His mãe had loved to tell stories of how Rico gobbled down all the brigadeiro before she could get the condensed milk truffles molded into balls.

Then a time had come when his impatience had dissipated in the blink of an eye. Everything had dissipated when his mãe and pai left home one evening to go to the movies and never came back. Well, they had come back, but in closed coffins because the car crash hadn’t left much of them. Everything had stopped that day and never quite started up again.

Rico had entered a fog that felt like glue, viscous and sticky around him. One moment he’d been in a hurry to rush from thing to thing—football, friends, school—then the next moment it had all vanished. There had been nowhere to go, nothing he needed to get to. That’s how it had stayed as he moved, seemingly in slow motion, from Rio de Janeiro to his mãe’s sister’s house in California. She had been his only living relative. At least the only living relative who acknowledged him. His father’s family had never acknowledged his mãe and him.

His pai had met his mãe in England while playing for Man U. He had asked her to go to Rio with him after he retired, and she had. He had asked her to keep their relationship quiet, and she had. If the fact that he never left his wife bothered her, she never showed it. She had once told Rico that she would do anything his pai asked of her. Because that’s what love meant.

At fifteen Rico had still needed a legal guardian, and that meant leaving his home and moving to California. Not that he cared where he moved. His ability to care about anything at all had also vanished.

That’s how it had stayed until he’d stopped a ball from hitting a girl on the head. Then everything had changed again. Almost everything. His impatience, his burning need to get to the next thing, hadn’t come back. Not until he made his way to England and found football again.

Being dumped by someone you believed to be the love of your life because her family thought you were worthless had a way of shaking you out of the thickest stupor. Over the past decade, Rico had left that heartbroken boy so far behind that he barely recognized him in his own memories. At least, that’s what he had believed until Zee’s bachelor party. Apparently his young self was more tenacious than Rico gave him credit for.