and stood there with his mouth slightly open and his neck craned back, and said nothing at all.
MetLife opened up around them, vast and steep and roaring, a green rectangle at the bottom of a cliff of eighty thousand people, half of them in white and half in deep red, the noise of them rising and folding over itself until it stopped being noise and became a kind of weather. Flags the size of tennis courts passed hand to hand across whole sections. Somewhere a band was playing. The floodlights were coming up against a sky just beginning to go gold at the edges, exactly as Andy had promised, and Bronwyn made a small involuntary sound of aesthetic approval and began, immediately, to assess angles.
But Andy wasn't looking at any of it. Andy was looking at Roark.
She had bought four tickets to a football match, and she had told herself and everyone else that it was about the football, about giving Roark the thing he loved, and all of that was true. But standing there watching his face, the way it had gone completely open, completely young, stripped of the fourteen-year-old armor of knowing-everything, wonder-struck and enormous-eyed in the swelling light, she understood that she had not, in fact, bought tickets to a football match. She had bought this. This exact expression. She would have paid ten times as much for this exact expression, and considered it a bargain, and she stood very still so as not to disturb it.
She did not notice Emily watching her watch him.
Emily had noticed everything. Emily always noticed everything. It was the source of most of her power and nearly all of her exhaustion. She had watched Andy stop caring about the stadium the instant she caught sight of Roark's face, and she finally understood the whole of it in a single glance. The tickets, the jersey, the two hours of traffic, all of it, the entire elaborate production, and what it had actually been for. And she leaned in close, so that only Andy would hear it over the noise, and she said, quietly.
“That was a very good thing you did.”
Andy turned. Whatever she had been braced for, it wasn't sincerity from Emily, not here, not out loud, and it undid her a little.
“I wanted him to see them play,” she said. “In person. Once. I wanted him to have seen it.”
“I know.”
“And I wanted—” Andy stopped, and started again, more quietly. “I wanted us to do something together. All of us. A thing we did, that we'd have. I don't know. I wanted us to have a day to remember.”
Emily did not say anything to that. Emily simply took her hand, not for the crowd this time, not for practicality, there was no risk of being separated standing still in their own row, and squeezed it, once, hard, and looked out at the pitch so that she would not have to look at Andy's face while she did it.
“Okay,” said Bronwyn, materializing between them with the specific timing of a teenager who could sense an emotional moment from forty feet and was constitutionally opposed to it. “Before everyone gets sweaty and disgusting and the light goes flat. Family photo. Now. I've found a man three rows back who looks like he has a steady hand. Come on. Squeeze in. Roark, close your mouth, you look like a fish. Mum, do the thing with the blazer where you look expensive. Everyone. Go.”
Their seats were good, low in the corner, near enough to the pitch to hear the specific thock of a ball struck cleanly, and they were in them early, early enough to watch the players come out to warm up, which was, for Roark, its own event, its own reason to have come. He had brought binoculars, despite the seats being close enough not to need them, and he had them trained on the far end where the England players were jogging out in their training bibs.
Andy kept stealing the binoculars. “Let me see. Let me, which one's Bellingham. Ro. Which one's Bellingham?! The binoculars. Give me the—”
“You can see him with your actual eyes, he's right there—”
“I want to see him bigger!”
Bronwyn had spent an unconscionable sum on something in a commemorative cup and was drinking it slowly while conducting her true business of the evening, which was people-watching, registering outfits three sections over. Emily was pretending, with total transparency, not to notice that Andy had already taken approximately eighty photographs of the four of them in their England jerseys and was showing no signs of stopping.
And then Norway came out to warm up at the near end, and the second Haaland appeared, both Andy and Roark sat forward in their seats as though pulled by the same wire.
“Oh my god,” said Andy. “He's enormous.”
“Six foot four,” said Roark, immediately, the way another child might recite a saint's day.
“That is not a soccer player. That's a Norse experiment. Look at the size of him. Look at him jog. He jogs like something that's been built to a specification.”
Emily glanced down at the pitch, where the very large blond man was casually stroking a ball into the top corner of the net from the edge of the box, again, and then again, without any visible change of expression.
“He does look as though he was assembled specifically to frighten defenders.”
“He's one of the best strikers in the world,” Roark said, with the reverent misery of a boy who supported the other team and could not, in conscience, pretend otherwise. “Maybe the best. He scores, like, his numbers aren't normal. They're not human numbers.” He watched another shot fizz into the net. “And we have to root against him.”
“Wait,” said Andy. “We're rooting against that?”
“Yes.”
“But look at him!”
“Andy.”
“I'm just appreciating athletic excellence. I'm allowed to appreciate the athletic excellence of the enemy. That's a very mature thing I'm doing!”
“You sound,” said Roark, “like a commentator who's forgotten which country she's supporting.”
And then Bronwyn looked up from her phone, and there was a particular gleam in her eye, the gleam of a younger sibling in possession of a weapon. “Wait,” she said. “Has nobody shown Andy the memes?”
Roark went completely still. The binoculars came down slowly. “Oh my god,” he breathed. “No one has shown Andy the memes.”
“What memes?” said Andy, instantly suspicious, looking between them. “What are the memes? Why are you both looking at me like that? What. Memes.”
“Give me your phone,” said Roark, holding out his hand.
“Why?”
“Education.”
The first one they showed her was the photograph of Haaland from behind, his long blond hair hanging loose and damp, set side by side with a picture of an ordinary household mop. The resemblance was not subtle. The resemblance was, in fact, the entire joke, and it was devastating.
Andy stared at it. Then she looked down at the pitch, at the actual Haaland, hair currently tied back, thundering another shot into the net. Then she looked back at the phone. Then at the pitch. Then at the phone.
“Oh, that's mean,” she said.
She lasted perhaps two seconds. Then she folded forward over her own knees, wheezing, one hand flat against Roark's arm for support, laughing in the specific silent way that meant no sound would come out for several seconds. “That is so mean,” she managed, when she surfaced. “That is so… show me again. Show me the mop again.”
Emily leaned over to see what the fuss was, purely to know the enemy, purely for intelligence. “Well,” she said, and something happened at the corner of her mouth.
“Don't encourage them,” Andy said, still not fully recovered.
“I said nothing.”
“Your face said something.”
“My face is doing what it always does.”
“Your face said accurate. I saw it. I know that face. That's your accurate face.”
“My face did no such thing.”
Bronwyn, without comment, zoomed in on the mop and held the phone closer to Emily. And Emily looked at it, properly, the strands and the fringe of it, and she said, in a flat and final tone just like delivering a verdict from which there is no appeal.
“The resemblance is unfortunate.”
Andy lost it entirely, all over again, a fresh collapse, and Roark had to put the binoculars back on his own neck to stop her knocking them onto the concrete.
And then, out on the pitch, as if he had heard them, as if the universe had a sense of comedy, Haaland reached up mid-stretch and pulled the tie out of his hair, and it came loose all at once, the whole blond curtain of it falling around his face, and Andy physically seized Emily's forearm with both hands.
“Em. Em. The mop is out.”
“Do not call the man a mop.”
“You just said it was accurate!”
“I said it privately. To this row. Under conditions of strict confidence. There is a very great difference between a private acknowledgement of an unfortunate resemblance and standing in a stadium seizing my arm and shouting the mop is out at a national team—”
“The mop,” said Andy, with enormous tenderness, watching him shake it back, “is absolutely out.”
Next Roark showed her the other genre, the entire ecosystem of jokes built on the premise that Haaland was not, in the strictest sense, a human being. There were the edits with the red targeting reticle over his eyes. There were the comparisons to the Terminator. There were the ones implying he was manufactured, assembled, produced on a line, activated before matches and powered down after, and the ones about him being plugged in overnight to charge. It worked, Roark explained, because of his build and his blank expressions and his genuinely inhuman scoring record. Not human had become one of the standard formats.
Andy became obsessed with this one on a deeper level than the mop. The mop had been funny. The robot, she felt, was the truth.
“Wait,” she said, going quiet with revelation. “This explains everything.”
“Explains what?” said Emily.
“The way he celebrates. Have you seen the way he celebrates? He doesn't celebrate like a person. A person scores a goal, they lose their mind, they run, they scream, they slide on their knees. He scores a goal and he just—” she made a small, flat gesture with both hands, “—completes it. He completes the assigned task. There's no joy. There's just confirmation. Objective met.”
Roark, deadpan, in the flattest possible robotic monotone. “Goal successfully processed.”
Bronwyn, without looking up. “Returning to charging station.”
Andy was crying now, actual tears, gripping the seat in front of her. “Stop. Stop it. I can't—”
And later, minutes later, during the warm-up, Haaland took a pass on the half-turn and, with no run-up and no apparent effort and no change whatsoever in his face, hit it so cleanly into the far top corner that a groan of appreciation went up even from the England end, and he did not celebrate, did not smile, simply turned and jogged back to the cone he had come from, and Andy said, quietly, reverently, into the noise.
“Target eliminated.”
Roark nearly dropped the binoculars.
“You are both,” said Emily, “twelve years old.”
“I'm fourteen,” said Roark, with dignity.
“Then this is particularly embarrassing for you.”
Then came the anime. Bronwyn had strong feelings about this genre and took over the phone to curate it herself. There were the Super Saiyan edits, the long blond hair given a golden glow and lifted on an unseen wind, crackling with energy. And there was the Majin Buu comparison, which Bronwyn presented as her personal favorite, the pink, round, oddly serene expression matched against a photograph of Haaland looking placidly enormous, and which was funnier, she explained, because Haaland himself had apparently seen the comparison online at some point and more or less admitted it.
Andy knew precisely enough about Dragon Ball to become insufferable. “Oh my god,” holding the phone up beside the pitch, squinting between the Super Saiyan edit and the actual man. “Oh my god, he does look like a Super Saiyan. Is that why he scores so much? Is that the reason? Has anyone checked, has anyone actually confirmed, that he is not collecting the dragon balls?!”
Emily looked as though someone had read the sentence to her in a language she resented understanding. “I do not know what a single part of that meant, and I already regret the parts I understood by context.”
“Dragon balls,” Andy began, with delight and about to explain something at length, “are these seven magical—”
“No.”
“There are seven of them and when you collect all seven—”
“Stop.”
“I need you all to understand,” Andy went on, ignoring her, holding the phone up beside the real man one more time, squinting, “that this is changing my life. Right now. In real time. I am a different person than I was ten minutes ago.”
“You had a life before this?” said Emily.
Andy turned to her, very slowly, with wounded reverence. “That,” she said with a pointed finger, “was nasty.”
“Thank you.”
And when, a few minutes later, Haaland dropped into a brief stretch, knees bent, arms low, head slightly bowed, holding the pose the way large men occasionally do, Roark leaned in and said, with total seriousness, “He's powering up,” and Andy began providing dramatic anime sound effects under her breath, a low building hum rising toward a crescendo, until Emily told her that if she made “that sound” one more time she would be watching the remainder of the match from the parking lot.
Then Roark found the one he had been saving. He didn't say anything. He just turned the phone around and held it up. The famous image of Haaland mid-roar, face contorted, mouth open, every tendon in his neck standing out, set beside a picture of the Pokémon Gyarados, a great blue serpentine sea-dragon, screaming, in an almost identical pose. The match was uncanny. It was more than uncanny. It was the same photograph of the same animal.
Andy laughed so suddenly and so loudly that the entire row in front of them turned around.
“THAT'S A POKÉMON!!!”
“Keep your voice down,” Emily hissed, sinking two inches into her blazer.
“Em! Em, look at me! He's Gyarados. He is Gyarados. This isn't a joke, this is taxonomy—”
“I do not know what that means, and I have made my peace with not knowing.”
And all three children, for Andy absolutely counted as a child in this context, possibly the youngest present, began attempting to explain Pokémon to Emily simultaneously, at cross-purposes, a rising babble of types and evolutions and water-flying, until Emily held up one flat hand and said, “I regret asking. I regret speaking,” and none of them stopped.
Then, on the pitch, something displeased Haaland, a ball played slightly behind him, a cone in the wrong place, some small injustice, and he threw both arms out wide in a gesture of enormous exasperation, and Andy whispered, instantly, with the delivery of a nature documentarian.
“A wild Gyarados appeared.”
Roark, without missing a beat. “England used Harry Kane.”
“Is it effective?”
“We'll find out.”
And then Bronwyn, who had not appeared to be listening, said, without lifting her eyes from her phone, “Gyarados is Water-Flying. Kane doesn't have the type advantage. He'd need something Electric. This match-up is actually bad for England on paper.”
There was a silence. All three of them turned to look at her.
“What?” said Bronwyn, glancing up, defensive. “I had a childhood. It was a whole thing. Don't look at me like that.”
Surprisingly, Bronwyn maintained a folder. She called it Haaland Core, and she scrolled through it now with the pride of a curator walking a visitor through a private collection. It contained photographs of him standing among ordinary-sized footballers, looming, unsettlingly serene, like an adult who had wandered into a children's team. Dramatic low-angle shots where he genuinely resembled a Viking arriving by longship to conquer a coastline. Mini Haalands running around the pitch. Clips of him saying strange, blunt, affectless things in interviews, delivered in a flat calm that made them funnier. Screenshots of the meditation pose he sometimes dropped into after scoring. Edits that turned him into a fantasy character, a frost giant, a final boss. The enormous unblinking intensity of his match face. And a whole subgenre in which his long hair was doing something structurally impossible, defying wind and physics and reason.
Andy scrolled through it in a state of mounting disbelief, and at last arrived at the only conclusion available to her. “Why,” she said slowly, “is he simultaneously terrifying and kind of adorable?”
Roark looked as though she had insulted a family member. “Adorable?”
“In an enormous, genetically engineered sort of way. Like a very large dog that could kill you but has chosen, for now, not to.”
“You cannot call the opposition adorable, that's— there are rules, that's against the whole—”
“I can appreciate him as a specimen and still want England to win. Those are separate rooms in my heart. I keep them separate.”
Emily arched one eyebrow. “You changed allegiances remarkably quickly, for a woman who wept at a different anthem last week.”
“The USA is out,” said Andy, with the serenity of the recently converted. “I'm a free agent. I've entered the transfer market. I've signed for England on a short-term deal. It's very common.”
The funny thing, the thing Andy would treasure, was how hard Emily fought it.
“I have no interest,” Emily announced, to the general vicinity, “in internet photographs of a Norwegian footballer. None. You may look at them among yourselves. I will be watching the pitch, like an adult.”
So Andy showed her one without warning. She simply held the phone up in front of Emily's face, one of the Viking ones, Haaland glowering out of a low golden light like something come to burn a monastery, and watched.
Emily's mouth twitched.
Andy caught it the way a hawk catches movement in grass. “You think it's funny.”
“I do not.”
“You almost smiled. I watched it happen.”
“I was grimacing. It is very warm, and I am wearing polyester under a blazer, as you well know, and occasionally my face grimaces of its own accord. It is a heat response. It is medical.”
Then Bronwyn, sensing blood, leaned across and showed her another, the mop again, the original, the strongest of the collection, and Emily looked at it for a long, considering moment, and then said, in a tone so bone-dry it could have started a fire.
“One would think, given his salary, that someone in his life might have introduced him to conditioner.”
Roark and Andy both entirely lost it. It took them some time to come back.
And from that moment they hunted her mercilessly. They kept trying to make her rank the memes, the mop against the robot against the Viking, hold them up two at a time, force a judgment out of her, and she refused, every time, on the grounds that she was above it, that she would not be dragged down to their level, that she had a job and a home and standards. She refused for a solid five minutes.
And then Andy showed her the robot one, the charging-station edit, and Emily, without quite seeming to decide to, said, “The mop was stronger.”
Absolute silence in the row.
Andy turned toward her, slow, and acting like she was witnessing something sacred. “You have a ranking.”
“I have eyes,” said Emily, looking straight ahead at the pitch. “Observation is not endorsement. The mop is the superior comparison because it is the most immediately legible. The robot requires a premise. Comedy rewards economy. That is not an opinion about football, it is an opinion about structure, and I will not have it recorded as anything else.”
“She's ranking the memes,” Andy whispered to Roark, awed. “She gave a critical framework.”
It was Roark who brought Bellingham into it and thereby ended any hope Emily had of a calm evening. He found a photograph, Haaland and Bellingham, younger, in the yellow of their old club, arms around each other, grinning, from the season they had played together at Dortmund, and showed it to Andy, and Andy lit up like the floodlights.
“Wait. They know each other?!”
“They played together,” Roark said. “Dortmund. Before Haaland went to City and Bellingham went to Madrid. They were teammates for a bit. They're mates.”
“Oh,” said Andy, in a hushed and terrible voice. “Oh, there's lore...”
Emily let her head fall back against the seat. “There is not lore. There are two men who once worked at the same company. That is not lore, that is a LinkedIn connection.”
“So this is personal,” Andy breathed, ignoring her completely, staring down at the two figures warming up at opposite ends of the pitch. “Tonight. This is personal for them.”
“Not really,” said Roark. “They're just—”
“Childhood friends,” Andy went on, building it in the air with her hands, “torn apart by fate. Turned by the cruel machinery of international soccer onto opposing sides. One a blond machine. One an English national treasure. Brothers, now enemies, meeting at last across the—”
“They weren't childhood friends, they were like twenty—”
“Andy,” said Emily, exhausted, “you have known who Bellingham is for approximately three weeks.”
“And yet,” said Andy, laying a hand across her own heart, “I have supported him through everything.”
Roark stared at her. “What everything? What have you supported him through? You learned his name last month???”
“Don't,” said Andy, gravely, “diminish our journey.”
And Emily, despite herself, despite the heat and the polyester and the fact that she did not care about football, laughed, a real one, short and surprised and out before she could stop it, and Andy heard it, and turned, and looked at her with such open, uncomplicated happiness that Emily had to pretend, very quickly, to be extremely interested in the far goal, where a very large blond machine was placidly ending the careers of imaginary defenders one warm-up shot at a time.
The whistle went, and the noise that had been building for an hour finally had somewhere to go, and eighty thousand people leaned forward at once.
For twenty minutes it was even, and tense, and, Emily was forced to concede, privately, to the pitch, rather beautiful. She had not expected it to be beautiful. She had expected it to be tedious and loud and long, and it was loud, and it was long, but there was a pattern to it that she found, against every intention, absorbing. The way the shape of it shifted and re-formed, the little triangles of passing, the sudden acceleration when someone broke a line. Roark had gone silent and forward again, forearms on his knees, reading it. Andy narrated everything at a volume that made the men behind them grin.
And then, in the twenty-sixth minute, Norway scored.
It came fast, a turnover in midfield, exactly the space Roark had spent three weeks complaining about, a ball slid through, and Andreas Schjelderup arriving onto it at the perfect moment and finishing low across the keeper before the England end had fully understood the danger. For half a second the stadium held its breath. Then the Norway end erupted, a wall of deep red rising and roaring, and the scoreboard turned over, and it was one-nil, and it was the wrong one-nil.
Roark sat back as though he'd been pushed. His whole face fell open, wounded, betrayed by the game he loved the way it had betrayed him before and would again. “That's the space,” he said, faintly. “That's the exact space. I said— I said they were leaving the middle—”
Andy was on him instantly, both hands on his shoulders, turning him toward her. “Hey. Hey. Look at me. There's so much time. There's so much time, okay? It's the twenty-sixth minute. That's nothing. That's basically a warm-up. England scores all the time, they score late, they specialize in it. Look at me, there is so much soccer left.” She had no idea whether any of this was true. She delivered it with the total conviction of a woman who had watched a great many American sports films, and it worked, because Roark was fourteen and wanted to be told exactly that, and he nodded, and sat back up.
“They always,” said Emily, to no one, watching the Norway players celebrate, “make it unnecessarily difficult. Every time. It is not enough for them to simply be worse or better than the other side. There must be suffering. There must be a first-act catastrophe. It is practically a national tradition. I believe it is written into the constitution.”
Andy, still rubbing Roark's shoulder, cut her eyes sideways. “You care.”
“I care that Ro is upset. That is a separate and entirely maternal concern.”
“You're yelling at the referee.”
“Because he is incompetent. That is an objective assessment of his officiating and would be true whether or not I cared about the outcome, which I do not.”
But something had shifted in Emily, and Andy watched it happen over the next twenty minutes with growing, silent glee, because Emily, who did not care about football, was becoming, by increments, unmistakably animated. She began, at first, with tactical criticism, offered coolly, as though from a great height.
“They are playing the same pass over and over, and it has not worked once. Vary it. Switch the play. There is an enormous amount of grass on the left, and nobody in England appears to have noticed it exists.”
Then it grew warmer. She started using names. She knew the names. “Kane. Kane. Wake up, for God's sake, you are the captain, come and get involved, you cannot simply stand on the last man's shoulder for ninety minutes and hope—” She rose an inch off her seat when a chance went begging and sat down again with a sharp, disgusted exhale and a hmph.
Andy was in heaven. Andy had stopped even watching the football. Andy was watching Emily.
“You're enjoying this,” she said.
“I am appalled by this! There is a difference. I am appalled at close to the maximum intensity a person can be appalled!”
“You just called Kane by his name and told him to wake up.”
“Because he is asleep, Andrea! Watch him. He is a very expensive man having a nap,” she said, rolling her eyes.
It came right before halftime, in the final minute of the first half, in the way that England had made a tradition of, the way that seemed almost designed to punish everyone who had spent the previous half-hour in despair.
There was a move down the right, quick, one touch, then another, and a ball pulled back across the face of the box, and the whole stadium seemed to see it a fraction before it happened, a great intake of breath, and then Jude Bellingham arriving into the gap with that specific composure that made grown commentators lose their vocabulary, and he took it first time, low and hard and precise, and it was in the net before the Norwegian keeper had finished moving.
And MetLife came apart.
Roark was up. Andy was up. The men behind them were up. Eighty thousand people rose in a single motion and the noise was no longer weather, it was something you felt come up through the concrete and into your feet and your chest, and Roark was screaming something with no words in it and Andy was screaming BELLINGHAM, both fists over her head, and in the middle of all of it, in the middle of the loudest thing any of them had ever stood inside, Andy turned and grabbed Emily and hugged her.
It was not planned. It was pure reflex, the overflow of a feeling too big to keep inside one body, and Emily was caught completely off guard, arms pinned for a second, her careful composure knocked clean out of her, and then, before she could think about it, before the part of her that managed everything could get there and stop it, she hugged Andy back. Hard. Both arms. In the middle of a crowd of strangers, in a stadium in New Jersey, in a jersey with her own name on the back, Emily Charlton held on to Andy Sachs and let herself be held, and for a few seconds neither of them was performing anything at all.
Bronwyn, beside them, groaned to the heavens. “Oh, they're doing this. In public. Okay. Great.”
Roark did not notice a thing. Roark was too far gone, screaming into the roar, watching Bellingham wheel away toward the corner flag with his arms out, and it was probably for the best that he did not see his mother's face.
When they finally pulled apart, the roar still going, the whole stadium still on its feet, Andy's face was inches from Emily's, flushed and blazing and radiant, and she beamed and shouted, at absolutely unnecessary volume.
“GOAL!!!!!!!!”
“Yes, darling,” said Emily. “I gathered.”
But she was smiling. She was smiling with her whole face, helpless with it, the blazer askew and one earring knocked crooked and a strand of hair loose across her forehead, and she made no attempt at all to hide it, and Andy would remember it, she knew even then that she would remember it, for the rest of her life.
The halftime whistle went a moment later, one-one, and the England end sang the whole way down into the break.
They descended into the concourse on a tide of white shirts, and Andy insisted on buying food, and this was where Emily discovered the true horror of the evening, which was not the football but the economy of the football.
“For this—” she said, holding up a small tray of chips, fries, she supposed, in the local dialect, that had cost a sum she genuinely believed to be a clerical error. “For this. This exact object. This handful of hot potato in a cardboard boat. They want, they are asking—” She turned the tray as though a lower price might be printed on the underside. “It is not even good. It is not even, in the strictest sense, food. It is a cardboard tray of regret, and they have priced it absurdly.”
“You,” said Andy, eating one of the chips, “once spent more than that on a candle.”
“The candle,” said Emily, with icy precision, “was hand-poured in Paris. By a maison. It was fig and cedar, and it did not come in a cardboard tray shaped like a canoe. You cannot compare a candle to this. That is just insulting. This however, is an insult wearing the costume of a snack.”
“You're the least affected person here by the price,” Bronwyn pointed out, appearing with something enormous and neon-blue in a souvenir cup. “You could buy the stand. Why are you the one having a breakdown about it.”
“It is not about the money,” said Emily, eating a chip, “it is about the principle,” and ate another one, and would not meet anyone's eye.
Roark had not touched his food. Roark was conducting a full tactical review of the first half, mostly to himself, mapping it out with his hands in the air. “If they'd just shifted him ten yards inside they'd have had the whole, and Bellingham keeps drifting right, which is fine, that's where the goal came from, but it leaves—”
Bronwyn had, in the space of a fifteen-minute interval, somehow made three friends. They were Norwegian. They were enormous and delighted and draped in red, and Bronwyn was showing them something on her phone and all three were laughing, and when Emily raised an eyebrow at her, Bronwyn shrugged and said, “They're nice. Their striker's a robot, but they're nice about it,” and one of the Norwegians gave Emily a solemn, respectful nod, which she found she did not entirely mind.
“Bellingham,” announced Andy, “is going to score again. Second half. I can feel it. Right here.” She tapped her chest.
“That is statistically unlikely,” said Roark, surfacing from his review. “He's already scored, and he's a midfielder, and Norway will tighten up on him now, they'll double him. The odds of the same player scoring twice in a knockout after they've adjusted are actually pretty—”
“Andy knows nothing about statistics,” said Emily.
“I don't need statistics. I have a feeling. The feeling is never wrong.”
“The feeling,” said Emily, “told you Morocco would win the group. The feeling told you the American number nine was, and I quote, about to explode. The feeling has a record, Andy, and it is not good.”
“Have faith,” said Andy, to both of them, serenely, gathering up the tray of ruinously expensive chips, “that's all I ask. A little faith. It's coming home.”
“Oh, do not,” said Emily, “you are American for God’s sake, you are not permitted that phrase, it is ours, we suffer for it—” but the bell or the buzzer or whatever it was had gone, and the tide of white and red shirts was turning back toward the stands, and they went with it.
Nobody scored, and it was awful.
That was the thing about the second half that Emily had not anticipated. That the absence of goals could be so much more punishing than their presence, that forty-five minutes of near-misses and half-chances and balls flashed across empty six-yard boxes could wind a person tighter than any amount of scoring. The match became a slow torture device. Every England attack broke down at the last moment. Every Norway break sent a cold current through the England end. The light had gone fully now, the floodlights burning white, the pitch impossibly green beneath them, and eighty thousand people spent forty-five minutes making a noise like a held breath.
Andy shouted herself hoarse and then kept shouting past hoarse, into a register that was mostly air, a cracked and ruined little voice that she deployed regardless, because volume, to Andy, had never been about being heard so much as being felt. Roark was on the very edge of his seat, silent, gripping the seat-back in front of him, flinching at every turnover. Bronwyn, who had spent the entire tournament pretending to care about nothing, had somehow been pulled all the way in, gasping and clutching Roark's arm on a Norway counter, then looking briefly appalled at herself, then doing it again ninety seconds later.
And Emily kept claiming, out loud, to anyone who would listen, that she was perfectly calm.
“I am entirely calm,” she said, gripping Andy's hand hard enough to compress the bones. “I simply think the wide man ought to have crossed it earlier. That is a calm, considered observation. There is no need for anyone to be anything other than calm.” Her knuckles were white. Somewhere in the second half she had taken Andy's hand, and she had not, at any point, given it back, and the grip had tightened by degrees as the minutes wore on until Andy could feel her own pulse in her fingers.
Andy looked down at their hands. She did not say anything. She had learned, over the course of a year, exactly when not to say anything, and this was one of those times, and she simply let Emily crush her hand and stared at the pitch and pretended, generously, along with her, that neither of them noticed.
And then, a moment later, a Norway attacker got in behind, one on one, and the whole England end died a small death, and the keeper spread himself and smothered it, and Emily came six inches off her seat with a noise Andy had never heard her make, and sat back down, and said, in a slightly strangled voice, “I am fine.”
It happened in the seventy-ninth minute. The pressure had built and built, England pushing now, Norway sitting deeper and deeper, and the ball would not go in, and the whole thing had the terrible airless quality of a game that was going to need more than ninety minutes, and Emily, watching England play a slow sideways pass across the top of the box for the fourth time in a row while a gap yawned open and unused on the far side, lost her composure entirely, shot up out of her seat before she knew she was doing it, and screamed, at the top of her considerable lungs, in her crisp and carrying English voice.
“Oh, for God's sake, PASS THE BLOODY SOCCER BALL!”
The word left her mouth before she could catch it.
There was a beat. And then, slowly, one by one, the entire family turned to look at her. Andy first, her ruined voice failing her completely, her mouth falling open. Then Roark, tearing his eyes from the pitch immediately for the first time in twenty minutes. Then Bronwyn, who lowered her phone. All three of them, staring at Emily Charlton, English, dignified, the woman who had corrected the word football perhaps four hundred times since June, who had, in a moment of extremity, in front of God and eighty thousand people, called it soccer.
Emily did not look at any of them. She kept her eyes fixed on the pitch, her chin lifted, her spine perfectly straight, and she said, in a voice of absolute and final authority.
“Not one word.”
Nobody said one word. But Andy made a sound, a wheezing, delighted, voiceless sound, and pressed both hands over her own mouth, and Emily's jaw tightened, and out on the pitch England kept passing it sideways, and the ninetieth minute came, and the board went up, and it was not enough, and the whistle sent them into extra time.
“This is absurd,” said Emily, sinking back, spent. “Ninety minutes! Ninety minutes should be sufficient for any activity. Any activity on earth can be concluded in ninety minutes if the participants apply themselves.”
Andy, exhausted, voiceless, wrung-out, could not let it go. She turned her head, slowly, and with a tilt of her eyebrow, rasped, in the wreckage of her voice. “Any activity?”
“Shut up,” said Emily, instantly, not looking at her, going faintly pink. “Shut up, Andrea, the children are right there—”
“I didn't say anything.”
“You said any activity in that voice, I know that voice, that is your... the children, Andrea—”
“Gross,” said Roark, automatically, not really listening, watching the players gather in exhausted huddles on the pitch below.
“Deeply,” agreed Bronwyn.
And the two teams broke from their huddles, and dragged their tired legs back out across the enormous green, and the noise gathered itself once more for thirty minutes it had not asked for and could barely survive.
It happened early. It happened in the ninety-fourth minute, four minutes into the first period of extra time, before anyone had settled, while legs were still heavy and the crowd still catching the breath the second half had taken from them.
There was a loose ball at the edge of the Norway box, a header half-cleared, dropping, and the whole of MetLife saw who was arriving onto it a fraction before it happened, and the intake of breath was enormous, and Jude Bellingham met it on the half-volley with the same impossible composure he had shown in the first half, struck it clean and low and true, and it went in off the inside of the post, and the goalkeeper never had a chance.
Two-one.
And the noise that came then was different from the noise before, because the first goal had been relief and this one was belief, this one was the sound of a thing that had been suffered for finally arriving, and the whole white half of the stadium came off its feet as one enormous animal and roared until the roar had texture and weight and mass.
Roark screamed. Andy screamed. Bronwyn screamed. Bronwyn, who had been so careful all tournament to care about nothing, was screaming purely because everyone around her was screaming, gone completely, hair everywhere, phone forgotten in her lap.
And Emily, Emily Charlton, who did not care about football, who had organized her entire adult life around never standing in a crowd like this, leaped to her feet before her mind had given permission and shouted, at the Norwegian back line, at the top of her lungs, “Oh, PISS OFF back to your fjord, you offside-trap-setting BASTARDS!” It was a phrase so genuinely and creatively vulgar that a man three rows down turned around to see who had said it and looked frankly impressed.
Andy froze mid-celebration. She turned, very slowly, away from the pitch, toward Emily, and her ruined voice came out in a cracked whisper of pure, incandescent joy.
“Oh my god. You're a fan.”
“I am not.”
“You just threatened a Norwegian center-back's bloodline. In front of everyone. You used words. There were specific words, Em, I heard them, that man heard them—”
“He left Bellingham completely unmarked at the edge of the box in the ninety-fourth minute of a World Cup quarter-final,” said Emily, still standing, still flushed, still watching the celebrations. “It was an act of professional negligence. I was commenting on the negligence.”
“You know what unmarked means.”
“Everyone knows what unmarked means, it is not a technical—”
“You tracked the run. You saw him unmarked before it went in. You were watching the space, you have been watching the SPACE, Em, that's a Ro thing, that's a plays-the-actual-sport thing—”
“Andy,” said Emily, sitting down with tremendous dignity while everything around her continued to erupt, “watch the match. There are twenty-six minutes remaining, and given this team's temperament I would not celebrate a single one of them until the whistle.”
But Andy had stopped listening. Andy leaned across, in the middle of the still-roaring stadium, and kissed her once on the cheek, quick and smug and delighted, and then spent the remaining twenty-six minutes wearing an expression of such insufferable vindication that Emily eventually told her that if she smiled like that one more time she would be finding her own way back to Manhattan.
The last twenty-six minutes were their own particular agony. Norway threw everything forward, and Haaland, the great blond machine, came alive at last, and there was one moment, one header, that Andy would swear afterward stopped her heart entirely, that the keeper somehow clawed away, and the whole England end aged a year in a second. But it held. It held. And the fourth official's board went up, and the added minutes bled away one by one, and the referee, incompetent, Emily maintained, to the very end, finally, mercifully, put the whistle to his lips and blew.
England had won. Two-one, after extra time. They were through to the semi-final.
MetLife detonated. There is no other word for it. The sound was not a sound anymore. It was a physical event, and Roark (Roark, who knew the whole squad, who had expected heartbreak and turned up for it anyway, who had just watched his country win a World Cup quarter-final with his own eyes, in person, in the flesh) was screaming so hard that nothing identifiable was coming out of him any longer, just a raw and cracking noise of a boy at the absolute outer edge of joy, and there were tears on his face, and he did not care, he did not care about anything.
“OH MY GODDDDDDDDDDDDDD!!!! AHHHHHHHHHH”
Andy got to him first. She wrapped him up, both arms, and he grabbed her back and held on, and over the din he shouted, into her shoulder, the truest thing he had ever said to her.
“This is the best thing anyone's ever done for me. This is the best, thank you, thanks, Mum—” He heard it the instant it was out. His whole body went rigid. “—Andy. I said Andy. Thanks, Andy.”
He pulled back with a look of such profound and specific horror, the horror of a fourteen-year-old who has accidentally revealed his entire heart in a stadium, that Andy understood, immediately and completely, that the single kindest thing she could do, the only acceptable thing, was to pretend with everything she had that she had not heard it. So she did not react. She did not soften, or tear up, or make a single sound about it.
She just gripped his shoulder and grinned and shouted, “BELLINGHAM, THOUGH! TWICE! I TOLD YOU, I LITERALLY TOLD YOU!! I had a feeling—” and let him off the hook, let him fall gratefully back into the safe territory of the football, and only much later, hours later, would she cry about it, quietly, into Emily's shoulder in the dark, that word, Mum, the one he hadn't meant to say and the one he had.
But that was later. Now there was only the noise, and Andy's eyes going bright, and Roark saying “don't cry, don't you dare cry—”
“I'm not crying.”
“You're literally crying, I can see it—”
“It's the air in here. The stadium air is aggressive. It's a ventilation issue.”
And Emily watched the two of them, her son and her girlfriend, both wet-faced, both pretending they weren't, gripping each other in the roar, and understood something that had been arriving in her slowly for a year and now landed all at once, complete and permanent. This was no longer simply her partner making an effort with her children. This was not a woman being good with the kids to please their mother. Andy was in it. Andy was one of them. The unit had four sides now, not three plus a visitor, and Emily had somehow failed to notice the exact moment the shape had changed because it had changed so gradually and so completely.
So she did the thing she never did. She reached out and gathered them in, one arm around Andy, one around Roark, and pulled them both against her, and held on.
“Excuse me?” said Bronwyn, from just outside the huddle. “Excuse me? Hello? I'm also here. I'm being left out of the moment. This is a documented exclusion—”
Emily reached out without a word, seized a fistful of Bronwyn's cropped and artfully ruined England shirt, and hauled her bodily into the middle of it, and for one long, awkward, imperfect second, the four of them stood locked together in a lopsided knot in the corner of MetLife Stadium, jostled on every side by thousands of screaming strangers, none of them balanced, someone's elbow in someone's ribs, and it was, Andy thought, with her face pressed into the back of Emily's blazer and Roark's shoulder digging into her arm and Bronwyn complaining from somewhere in the middle, the single best moment of her entire life.
When they finally came apart, whatever composure Emily had defended all evening was comprehensively gone. She was still on her feet, both fists clenched, shouting something about Bellingham being “an absolute bloody genius” as though she had personally coached the boy since he was six, and Andy turned to her with the single most obnoxiously delighted expression in the recorded history of the human face.
“You care!”
“Don't start.”
“You love soccer!”
“Football, and I love winning,” said Emily, rolling her eyes with a pleased expression on her face. “There is a difference, and it is an important one, and I will thank you to observe it.”
“You feel bad for him now, though, don't you,” Andy said, rounding on her, gleeful, pressing every inch of her advantage. “Haaland. You watched him drag that entire team up the pitch by his teeth for two hours, and somewhere in there, admit it, you started to feel just the smallest bit sorry for him.”
Immediately, the pleased expression vanished. “I feel that the multimillionaire Viking appliance will recover.”
Andy nearly went down into her own seat. Roark, overhearing, made a noise like a punctured tire. It was, they would all later agree, the single finest thing Emily said all night, and she said it without cracking a smile, which only made it worse, or better, depending on where you were sitting.
And then the stadium speakers came up, and over the fading roar the first notes of a song began, that unmistakable, endlessly familiar opening, the guitar figure that every English person over the age of ten carries somewhere in the marrow, and a ripple went through the England end as people recognized it, and then, section by section, eighty thousand people began to sing.
It was Wonderwall. Of course it was Wonderwall. It was always going to be Wonderwall.
Down on the pitch, the England players had gathered into a loose huddle near the center circle, arms around each other's shoulders, and they were singing too, bouncing, and the crowd sang with them and at them and around them, tens of thousands of voices swelling up into the New Jersey night, flags waving, people up on their seats, strangers with their arms around strangers, the whole vast bowl of the place turned for a few minutes into a single ragged choir.
Today is gonna be the day that they're gonna throw it back to you
By now, you should've somehow realised what you gotta do
I don't believe that anybody feels the way I do about you now
Roark knew every word and sang every word. Andy knew every word too, because of course she did, and she threw one arm around Roark's shoulders and the other around Emily's and dragged them both in close and began to sway, dramatically, side to side, with the total commitment someone who had waited her whole life to sing this exact song in this exact place.
Backbeat, the word is on the street that the fire in your heart is out
Emily looked as though she had been asked to disrobe. “Absolutely not.”
“Come on!”
“Andrea, I am not singing Oasis in a football stadium in New Jersey. I have a reputation. Somewhere. In some circles. There are people who respect me.”
I'm sure you've heard it all before, but you never really had a doubt
“You're wearing an England jersey with your own name on the back.”
“Against my will.”
“You screamed at the referee. For ninety minutes. Plus extra time.”
“He deserved every word, and I stand by all of it.”
Bronwyn leaned around Andy and deployed the eyes, the puppy eyes, the ones that had already cost Emily one jersey and four tickets. “Mum. Literally everyone is singing. Look. That entire stand. Those men. That baby. Everyone.”
I don't believe that anybody feels the way I do about you now
“That is not an argument in its favour, that is mob psychology, that is precisely how—”
Then, the song lifted toward the chorus, that great swelling turn that everyone in the building had been waiting for, and eighty thousand people hit it at once and the sound doubled, and Andy and Roark both swung to face Emily and sang it directly at her.
And all the roads we have to walk are winding
And all the lights that lead us there are blinding
There are many things that I would like to say to you
But I don't know how
Appallingly out of tune, far too loud, far too close, both of them beaming into her face from a distance of about six inches, and Emily held out for three more seconds.
Then she rolled her eyes to the heavens, and she joined in.
Because maybe, you're gonna be the one that saves me
Quietly, at first. Under her breath. Barely a mouth-movement. But Andy's whole face lit up the instant she saw it, that first traitorous shape of the words on Emily's lips, and Emily saw her see it, and pointed one warning finger directly at Andy's nose, without stopping singing, which rather undercut the warning, as if to say do not, do not make this a thing, and Andy nodded solemnly, promising nothing, and kept her arm right where it was around Emily's waist.
And after all, you're my wonderwall
And by the second half of the chorus, Emily was gone. There was no other word for it. She had crossed over. She was singing louder than Andy now, she had, it turned out, an actual voice, low and clear and true, a voice that had plainly known this song for thirty years, one arm wrapped tight around Andy's waist and the other slung around Roark's shoulders, and Bronwyn had wedged herself into the middle of the three of them, still filming, holding the phone up to catch all four of their faces, until Emily reached over without breaking the line she was singing and firmly pushed the phone down so that Bronwyn would have to actually be in the moment instead of recording it.
Today was gonna be the day, but they'll never throw it back to you
By now, you should've somehow realised what you're not to do
I don't believe that anybody feels the way I do about you now
So there they were. A messy four-person cluster, swaying out of time, half of them out of tune, in the corner of an enormous stadium, surrounded on every side by thousands of strangers doing the exact same thing, all of them singing the same old song up into the same summer dark.
And all the roads that lead you there were winding
And all the lights that light the way are blinding
And Andy, in the middle of it, arm around Emily, Roark flushed and radiant on her other side, Bronwyn laughing and finally singing, Emily's head tipped toward hers as she sang, Andy looked around at the three of them and felt something rise up in her chest so suddenly and so completely that it spilled straight over, and her eyes filled, and she had to stop singing.
Emily noticed at once. Emily always noticed. “Why are you crying?”
Andy laughed, wet, and wiped underneath one eye with the heel of her hand. “I'm not.”
“You very clearly are. You have stopped singing, and you are leaking. That is crying.”
“It's just—” Andy gestured, helplessly, at all of it, at the stadium and the song and the three of them. “This is really nice. This is just, it's really, really nice.”
And that undid Emily completely, in the way that only Andy's total lack of sarcasm ever could. Her face softened all the way through, the last of the arch performance falling off it, and she reached up and cupped the back of Andy's neck with one hand and drew her in and kissed her temple, once, while all around them the chorus rolled on and thousands of voices reached for the line about being the one who saves her, and Andy, of course, ruined it immediately, because that was what Andy did, leaning in close to shout over the noise.
There are many things that I would like to say to you
But I don't know how
I said, "Maybe, you're gonna be the one that saves me"
“You said maybe!”
“I said nothing of the sort.”
“You were literally singing! You were singing the maybe part! I heard you do the maybe part!”
“Prove it.”
Bronwyn lifted her phone. “I have four minutes of proof.”
Emily's face dropped several degrees of temperature. “Delete that.”
“Absolutely not,” said Bronwyn, and turned the phone away, and kept it.
It should be recorded, for the sake of accuracy, that none of them could sing.
Andy had lost her voice somewhere, so she began the song at a shout and arrived at the words sounding like a goose in genuine distress, a wheezing, cracking, tuneless honk that bore only a passing relationship to melody.
And after all, you're my wonderwall
I said, "Maybe (I said maybe), you're gonna be the one that saves me"
And after all, you're my wonderwall
“You're ruining it,” Roark told her, appalled, because Roark actually knew the words and the tune and cared about both. “You're actively ruining Oasis. That's a real song. People love that song.”
“Emotion,” rasped Andy, with great dignity, “is more important than vocal quality.”
“Neither of you can sing,” said Bronwyn flatly, “and honestly, at this point, I wish Norway had won.”
And Emily, who was clearly personally invested now, wholly and irreversibly compromised, rounded on her own daughter with genuine offense. “Don't be ridiculous.”
There was a small pause. Slowly, all three of them turned to look at her.
“What?” said Emily.
“Nothing,” said Andy, radiant, insufferable, saving it forever. “Nothing at all.”
Andy, for her part, had developed a technique for the parts of the song she did not know, which was most of the parts, which was to simply shout BELLINGHAM at full voice wherever a lyric escaped her, so that the song as she performed it was roughly 40% Oasis and 60% the name of a midfielder, and Roark suffered visibly every time she did it. And when the great chorus came round one final time, and the whole stadium reached for it together, Andy turned to Emily and sang it directly at her, both hands pressed flat over her own heart, chin quivering with exaggerated devotion, milking every second, and Emily tried, she genuinely tried, to hold the line of her mouth flat and unimpressed.
She failed completely.
I said, "Maybe (I said maybe)
You're gonna be the one that saves me (that saves me)
You're gonna be the one that saves me (that saves me)
You're gonna be the one that saves me" (that saves me)
It should have ended there with the outro tune. It very nearly did. But as the celebrations rolled on and the players did their lap and the crowd refused to sit down, the enormous screens above the stands began cutting around the stadium, and the crowd near them began to cheer at something, and Andy, who noticed screens the way moths notice porch lights, looked up, and pointed, and shrieked.
“THAT'S US. Em. EM. That's us, we're on the—”
Emily looked up. Emily saw herself, forty feet tall, flushed, hair wrecked, one earring gone entirely at some point during extra time, in an England jersey with her own name on the back, on the giant screen, framed in a bright pink heart, beside Andy, who was already waving both arms over her head at their own enormous image. The word above the heart said KISS CAM.
“No,” said Emily.
The section around them, seeing the English woman's face of pure arctic refusal, began to cheer. A chant started. Andy turned to her, glowing, and made a face of exaggerated, quivering hope.
“Absolutely not,” said Emily. “We are on a screen. There are eighty thousand people. There is a camera. I will not—”
“KISS! KISS! KISS!” Bronwyn had joined the chant. Bronwyn was leading the chant. Bronwyn had turned to the strangers around them and was actively conducting them, both hands, like an orchestra, and the strangers were delighted to be conducted. “KISS! KISS! KISS!”
Roark had both hands over his face and was speaking into them. “I'm not here. I don't know these people. I have never seen any of these people before in my life.”
“Andrea, if you think for one second that I am going to—”
And Andy pouted, the full pout, the devastating one, and the chant swelled, and the giant Emily on the screen looked more appalled by the second, which only made the crowd louder, and Emily held out for exactly as long as Emily Charlton had ever been able to hold out against Andy and a crowd and her own traitorous heart, which was to say not very long at all, and then she made a small sound of profound exasperation, grabbed Andy by the front of her Kane jersey with both fists, hauled her in, and kissed her. Properly. Thoroughly. With a commitment entirely disproportionate to a woman who had, four seconds earlier, refused.
The entire section erupted. It was, some of them would later agree, louder than the goal.
When Emily let her go, Andy was dazed and beaming and slightly unsteady, and Bronwyn was filming, and Roark had walked several feet away and was pretending to be a stranger, and Emily straightened her blazer, and lifted her chin, and said, to the middle distance, with what remained of her dignity. “There. Happy? It's out of your system.”
It was not out of anyone's system. The clip was online before they had even left the stadium. By the time they reached the concourse it had a caption, something along the lines of ENGLAND FAN LOOKS LIKE SHE'D RATHER DIE THAN KISS HER GIRLFRIEND, PROCEEDS TO ABSOLUTELY DEVOUR HER, and several hundred thousand views, and by morning it would have several million, and Emily would demand, repeatedly and with mounting fury, that it be removed from the internet, and it would not be, because that is not how the internet works, and Andy would save it to her camera roll and watch it approximately once a day for the rest of her natural life.
Afterward they moved out of the stadium on pure adrenaline, though it was late now, properly late, and they had just survived more than two hours of football, and by human rights they should all have been unconscious. None of them were. Roark least of all. Roark hadn’t stopped talking the entire way through the concourse and out into the warm night, a rolling ecstatic monologue. Bellingham's equalizer, and then the winner, the movement for the winner, the way he read the drop of the ball. England's midfield in the second half. Haaland, terrifying, every single time he touched it, that header at the end, “how did he not score that header?!!!” The referee, whose decisions had been an outrage from first whistle to last. And how he, Roark, had known all along that England would come back, despite having, at approximately the twenty-seventh minute, loudly and tearfully predicted the exact opposite.
Andy agreed with every single point, including the ones that directly contradicted the other points, because agreeing with Roark was, right now, the entire purpose of her existence.
“I'm muting both of you,” Bronwyn announced, “for the whole journey home. I've made my decision. It's final.”
Emily kept one hand in Andy's as they moved through the crush toward the trains. She said, when Andy glanced down at it, that it was purely so they wouldn't be separated in the crowd, a practical measure, nothing more, and this was, everyone understood, a complete lie, because they stayed hand in hand long after the crowd had thinned and there was no earthly risk of losing anyone, and she did not let go, and Andy occasionally swung their joined hands between them like a child on the way home from a party.
“Good soccer game,” said Andy.
Emily stopped walking.
“After everything you have witnessed tonight. After everything I have suffered. That is the sentence you have chosen.”
“Great soccer game, actually,” Andy amended.
“I could leave you in New Jersey. I want you to understand that the option is available to me and that I am, at this moment, actively considering it.”
“You'd miss me.”
“Eventually,” said Emily, and started walking again, and did not let go of her hand.
Roark, several strides ahead, spun around and walked backward to shout it at them. “It's FOOTBALL, Andy!”
“Your mother,” Andy called back, pointing at him, “has brainwashed you.”
“I'm English!”
“Exactly! That's exactly what I'm saying!”
The train back was packed with England supporters, every one of them exhausted and sweaty and half-deaf and still, underneath it, glowing. Flags hung over the luggage racks. Somewhere a phone was replaying the winning goal at full volume, again and again, and each time it reached the moment of the strike a small ragged cheer went up from whoever happened to be nearest. Strangers dissected the match in the aisles as though they had personally selected the team.
By some miracle the four of them got seats together, two facing two. Bronwyn immediately claimed the window, announced she was going to sleep, and put her head against the glass. Roark insisted, with tremendous energy, that he was not remotely tired, and then spent the next ten minutes blinking with increasing slowness, like a lighthouse winding down.
Andy sat in the middle of their side, Emily on one side of her and Roark on the other, and scrolled through the videos she had taken, showing Emily the same Bellingham goal from what felt like every angle available to modern science.
“And this one's from behind the goal.”
“Yes, darling.”
“But look at the movement, look how he just—”
“I have now looked at the movement seventeen times. It has been, each time, the same movement.”
“It gets better the more you watch it.”
“It remains, with a consistency I find almost admirable, precisely the same goal.”
Roark leaned across Andy to look. “No, that angle's actually the best one. You can see the whole run develop.”
Emily looked from one of them to the other, the two of them bent over the little screen with identical frowns of concentration, and sighed. “Of course you agree with her. You always agree with her. You are a bloc.”
A few minutes later Roark's head dropped sideways onto Andy's shoulder. He jerked upright at once, mortified, muttering that he'd just been resting his eyes, and Andy did not say a word about it, she simply shifted a little, angling her shoulder so it made a better pillow, and went back to lowering the brightness on her phone so the light wouldn't bother him. Within a few minutes his breathing had gone slow and even, and he was properly, deeply asleep, and worn out with joy, his head heavy against her arm.
Emily watched the whole thing happen. She watched her son fall asleep on Andy's shoulder, and her entire face changed, went open and unguarded in a way she would never have permitted if she'd thought anyone was looking, but Andy was too busy holding still for Roark to notice. Across the aisle, Bronwyn's eyes were shut, her head against the window, though whether she was asleep or simply resting was impossible to say.
Emily reached over and smoothed Roark's hair back from his forehead, once, the way she had when he was small.
Andy looked at her and smiled. “He had a good time.”
“He adored it. He will talk about this for a year. He will describe this day to his own children.”
“I'm glad.”
“You have spoiled him terribly.”
“It was one game.”
“You bought four quarter-final tickets.”
“Okay,” Andy conceded. “So it was a really big one game.”
Emily looked at her for a long moment, the train rocking gently beneath them, Roark asleep between them, and then she said, quietly, not arch at all. “Thank you.”
Andy went instantly, helplessly awkward, because she had been braced for a joke and got sincerity instead, and sincerity from Emily always caught her somewhere soft and undefended. “You don't have to thank me.”
“Yes. I do.”
“I wanted to take him. I didn't do it to be thanked, I did it because... I wanted to. That's all.”
“I know,” said Emily. She glanced down at Roark, asleep and heavy against Andy's side, his face slack and young. “That,” she said softly, “is precisely why I am thanking you.”
The train pulled farther from the stadium, and the carriage began, slowly, to quieten, the cheering thinning out, the goal replays going silent one by one, exhaustion settling over everyone like a blanket. And then, from the far end of the carriage, a few hoarse voices started up Wonderwall again.
It began badly. It began as three or four wrecked and sleepy voices, much slower than it had been at the stadium, dragging, tender, more lullaby than anthem. And then, from a seat here and a seat there, other people picked it up, quietly, until half the carriage was singing it under its breath in the dark.
Andy's head came up the instant she heard it.
Emily watched the exact moment she recognized what it was, watched the whole thing arrive on her face, and got there first. “No.”
“I didn't say anything.”
“Your face said it. Your face is always saying it. Your face has never once kept a secret in its life.”
But Andy was already singing, very softly, barely above a breath, because Roark was asleep on her shoulder, and this time she wasn't going to belt it into anyone's face. This time it came out quiet and low, almost a hum, an odd and gentle thing to be doing, singing Oasis under her breath on a crowded midnight train with a sleeping boy against her arm.
Bronwyn opened one eye across the aisle. “Are we seriously doing this again...”
“Tradition,” whispered Andy, solemn.
“It happened one hour ago. That's not a tradition, that's a recent event.”
“A long-standing tradition,” said Andy, “of over one hour,” and Bronwyn sighed the enormous sigh of a teenager overruled by sentiment, and then, quietly, so as not to wake her brother, started singing too.
And then Roark, eyes still shut, head still heavy on Andy's shoulder, apparently fast asleep, joined in on a single line. Just one. There are many things that I would like to say to you. Under his breath, without opening his eyes, without moving.
Andy froze. “You're awake?”
“No,” said Roark, eyes shut, and did not sing the next line either, and kept his face perfectly still against her arm, and Andy had to press her lips together hard to keep from making a sound, because she was smiling so wide it actually hurt the corners of her mouth.
Emily, of course, refused to participate. She had already done so before, so there’s absolutely no reason for her to join again (right?). She maintained with her chin lifted and her eyes on the dark window, a woman entirely above singing pop songs on public transport.
At least, she appeared to refuse. But when the chorus came around, quiet now, half the tired carriage reaching for it together, gentle in the dark, Andy heard, very close beside her, low and clear and unmistakable, Emily's voice. Singing. The maybe line. All of it.
Because maybe, you're gonna be the one that saves me
Andy turned her head.
Emily was looking straight ahead, out at nothing, at the black window and the lights sliding past, with an expression of complete and studied innocence, as though she were doing nothing at all, as though the voice were coming from somewhere else entirely, from some other, less dignified Emily two rows back.
And Andy started singing toward her again, but not to tease this time, not to catch her out, not to win. Just quietly, just for her, warm and low, turned toward Emily's profile in the dim carriage.
And after all, you're my wonderwall
The noise of the train seemed to fall away a little around the two of them. Roark was asleep on Andy's shoulder. Bronwyn was humming across the aisle, eyes shut again. Andy's hair was a wreck, and her face paint was long gone and smudged, and her England jersey was creased beyond saving, and she was singing a nineties song under her breath on a train through New Jersey at midnight.
Emily looked back at her. And thought, with a clarity that startled her, that she had never in her life loved anyone more than she loved this ridiculous, exhausted, tuneless, radiant woman, right now, in a creased jersey, in the dark.
Andy hooked her little finger around Emily's, gently, on the seat between them.
Emily turned her hand over and laced their fingers together, all the way, and held on. And the two of them kept singing, very quietly, with the rest of the tired, happy train, all the way home.
When the song wound down, the carriage broke into scattered, sleepy applause and a little laughter, and then settled back into the rock and hum of the rails.
Andy rested her head against Emily's, careful of Roark on her other shoulder. “You sang. Twice. Tonight. You sang twice.”
“I was surrounded. Both times. It was a question of survival. When one is completely surrounded by singing, one sings. It is a form of camouflage, it is what the small fish do—”
“You know all the words.”
“I was alive in the nineties, Andrea. Everyone alive in the nineties knows all the words. It is not a preference. It was forced.”
“So you admit you like Wonderwall.”
“No.”
“Soccer?”
“No.” Stopped for a second, then under her breath, “Football, Andrea.”
“Shush. The jersey?”
“Certainly not.”
Andy squeezed her hand. “Me?”
Emily turned her head and looked at her, unimpressed, from about three inches away. “Occasionally.”
Andy grinned.
And then Roark, still apparently and profoundly asleep against Andy's shoulder, muttered, without opening his eyes. “Gross.”
“Extremely,” added Bronwyn, from across the aisle, eyes shut, not even pretending to be asleep anymore.
Andy leaned close to Emily's ear and whispered, delighted, “Our children are so judgmental.”
And then she heard herself. She heard the words come out, our children, easy, unplanned, without the little stumble she usually put in, without the immediate scramble to correct it to Roark and Bronwyn or the kids or your kids the way she always, always did, the way they both did, the two of them forever catching the phrase halfway out and refusing, laughing, to discuss it. She had just said it. Straight out. Our children. As though it were the simplest and most obvious thing in the world.
Emily noticed. Of course Emily noticed.
And Andy noticed that Emily had noticed, and for one terrible plunging second her face went stricken, certain she had overstepped, certain she had reached for something she hadn't been offered, and she opened her mouth to walk it back.
But Emily only squeezed her hand, and looked at the two of them, Roark heavy and warm against Andy's arm, Bronwyn feigning sleep across the aisle, and said, simply, without any weight on it at all, as though it settled everything, which it did.
“They get that from me.”
Andy did not say anything for a while after that. She couldn't. She just held on to Emily's hand and watched the lights go by and let the enormity of it sit in her chest, warm, and did not correct anything, and neither did Emily, and the train carried the four of them home through the dark.
And then, a few miles on, in the hush of the carriage, Andy’s phone lit up in her free hand. It was Roark who’d sent it, though no one saw him do it.
Back at the stadium, halfway through the first Wonderwall, Bronwyn had turned the camera away from the crowd and onto her own family, and the video she'd captured was four minutes long and, in its way, perfect. Andy singing terribly, that ruined goose-honk of a voice going for notes it could not possibly reach. Emily, at the start, refusing, arms folded, mouthing nothing. Roark beside her, laughing at his mother's girlfriend. Bronwyn's own arm coming into frame as she forced herself into the shot. And then, the turn of it, the whole point of it, Emily giving in, Emily beginning to sing, Emily singing louder than any of them by the end, one arm around Andy and one around Roark. And Andy, at the very end, looking around at all three of them and going bright-eyed and stopping. And Emily catching it, and reaching up, and kissing her temple while the chorus rolled on.
Somewhere on the dark train, without a word, without lifting his head from Andy's shoulder or appearing to wake at all, Roark had taken Bronwyn's video and sent it into the family group chat.
The group chat had been named, some months ago, by Andy, over Emily's objection, and it was still called, despite there being only four of them, despite this making no numerical sense whatsoever, the starting XI.
Andy's phone lit up in her hand while everyone else drifted at the edge of sleep. She opened it. She watched the four minutes all the way through, once, in silence, the sound off, reading it in their faces, and by the end of it her eyes had filled for the third time that night.
Emily looked over. “Are you crying… Again? For the third time? In one evening?”
“No.”
“Andy.”
Andy didn't trust her voice. She just handed Emily the phone.
Emily watched it. She watched herself, in the England jersey she claimed to despise, in the stadium she claimed to resent, with her arms around Andy and both children, singing a song she claimed not to like, with her head tipped toward Andy's and no apparent concern in the world for how any of it looked. She watched it once. Then, without a word, she watched it a second time. Then she did something she absolutely would have denied under oath, she tapped save, quietly, and put the video onto her own phone, and handed Andy's back to her, and said nothing at all about it, and looked out the window.
They came home during that soft, blurred hour when even the city has gone quiet. Roark was barely conscious, a fourteen-year-old sleepwalker insisting with total conviction that he was perfectly capable of walking on his own even as he tilted gently into doorframes, eyes fluttering, and Andy steered him up the stairs by the shoulders, no I've got it, I'm fine, that was the best day of my... goodnight, Mum, and got him to his room, and did not say a word about the goodnight, Mum, because she understood that saying anything about any of it would only make him wish the ground would swallow him whole. She would keep every one of them, though. She had a small private note in her notes app of the things Roark accidentally let slip, and she took them out and looked at them sometimes, and told no one.
Bronwyn disappeared into her own room with a final warning, delivered over her shoulder, that no one was to speak to her, look at her, or exist audibly anywhere near her before noon.
And Andy and Emily went to the bedroom, both of them wrung out and wired at once, that particular late-night state of being far too tired to sleep. Andy took her earrings out at the mirror and, without at all meaning to, began to hum it, that song, again, low, under her breath.
A pillow hit her in the back of the head.
“We have,” said Emily, from the bed, “listened to that song enough for one evening. We have listened to that song enough for one lifetime. I have a policy. It is in effect.”
“But Em.”
“No.”
“But maybeeee—” began Andy, with a wicked look, drawing the word out, because Emily had sung the maybe part and they both knew it,
“Do not.”
“—you're gonna be the one that saves—”
Emily crossed the bed on her knees, got off, and kissed her, mid-word, mid-line, catching the song in Andy's mouth and stopping it there, and Andy made a small surprised sound and then melted into it completely, smiling against Emily's lips so that the kiss went crooked and neither of them minded.
When Emily pulled back, she looked insufferably pleased with herself. “There. Silence.”
“That is not going to work every time,” said Andy, a little dazed.
“It has worked remarkably well so far. I have a near-perfect record. I intend to keep using it until it fails, and I do not anticipate it failing.”
Andy's eye caught on the chair in the corner, where Emily’s custom England jersey, CHARLTON, on the back, the one Emily had worn under a blazer all day and complained about from dawn until midnight, was not, as it should have been by every law of Emily's stated feelings, crumpled in the laundry basket or the bin. It was folded. Carefully. Squared at the corners. Laid over the back of the chair with the name facing out.
“You're keeping it,” said Andy.
“It has my name on it. One does not simply discard a garment with one's name on it. There are principles of self-respect involved.”
“You folded it. You never fold anything of mine. You love it.”
“I tolerate it.”
“You love soccer.”
“I tolerate FOOTBALL.”
“You loved tonight.”
And here Emily did not have a deflection ready. Here the reflexive dryness failed her, because it was very late, and she was very tired, and Andy was looking at her with her ruined voice and her smudged face and her whole open heart, and there did not seem to be any point, anymore, in pretending. She lay down. She looked at Andy in the dark. And she said, quietly,
“Yes.”
Just that. One word, sincere, unqualified, and it landed on Andy so completely that she went quiet, all the teasing gone out of her, and slid down under the covers until she was level with Emily, close, their faces a few inches apart on the same pillow.
But Andy being Andy, she couldn’t just stop there.
“You screamed at the referee.”
“He was incompetent.”
“You sang Wonderwall twice.”
“I was surrounded, against my own will.”
Andy smiled and wrapped her arms around Emily. “So… we’ll go to another soccer game?”
Emily turned over. “Football.”
“Soccer.”
“Football.”
“Soccer.”
Emily turned back and kissed her, efficiently and without warning, cutting her off again.
When she drew back, Andy was smiling far too smugly for someone who had just been silenced.
“That doesn’t count as winning,” she whispered.
Emily looked at her. At the woman who had moved into her house and somehow filled every quiet room in it. At the crumpled England shirt abandoned beside the bed, the photographs accumulating on Andy’s phone, and the two children sleeping down the hall after the best day Roark had ever had.
Then, so quietly Andy nearly missed it, she said, “It’s coming home.”
Andy went completely still.
From down the hall, Roark shouted, “I HEARD THAT!”
Emily closed her eyes.
Andy’s laughter shook the mattress.
And from down the hall, muffled through a wall, through a phone speaker at one in the morning, came the opening chords of Wonderwall.
Emily closed her eyes. “I will end him.”
Andy started laughing, helplessly, into the pillow.
“TURN IT OFF,” came Bronwyn's voice, furious, through two walls.
“IT'S A CLASSIC,” Roark shouted back, wide awake after all, unashamed, king of his own small kingdom down the hall.
Emily reached blindly for her phone on the nightstand. “I am changing the locks. Tomorrow. First thing. All of them. New keys for no one.”
Andy curled in against her side, tucked her cold nose into Emily's neck, threw an arm across her, and settled. “You'd let us back in.”
Emily gave up on the phone. She let it drop. She wrapped her arm around Andy in the dark, and pulled her in close, and pressed a kiss to the top of her messy, beloved head, and down the hall the song played on, and her whole ridiculous family was under one roof, awake and arguing and hers.
“Eventually,” she said.