Demien absorbed this in silence while the apartnt stayed quiet around him.
"Now you can talk," Marco said.
"I can’t think about transfers right now," Demien said. "The England announcent ca six hours ago. I haven’t processed that yet."
"I understand that," Marco said, and the patience in it was genuine rather than perford. "But I need you to also understand that the calendar doesn’t care about your processing ti. The window opens in seventeen days and clubs with fifty million euros on the table don’t hold their position indefinitely while a nineteen-year-old gets comfortable with the idea."
"I know that," Demien said.
"Good." Marco’s voice settled slightly. "So I’m not asking you to make a decision today. I’m asking you to agree that we sit down properly and go through everything together before the window opens. Face to face. I’ll co to you, or you co to — wherever is easier."
Demien ran a hand along the back of his neck. "After England duty," he said. "June twenty-first. That’s when I’m back. We sit down then."
A pause. "That’s tight."
"I know it’s tight."
"The window will be open for twelve days by then," Marco said. "We’d be negotiating with clubs who’ve had a month to plan and we’d be starting from scratch."
"Then brief before I go," Demien said. "Send everything in writing — the offers, the terms, the positions. I’ll read all of it during the camp. I just won’t make a decision until I’m back. Can we work with that?"
Marco was quiet for a mont, and Demien recognised the particular silence of soone calculating whether the terms were workable rather than deciding whether to accept them.
"I can work with that," Marco said finally. "I’ll have a full briefing docunt to you by Friday. Everything in writing — figures, contract lengths, wage structures, what each club has communicated about their sporting plans. You read it. You think about it. Then we talk June twenty-first."
"Yes."
"And Demien." Marco’s voice shifted slightly, the professional register dropping one degree. "This is a real decision with real consequences in both directions. I want you to treat it like one. Not sothing you decide in five minutes on the phone."
"I know what it is," Demien said.
"Good," Marco said. "Enjoy the England camp. And call if anything changes before then."
The call ended and Demien set the phone on the table again and looked at the window where the morning had moved forward while they’d been talking, and outside the pigeons had relocated from the ledge opposite to sowhere further down the street.
Tuesday — WednesdayBergamo
Sky Sport Italia ran it for most of Tuesday afternoon — a twenty-minute segnt that led their early evening show, two analysts in a studio with a graphic of Demien’s season statistics on one side of the screen and a map of Europe with the interested clubs plotted on the other, and the conversation moved through whether Italian football could hold its best young talent and what it would an for Serie A if he left before reaching his ceiling.
He watched about four minutes of it before switching channels.
La Gazzetta dello Sport published an opinion piece that he found by accident because soone sent him the link, the headline asking whether he would follow Jude Bellingham’s path out of continental football too early, and the piece made a reasonable argunt alongside so less reasonable assumptions and he read it to the end out of stubbornness rather than interest.
Atalanta’s official account posted a congratulations tweet for the England call-up at three PM and the replies section beca the specific kind of conversation that supporter accounts have when they’re afraid of sothing — don’t sell him, please Percassi, he has to stay for the Champions League, and several in Italian that were more pointed — while the retweet count climbed past twenty thousand.
Wednesday started the sa way Tuesday had ended, which was with notifications he’d stopped reading and a ringer that stayed off and a coffee that he made automatically each morning because the routine was sothing to do while the world outside made noise.
The Athletic piece went up at half past nine. Eight thousand words, a byline he recognised from the tis Atalanta had been covered in English-language football press, and the headline was straightforward: From Fiorentina’s reject list to England’s senior squad: the making of Demien Walter.
He read the whole thing.
It was thorough and largely accurate, reconstructed from sources he couldn’t identify but who had clearly spoken to people who had been present — at the trial, at Atalanta’s early training sessions, at matches — and the through-line it drew from the Fiorentina rejection to the Coppa Italia hat-trick was the kind of narrative that worked because it was true rather than because it had been constructed. The Fiorentina section he read quickly and without lingering because that part of the story still had texture he didn’t particularly want to visit on a Wednesday morning.
The BBC Sport highlight reel appeared on his tiline at around eleven, and the graphic at the bottom of the video said 2.4 million views before he’d finished watching it, which was a number that required a specific kind of ntal distance to look at without it aning sothing disruptive.
He closed Twitter at half past two on Wednesday afternoon and did not reopen it.
The transfer aggregators continued running updates regardless, and Romano posted three tis across Tuesday and Wednesday — United’s interest confird again, Liverpool’s sporting structure flagged as the right fit, a standalone tweet noting that Atalanta had not yet responded formally to either bid — and each one arrived at several hundred thousand engagents within the hour, and none of it required his participation to continue.
The doorbell rang twice more on Wednesday. He didn’t answer either ti.
He made dinner at seven, read for an hour before bed, and set his alarm for eight because the train to Florence left at nine-fifteen and he’d told his mother he’d arrive in the evening.
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