Lukas - Prologue
Three weeks before the beginning.
The knee held until the 73rd minute.
After that, it didn’t.
I lay on the turf and waited for the pain to stop. It didn’t stop. The team doctor knelt beside me, said things I couldn’t hear, and somewhere above us sixty-five thousand people were roaring, and I thought only: that’s it. Not as a question. As a statement. The clear, calm end of something I had been building for eighteen years.
They carried me off the pitch. I let them. I had no choice.
Later, in the dressing room, I sat alone on the bench and stared at my hands. The right one trembled slightly. Not from pain. From something I couldn’t name and didn’t want to. Outside they were still celebrating. We had won. That no longer mattered.
The club doctor said I needed physiotherapy. Intensive treatment, three times a week, new therapist, fresh eyes on the tissue. He said it as if it were good news. As if it weren’t the end.
I nodded. I showered. I drove home.
In my apartment it was quiet. I normally liked quiet. Today it sat on my chest like weight. I lowered myself to the floor, back against the sofa, knee extended, and opened my laptop. Not for anything specific. Just to replace the noise in my head with something else.
That was how I found her.
An account. A name. A single photo — only a throat, a collarbone, a piece of gray fabric. Nothing special. Nothing exciting. But in the moment I saw it, the silence in my apartment was suddenly less loud.
I don’t know why I paid. I earn enough not to think about money, but I still always think about it, because money is the only thing that makes most people honest with me. What they want. What they expect. What I owe them.
She wanted nothing from me. Not yet. She didn’t even know I existed.
I thought about it for three minutes. Then I sent five hundred euros and waited.
Her first message was: Hello.
Nothing clever. No flirtation, no script, no version of herself she had prepared for me. Just that one word, which sounded as if she were saying it in this room for the first time.
I leaned my head back against the sofa and briefly closed my eyes.
The knee was hurting. The silence was still there. But something in my chest that had been knotted since the 73rd minute loosened by a single, barely measurable millimeter.
I didn’t know she would be the reason for that.
I didn’t even know her name yet.
