Chapter 61: Farewell, Single Life

Saint had made English football’s media uncomfortable on the pitch, so English football’s media made a point of returning the favour off it, right up until Saint held his own press conference and produced a stack of solicitor’s letters thick enough to make several outlets think twice.

Sofia, around the same time, went public with her own relationship with Jasper; a clean, deliberate confirmation, delivered on her own terms rather than the tabloids’.

Public figures on this side of the Atlantic tend to treat their personal lives rather differently than back home; disclosure, when it happens, is often strategic as much as it is honest. And in football specifically, plenty of relationships exist somewhere in the overlap between genuine feeling and genuine opportunity, visibility cuts both ways, and both parties usually know it.

Once the immediate fallout was handled, Saint turned his full attention back to the training pitch. He understood exactly what this whole cycle had actually been about, noise designed to pull his focus away from the football itself.

If anything, it backfired on the squad more than it did on him. The whole saga gave Saint a genuinely useful excuse to ramp up conditioning work that week, and nobody in the dressing room was in a position to argue about it.

Not that Saint needed the fitness coach’s blessing to justify it, though he’d cleared it with him anyway; truth was, this winning run had let a bit of complacency creep back into training standards, and a sharp reset wasn’t the worst thing for the group right now.

Whatever damage the tabloid cycle did to Saint’s public standing, it did something else entirely in his private life; made clear, in a way he hadn’t fully admitted to himself before, that he genuinely wanted something real, and that this whole mess had accidentally given him the push to go after it.

That evening, Saint had a proper date with Grace. The fact that she still showed up, even after everything the papers had thrown at both of them that week, told him plenty on its own.

Compared to their first meeting, this time carried a different kind of ease; more comfortable, more honest, the sense of two people who already understood roughly where this was headed.

Getting any real privacy in Birmingham right now, though, proved genuinely difficult. Five wins and a draw in this run had made Saint something close to a folk hero across the whole region.

Ventham? Barely a memory at this point, nobody in the city seemed to spare him a second thought anymore.

The early skepticism about Saint’s age and inexperience had all but evaporated too. Results have a way of settling arguments that words never could, and even his harshest early critics among the fanbase had largely come around.

Grace, dating him in the middle of all that, felt the weight of it most directly; even reporters who’d promised to keep their distance clearly couldn’t help themselves, and a small crowd of press had taken to loitering outside wherever the two of them went.

"Even knowing what I was signing up for, I genuinely didn’t expect this level of attention for a Championship manager," Grace said one evening, watching a knot of photographers linger across the street from her hotel.

She wanted visibility in her own career, certainly; but not quite at this volume, and definitely not attached to someone else’s story rather than her own. A few dates in, and her own hotel had become a stakeout location.

Technically, Saint managed a club two divisions below the very top of English football. Watching the coverage, though, you’d never have guessed it; the attention had settled around him like he was chasing a genuinely different kind of fame entirely.

"Honestly? I don’t mind it this time," Saint admitted, even though he genuinely disliked being followed as a rule.

Because Sofia had mentioned, in passing, that Grace had other admirers circling too; Julian’s name had come up more than once, which explained plenty about that particular evening’s tension.

"You’re serious right now?" Grace studied him carefully.

"I hate the reporters, don’t get me wrong. But this once, they’ve actually done something useful," Saint said.

"How exactly is any of this useful?" Grace asked, genuinely curious.

"Made it very clear, very publicly, who’s actually in the picture. Certain people can stop wondering." Not long after, the two of them made things official, no ambiguity left for anyone watching.

"You didn’t need to go about it quite like that," Grace said, though there wasn’t much real objection behind it.

"No?" Saint didn’t wait for an actual answer.

What happened next needs no further description here.

Not long after, Grace moved out of her hotel entirely and in with Saint, no longer any reason for either of them to pretend otherwise.

Jasper, for his part, took the hint gracefully and found somewhere else to crash for a while. Plenty of spare rooms in Saint’s house, technically; but that was never really the issue, and both of them understood it without needing to say so.

---

The following morning found Saint in genuinely excellent spirits, up early and full of energy despite how little sleep either of them had actually gotten. Grace, by contrast, was still very much horizontal.

"I’ll get breakfast started. Sleep as long as you need, I’ll keep it warm for whenever you’re up." Saint said it with a faint, entirely unearned pride.

"Mm," Grace managed, muffled into the pillow.

"Oh... and Jasper’s coming by this afternoon to grab a few of his things." Round thirty of the league was approaching fast, and Villa were about to host Barnsley, currently occupying the relegation zone.

Most pundits had already written this one off as the least competitive fixture of the round. Villa’s run, despite the recent Preston draw, still carried real momentum; while Barnsley had lost their last three straight and now sat just four points above the relegation places themselves.

Villa’s actual preparation for the match barely registered in the press that week, though. The coverage remained fixed almost entirely on Saint’s personal life, right up until kickoff.

And even with Saint’s relationship now fully public, a stubborn corner of the press refused to let the earlier story go entirely; insisting, against all evidence, that the whole thing with Grace had been staged, some elaborate cover story for a relationship with Jasper that simply didn’t exist.

If anything, that persistence only fed the story further; the entire, entirely manufactured saga between Saint and Jasper had, by this point, developed its own small, devoted following among a certain corner of the tabloid readership.