Mateo was speechless. He looked at the faces of his teammates, at their warm, genuine smiles, at the easy, unaffected way they interacted with the curious, star-struck children of the Casa. He looked at their families, at the wives and girlfriends who greeted him with a kiss on the cheek, at the children who looked at him with a mixture of awe and curiosity.
And in that moment, he understood. This was not a publicity stunt. This was not a calculated act of team-building orchestrated by the club's marketing department. This was real.
This was family. They had come not because they had to, but because they wanted to. They had come because they loved him, because they missed him, because they understood that family was not just about blood, but about choice, about loyalty, about love.
