Wednesday dawned before dawn.
Rai opened his eyes in the dark and lay still for a while, listening to the house. The neighborhood waking slowly—the bark of a distant dog, a creaking door, the first bus passing along the avenue like some huge animal breathing. The little back room smelled the same as always: mildew, kerosene, old wood. But now there was something else over it all, a smell he didn't quite know yet. A beginning.
The Gift was quiet behind his eyes, an ember covered in ash. It didn't ask for a ball. It didn't ask for a field. It simply existed, as if saying: you have a chance, but chance doesn't walk by itself.
He got up slowly so he wouldn't make any noise and put Leo's shirt back on. The peeling number 10 looked like irony written into the fabric. Or prophecy. He didn't know which of the two was more dangerous.
He left the little room and found Marta in the kitchen. She had her back to him, as always, stirring a pot that had nothing in it—stirring out of habit, as if her hands needed to stay busy so her mind wouldn't. Small, wiry, her white hair pulled into the same tight bun. The whole house seemed to arrange itself around her, even when she did nothing but exist.
“Up early,” she said without looking. It wasn't an accusation. Just an observation, like saying, “It's cold.”
“Practice is at six,” Rai replied.
Marta turned off the burner that didn't need turning off. She wiped her hands on her grimy apron. Then she turned and looked at him with those tiny eyes that seemed to pass through clothes, skin, and bone to find the part people hid even from themselves.
“You have two weeks,” she said.
Rai froze. Not because she'd figured it out. But because she already knew. Leo had told her. And even if he hadn't, Marta was the kind of person who always knew what nobody said. That was her Gift. A Gift without shine or applause—the Gift of surviving and carrying others along with her.
“I'll take care of it,” Rai said too quickly. Almost like an apology. Almost like a lie.
Marta gave him half a smile that wasn't a smile.
“You will. But how are you going to take care of it?”
Rai fell silent. There was no good answer. In his first life, he'd learned to solve things with his own body: taking more shifts, carrying heavier loads, swallowing humiliation with his head bowed. You couldn't fix paperwork by hauling crates. Paperwork was fixed with a name. With a document. With someone saying, “This one exists.”
And for that, he needed a legal guardian. He needed someone.
“My father…” he began, and the word came out strange in his mouth, as if it belonged to another language. Father. A small sound for such a huge absence.
Marta looked at him for one more second. Just one. But in that second, a decision was taking shape inside her, silent as everything else she did.
“Eat some bread,” she said, walking to the table. “You going to practice on an empty stomach? Then you'll pass out and I'll be the one blamed.”
Rai sat down and ate a hard roll with black coffee. The bitterness burned his tongue. He liked it. Bitter was honest.
Leo appeared in the doorway with his face creased from sleep and the patched-up ball tucked under his arm as if it were part of his body. He looked at Rai, then at Marta. He noticed the mood in the air, that denser silence.
“What happened?” he asked.
“Nothing,” Marta replied. “Go put on something decent, boy. And stop sleeping with your arms around that ball. It'll give you back pain.”
“It won't,” Leo grumbled, but he went.
Rai stood to follow, but the old woman's voice held him in place.
“You stay.”
Leo stopped in the hallway, confused.
“I'll be right back,” Marta said, as if she were talking about bread, not life. “Don't let him be late.”
Leo looked at Rai. Rai returned the look. Thirty-five years inside sixteen trying to say: go.
“Come on,” Rai said to Leo. “I'll meet you there.”
When Leo left, Marta opened a drawer and took out a folded, crumpled piece of paper, as if it had been opened and closed many times without ever being used.
“Address,” she said.
Rai took the paper. He recognized the street. He recognized the name of the place with a shock that was almost physical. Because he remembered. In his first life, at twenty-two, he'd walked down that street carrying a ladder on his back for a painting side job. He'd looked at a house with a high wall and thought: someone who never looks to the side lives here. Then he'd kept going. He'd never imagined his father might live there.
“It’s there?” Rai asked.
“It is,” Marta replied. “And before you say anything, I already know. ‘I can't ask this of him.’ ‘I don't want to bother him.’ ‘I'll handle it.’” She raised a hand, cutting him off. “Shut up. You're good, kid. I don't understand anything about soccer, but I understand people. And I saw how Leo came back from the tryout. I saw him start breathing again.”
Rai felt his chest tighten. It wasn't guilt. It was something else. The ugly feeling of having someone bet on you. Because bets were scary. You knew what losing felt like.
“I'll go,” Rai said.
Marta calmly shook her head.
“You're going to practice. I'm the one going.”
Rai stood up at once.
“No.”
It was the hardest word he'd said in the house.
Marta wasn't intimidated. She didn't even raise her voice.
“You don't have sixteen years in your head. You have forty. I can see it on your face. You'll get to that house and want to demand love. You'll want to demand justice. You'll want to make the past kneel. And the past doesn't kneel, kid. The past only bites.”
Rai opened his mouth to deny it, but couldn't. Because she'd hit the mark.
He wanted to demand answers. He wanted to look at his father and say: look what you did to me by doing nothing. Look what you let happen. Look at the life I had because you disappeared.
But he also knew, with the coldness his first life had taught him, that demands didn't get papers signed.
“I know how to talk to men like that,” Marta continued. “Men who disappear, men who disappear by choice. I know.”
She took the thin coat hanging behind the door and put it on as if it were a battle uniform.
“Practice,” she repeated. “And come back.”
Rai stood still. The Gift behind his eyes showed no lines, because this wasn't a field. It wasn't a game. It was something crueler: family. And in this game, he had no Gift at all.
“If he doesn't sign…” Rai began.
Marta fastened the coat tight around her neck.
“He'll sign.”
“How do you know?”
She opened the door, and the cold morning wind blew in.
“Because nobody wants to be remembered.”
And she left.
Rai stared at the closed door for a second, as if waiting for her to come back and say it was a joke, that all of this was just another dream. But it wasn't.
He grabbed his backpack, tied the lace on his flip-flop—it was going to snap, he knew—and ran out.
The Cruzeiro do Sul field was still wet with dew when Rai arrived. The thin grass gleamed beneath the weak light, and the goalpost's metal had that metallic smell that got into your nose and stayed there. The boys were already there, some yawning, others pretending they weren't afraid.
Dudu was among them. New cleats, shin guards, socks pulled up just right. His neatly trimmed hair looked as if his life had been measured with a ruler. He talked loudly, laughing and taking up space, like someone who already felt like the owner before buying anything.
When he saw Rai, his smile didn't change. But his eyes did. His gaze stopped at Rai's feet. Bare. Always bare. Then it climbed to his face with that wordless question the outskirts taught you early: what are you doing here?
Rai held his gaze. Not as a challenge. Out of old-man habit: whoever looks away first loses without even playing.
Dudu looked away, laughing with his friends as if nothing had happened. But Rai felt it. The tension had been born right there.
Sergiao arrived and blew his whistle.
“Today is real practice,” he said. “Today I want to see who can handle it. Anyone who only knows how to shine for seven minutes at a tryout is going to die.”
They ran. Endurance runs, explosive sprints, short bursts, changes of direction. Rai felt his body responding well—young, whole—but he also felt the limit he'd already noticed: he lacked explosiveness. He lacked the kind of speed that separated a pretty play from one that became reality.
The Gift showed him the space. His body didn't always get there. That was where the difference lived.
During the drills with the ball, Sergiao put Rai in the middle again. Midfielder. Playmaker. The world fell into place. Invisible lines lit up behind his eyes as if someone had switched on an entire stadium.
Rai began organizing the team without saying a word. One touch here, another there. A change of position with his body. A small gesture of his chin. The team responded without understanding why. Because soccer, he knew, wasn't about ordering people around. It was about making the other person want to follow you.
Dudu didn't want to. Dudu ran hard, shouted for the ball, tried to solve everything alone, shot from distance, tried to dribble past two at once. He played to be seen. He played like someone fighting for a throne.
And when Rai began to become the center, Dudu began to turn up the pressure.
On the first play, it was a harder challenge. Shoulder to shoulder. Normal. On the second, his studs came down on Rai's foot. “By accident.”
Rai didn't fall. He didn't complain. He just looked at him.
Dudu smiled without smiling.
“My bad, number 10,” he said, looking at the peeling number. “Didn't see you.”
Rai breathed. Let the air in and out. In his first life, he would've exploded. He would've gone after him, cursed him out, and lost the spot before winning it. In this life, he had something Dudu didn't: experience with losing. And that made him dangerous.
On the next play, Rai received the ball with his back to the goal, felt Dudu pressing against him, and the Gift showed him the boy's body coming in for the hit. Rai didn't turn. He didn't try to dribble. He simply released the ball before contact, with a first-touch pass that opened up the entire field.
Dudu came in full force and hit nothing but air. He lost his balance. Almost fell.
The other boys laughed. Not loudly, because nobody wanted to start something with Dudu. They laughed only from the corners of their mouths, like they couldn't hold it in.
But Dudu saw them. And for someone like him, that was worse than a goal.
Practice ended with Sergiao ordering everyone to do more short sprints.
“Anyone who wants to be a player needs a player's body,” he shouted. “Anyone who wants to be an artist can go on television.”
Rai ran until his leg burned. Until his lungs ached. Until his saliva grew thick with exhaustion. And even as he ran, he thought. Team practice was one thing. But he needed more. He needed to turn that body into a weapon. He needed to build explosiveness, strength, endurance. He needed to make his body catch up to the Gift.
When practice ended, Leo came over beside him, limping a little and laughing with his whole sweaty face.
“Did you see Dudu's face when he came to break you and broke the wind instead?” Leo said.
Rai didn't answer. He just drank some water and looked at the empty field. He didn't want a war with Dudu. But he knew war didn't ask whether you wanted one.
Leo noticed the silence and his smile faded.
“You okay?” he asked.
Rai looked at the sky, already pale blue with morning.
“Yeah,” he said. “It's starting.”
He went home and found Marta sitting in the kitchen chair as if nothing had happened. But the way she held her cup was different. Firmer.
On the table, a piece of paper.
Rai saw it before he got close: signature. Name. A crooked scrawl at the end, like someone wanting to finish quickly.
He picked up the paper carefully, as if it were alive.
“He signed,” Rai said, his voice low.
Marta gave him a dry half smile.
“He signed.”
Rai looked up.
“And…?”
She shrugged.
“He looked at me like someone looks at a power bill. I said, ‘You need to sign it. It's so the boy can play.’ He said, ‘It's been a long time since I've seen that name.’ I said, ‘Yeah, and he still exists.’ Then he signed.”
Rai felt his stomach twist.
“Did he ask about me?”
Marta was silent for a second. Just one second. But it was enough.
“He did,” she said. “He asked, ‘Where does he live?’ I said, ‘He lives with us.’ He said, ‘Okay.’ That's all. An ‘okay’ that held an entire life inside it.”
Rai clenched the paper in his hand.
In his first life, he'd fantasized about a reunion. Fantasized about an apology. Fantasized about a father who, deep down, had never existed. The fantasy had sustained him longer than it should have. Now reality was there. A signature without love. The quietest rejection there was.
And still… the signature was the first brick.
Rai took a deep breath.
“Thank you,” he said to Marta.
She waved a hand as if shooing away a fly.
“Go take a shower. You stink up my kitchen with practice.”
Rai almost laughed. Almost. But he didn't. Because that signature had no love in it at all. And even so, it had opened a door.
Only an open door in the outskirts isn't the end of anything. It's the beginning of a reckoning.