Chapter 1: The Crash
The rain hammered against the windshield like bullets striking glass. Each drop exploded and scattered, blurring the headlights of oncoming traffic into smears of yellow light. Demien Walter's scarred hands gripped the steering wheel, his knuckles white against the worn leather.
Thirty years old. The number sat heavy in his chest like a stone.
Under pressure, his body ached, making him feel twice that age. His left hip throbbed where the Ipswich had caught him three seasons ago. His right knee clicked with every press of the accelerator, a souvenir from QPR's pre-season disaster. These injuries piled up when you were good enough to make it pro but not good enough to matter.
The passenger seat held his life's work—a beat-up binder stuffed with tactical diagrams. Pages were filled with formations drawn in blue ink, arrows indicating player movement, and notes scribbled in the margins. Modern football was distilled into notebooks that no one wanted to read.
His phone buzzed against the dashboard. Callum's tinny, distant voice cracked through the speakers.
"Demien, mate. I got something for you in Sète. It's the third division, but it's a start. A manager's spot opened up after their relegation. They're desperate."
Desperate. The word hung in the air like smoke.
He had been desperate for years. Desperate when Mallorca released him at twenty-six. He was desperate when Ipswich wouldn't renew his contract. Desperate when QPR offered him trial terms at twenty-nine as if he were some kid fresh from the academy.
The French countryside rolled past in sheets of gray rain. Hills rose and fell like sleeping giants, their peaks lost in low clouds. This was supposed to be freedom—driving toward something instead of running from it. But freedom felt like loneliness when your body broke down and your dreams dried up before they bloomed.
Thirty wasn't supposed to feel like this. It was meant to be the prime of his life, the peak of everything he'd worked for. Instead, his hips ached when he got out of bed. His knees creaked on the stairs. His hands bore scars from tackles that meant nothing to anyone but him.
The notebooks beside him held everything he'd learned about the game: back three presses that could break compact defenses, box midfield transitions that created overloads in dangerous areas, and rotational zones that turned static formations into fluid attacking systems.
"They'd rather have a dinosaur on the touchline than hear this," he'd told his agent after the Bristol City interview. The manager had looked at his diagrams as if they were written in a foreign language.
Lightning split the horizon ahead, illuminating the road in stark white. Seconds later, thunder followed, rolling across the hills like cannon fire. The storm was moving closer.
His headlights caught the reflective strips of road markers, painting white lines through the darkness. The radio played something soft and French, words he didn't understand mixing with the rhythm of the rain and the wipers.
Another flash of lightning. This one is closer.
In that brief moment of illumination, he saw a truck approaching the bend too fast for the wet road. Its headlights swung wide, veering into his lane. The driver fought for control on asphalt slick as ice.
Time stretched like elastic. The truck's grille filled his vision, chrome, and steel catching the lightning's reflection. His foot found the brake pedal, but physics had already taken over: momentum, mass, and the simple fact that two objects couldn't occupy the same space.
"Shit—"
Metal met metal with a sound like the world tearing in half. Glass exploded inward, and safety glass was designed to crumble instead of slice. The airbag punched him in the chest, forcing the air from his lungs in a violent rush. Pain flared through his neck as his head snapped forward and back.
The world tilted sideways.
His vision flickered like a bad television signal. The dashboard cracked in front of him, drops of blood—his blood—dotting the plastic surface. Steam hissed from somewhere in the wreckage, carrying the smell of coolant and burning oil.
He caught sight of his own eyes in the spider-webbed remains of his side mirror. Hollow. Dull. The eyes of a man who'd run out of the road long before the crash.
No fear came. Just bone-deep tiredness, the kind that sleep couldn't fix. The kind that had been building for years through disappointment after disappointment until it filled every space inside him.
His breath rattled now, his lungs working against something wet and metallic. The taste of copper filled his mouth. Rain drummed against the crumpled roof, each drop a tiny funeral bell.
"Maybe next life..."
The words escaped him as a whisper, spoken to no one in the darkness of a nameless French road. The rain kept falling on twisted metal and broken glass. The storm continued moving east toward Monaco, carrying the last breath of a failed footballer whose dreams had never been quite good enough.
Darkness swallowed everything whole.
Then, breath—a gasp tore through the room like it didn't belong.