The house was warm when they got back.
His mother had left a light on in the kitchen — the specific habit of a woman who believed that returning to darkness was unnecessary when a small act could prevent it. Richard noticed it from the car and felt something move through him that was quieter and more lasting than anything the stadium had produced.
Chidi pulled up outside, cut the engine, and sat for a moment.
"I'll pick you up tomorrow," he said. "Late. Sleep."
Richard nodded. Got out.
The street was quiet. Somewhere in the distance the city was still celebrating — horns, voices, the specific warm noise of Dortmund processing something it had needed to happen. Here on this street it was still and yellow-lit and familiar.
Krause's kitchen window was dark. Late, the old man would be in bed, which was correct. Richard looked at the window for a moment anyway.
Then went inside.
His parents were in the living room.
His mother on the couch with tea, his father in the chair with his hands folded on his knees, both of them still carrying the evening in a way that sleep had not yet reached. They looked up when Richard came in.
Nobody said anything immediately.
Richard sat on the couch beside his mother.
She put her hand on his arm and left it there.
His father looked at him for a long moment.
"The goal," he said finally. "The seventy-first minute. The touch to take the midfielder out. Then the strike." He paused. "Where did you see the gap?"
Richard looked at him. "As soon as Can won the ball. I knew the shape would open. I'd seen it three times in training."
His father nodded slowly. "The preparation."
"Yes."
"Schmidt."
"Yes. And me."
His father held his gaze for a moment. Then: "Both things."
Richard smiled slightly. "Both things."
His mother squeezed his arm. Said nothing. Didn't need to.
They sat in the living room for forty minutes without the television, without phones, without anything except the three of them and the quiet of the house and the specific warmth of a night that had given everything it had to give and was now settling into something that would last much longer than the noise.
At some point his father said: "Your grandfather. The two matches for Nigeria." He paused. "He would have watched tonight and not said a single word. Just sat there and watched." A pause. "That would have meant more than anything he could have said."
Richard looked at his father.
His father looked at the wall.
"June," Richard said. "Super Eagles. You'll come?"
His father looked at him. "Try and stop us."
He woke at nine the next morning to the smell of his mother cooking.
This alone was worth the entire season.
He lay in bed for a moment listening to it — the specific sounds of his mother in a kitchen, the particular rhythm of someone who cooked with the focused efficiency of a person who had been doing it for twenty-five years and had opinions about every step. The sound of it in his house, his Dortmund house, felt like two worlds occupying the same space simultaneously and finding that they fit.
He got up.
His father was already at the kitchen table with tea and the newspaper — a German newspaper, which he could not read, held at the angle of a man who was looking at the photographs and constructing his own narrative from them. The front page had Richard's celebration — the goal, both arms raised, the Yellow Wall behind him, full colour.
His father set it on the table when Richard came in.
They both looked at it for a moment.
"Eggs," his mother said from the stove, without turning around. "Sit down."
They sat down.
The Champions League semifinal draw was on Friday.
Richard watched it at the kitchen table with his parents and Chidi — Chidi had arrived at ten with chin chin and the energy of someone who had not fully come down from the previous night and was not trying to.
The four remaining clubs:
Borussia Dortmund
Barcelona
Arsenal
PSG
The balls came out.
Dortmund vs Arsenal.
Barcelona vs PSG.
The kitchen was quiet for a moment.
His mother looked at Richard. "Arsenal. London."
"Yes," Richard said.
"English team," his father said. The tone of a man filing information carefully.
Chidi set down his chin chin very deliberately. "Arsenal. Saka. Martinelli. Ødegaard." He looked at Richard. "Arteta."
Richard was already thinking about it.
"First leg here," Chidi said. "Second leg at the Emirates."
Richard looked at the draw confirmation on screen.
Signal Iduna Park first. Then London.
London where Chidi lived. London where a version of this season could have happened if the draw had gone differently or the agent had advised differently or the choice had been made differently in the room where it mattered.
He thought about all of this for exactly as long as it needed.
Then he thought about Ødegaard. About Saka. About what Arteta's system would require from his own and what Schmidt would identify and build toward in the preparation weeks ahead.
Chidi was watching him. "You're already preparing."
"I'm always already preparing," Richard said.
"It's a problem," Chidi said. "A beautiful, exhausting problem."
His parents left on Sunday.
He drove them to the airport himself — Chidi in the back, nominally present but giving the front seat to his father without being asked, which was the kind of social intelligence Chidi deployed quietly and without acknowledgment.
At the departures gate his mother held him for a long time.
"June," she said into his shoulder.
"June," he said.
She pulled back. Looked at his face. The recalibration again — updating the internal image, storing it, taking it home to Lagos where it would be shown to relatives and neighbors and the woman at the church who had been praying for him since he was fourteen.
His father shook his hand.
Then — unusual, significant, a gesture Richard could count on one hand across his entire life — pulled him briefly into an embrace. One arm, firm, three seconds.
"Keep going," his father said.
That was all.
They went through the gate.
Richard stood at the barrier for a moment.
Chidi appeared beside him. Said nothing.
They walked back to the car.
Monday was the first training session of the Arsenal preparation window.
Schmidt gathered the squad in the meeting room at nine.
"Semifinal," he said. "Arsenal. Two legs — Signal Iduna Park first, Emirates second." He looked around the room. "Arteta has built one of the best teams in Europe. Their pressing system is the most sophisticated in the competition. Their width is exceptional. Saka and Martinelli give them threats from both sides simultaneously." He paused. "We know what is required. We have been here before."
He moved to the board.
"We begin today."
After the session Richard stayed on the pitch with Lukas for twenty minutes — the extra work, the rehearsed runs, the private language of two players who had built something together over a season.
They worked in comfortable silence mostly. Short sequences. Timing. The specific combinations that Schmidt's system made possible and that their own understanding of each other made sharper.
At the end Lukas sat on the grass and Richard sat beside him.
The Brackel pitch was empty around them. Late afternoon light on the grass. The stadium visible in the distance.
"How many times," Lukas said, "do you think we've done this specific session."
Richard considered. "Forty. Maybe more."
"Forty times." Lukas looked at the pitch. "The Madrid goal. The corner. The celebration." He paused. "I've been at Dortmund for four years. That corner against Madrid is the thing people stop me on the street for now."
Richard looked at him.
"My mother called me three times that night," Lukas continued. "She never calls during matches. She watched it somewhere and called me three times afterward and the third time she just — " he paused — "she just cried. She didn't say anything. Just cried."
Richard was quiet for a moment.
"Mine too," he said.
Lukas nodded.
They sat on the grass for another minute in the late afternoon light. Two players at the center of something enormous, sitting quietly in the ordinary space between the matches that made the enormous thing real.
Then Lukas stood. Offered his hand.
Richard took it. Stood.
"Arsenal," Lukas said.
"Arsenal," Richard agreed.
They walked off the pitch together.
The semifinal was coming.
The Super Eagles were coming.
December was coming — his eighteenth birthday, the Golden Boy announcement, the full weight of a year that had started in Belgium and was becoming something nobody had written the vocabulary for yet.
All of it coming.
Richard walked toward it.
Ready, the way he was always ready — not without nerves, not without weight, but with the settled, quiet certainty of someone who had crossed the distance once already and knew the crossing was possible.
The pitch was empty behind him.
The season waited ahead.
He kept walking.