Chapter 94: Coming Home

With Alencar and Jurek both confirmed, Villa’s summer business was, for all practical purposes, finished, barring a late departure from within the squad, there shouldn’t be much left to shake loose before the window closed.

Over the course of two weeks, Villa had quietly gone through a near-total overhaul, but the wider transfer market itself was only just getting into full swing.

None of that really concerned Villa directly, of course. As a newly promoted club, a modest operation by Premier League standards, the genuinely headline-grabbing business belonged to the established giants, not a side making its first return to the top flight in years.

Even so, Saint’s own activity had drawn real attention from the national press. Most of the summer’s coverage had understandably gone to the bigger clubs, but Villa’s business hadn’t gone unnoticed either.

Eighteen out, sixteen in, Villa had completed an almost total reconstruction of the squad over those two weeks, much of it quietly, with plenty of familiar names from the promotion-winning side simply gone by the time anyone outside the club had properly tallied it up.

The sheer volume alone would have been remarkable for any club, let alone one this size, more than half of last season’s regular starting eleven had turned over by the time the dust settled.

What genuinely stunned the press, though, wasn’t the scale, it was the pace. Two weeks, sixteen signings, and most of English football’s transfer media hadn’t even caught up to the first wave before the second was already done.

Speed alone wasn’t enough to slow the commentary down, though, and once the business itself stopped being news, the players themselves became the story instead. Teale, specifically, caught the brunt of it, his final, heavily criticised season at Chelsea, the one that had effectively ended his time at the club, got dredged back up at length.

Reyes’s doping ban got dragged back into the spotlight too, regardless of the ongoing appeal.

Jurek’s injury history and declining reputation got the same treatment. And the younger signings weren’t spared either.

Who was this Vacek, exactly? Was Tomlin genuinely worth six and a half million? Hadn’t Teale’s own agent oversold him?

Sixteen names, and the press found something to needle about nearly every one of them, which said plenty, on its own, about exactly how much resentment had built up toward Saint personally over the course of one season.

Every one of these new arrivals got a taste of that "warmth" before Villa had even kicked a ball of the new campaign.

Most of them understood fairly quickly, though, that none of it was really about them. It was about their manager, a thirty-one-year-old who’d somehow turned half the country’s football press into a running feud.

The vast majority of Villa’s new intake had come in on Saint’s direct word, some had never even met him in person before signing, purely trusting a phone call and a reputation. Naturally, plenty of them wanted to understand exactly who they’d just signed up to play for.

Saint himself remained the most talked-about figure of the entire window. Thirty-one years old, and of the sixteen new arrivals, only three were younger than he was, Crist, Gamble, and young Osei.

"Lee, what on earth did you do to this country’s press? They genuinely despise you," Teale said, tone equal parts amused and genuinely curious.

"Didn’t do anything. You’d believe that, right?" It wasn’t just Teale wondering, either, practically every new face in the dressing room had quietly asked some version of the same question.

After that exchange with Teale, Saint sent a short message out to the whole new intake, telling them plainly not to waste energy worrying about the press coverage.

With that settled, Saint boarded another flight, this one not business at all. A few hours later, he landed considerably further north than usual, in a quiet corner of the country he hadn’t visited properly in years.

The last time Saint had made this particular trip, by the memories folded into him, had been more than four years earlier, the summer before university, the same summer that had ended with the accident that brought him into this life in the first place.

Not quite a replacement, if he was honest with himself, more a merging. He carried the original Saint’s memories fully intact, his love for his family included, even if the person acting on them now was someone else entirely underneath.

After landing, Saint spent one night resting up properly before making the final leg of the journey. Months of English food, however good, hadn’t dulled his craving for a proper home-cooked meal, and he’d made a point of booking one extra night just for that.

His aunt ran a restaurant of her own, a modest family business that had quietly grown over the years, built up long before Saint’s parents had even opened their own place in Birmingham. It was, in fact, through his aunt that his own parents had first been introduced, all those years ago.

Which made her, in a very real sense, the reason Saint existed in this world at all, not just family, but the person indirectly responsible for everything that followed.

The drive out from where he’d stayed took the better part of an hour, which put Saint walking through the door right around lunchtime.

By memory, the restaurant had once been fairly modest, successful mostly because of where it happened to sit, close enough to a growing local development that it had ridden that wave into something considerably bigger over the years.

These days, it had built a proper local reputation of its own, regulars coming back week after week, and his aunt had apparently taken on a couple of trainees to help keep up with it all.

That expansion was exactly why she’d been threatening, more than once over the phone, to fly out to Birmingham and drag Saint home herself if he kept putting off a visit. With proper staff finally in place, she actually had the room to get away and make good on it.

Saint found the place easily enough, working off memory, the building itself had changed considerably, but the location hadn’t moved an inch.

"Table for one, or are you expecting company?" A smartly dressed waiter greeted him the moment he stepped inside.

"Just me," Saint said. The space itself had grown considerably since the version in his memory, what had once been a handful of tables now stretched into a proper dining room, not counting a couple of private rooms tucked off to the side.

Passing the counter on his way in, Saint caught sight of his aunt for the first time in years. In every memory he carried, she’d always been warm toward him, genuinely kind in a way that stuck.

Not conventionally striking, exactly, but she carried the kind of easy, comfortable presence that people gravitated toward naturally, Saint remembered, distantly, that his own uncle had worked for a long while just to win her over properly.

Lunch service had the whole place running at full tilt, every table occupied, which meant she hadn’t clocked Saint walking past at all.

The last time the two of them had properly spent time together had been that same summer, four years back by his memory, and as far as he could tell, very little about her had actually changed since.

He also remembered, somewhere in the back of his mind, a cousin, four years younger than him, having just finished school and about to start university herself, usually good for a brief catch-up whenever the two families spoke on the phone.

Getting into university was still treated as a genuinely significant milestone around here, and Saint, a graduate of a respected university himself, was held up as something of the family’s proof that it was worth taking seriously. Which was exactly why his aunt kept pushing so hard for him to actually come home and visit properly.

Because from where she sat, a university graduate with real prospects had gone and thrown it all away to become a football coach of all things, hardly the kind of career path the older generation of the family had ever imagined for him.

Football itself had never meant much to her, and Saint had never bothered correcting the impression. Which meant she had no idea, even now, that he’d not only become a manager, but a genuinely well-known one at that.

Plenty of people back home had asked after him over the years, as it happened, but nobody in the family actually knew he was making this particular trip. He’d spent the last two weeks bouncing around Europe, and the flight that finally brought him home had taken off from Prague, with nobody any the wiser.