Novel Title: All That Remains
Time Setting: 2022
Genre: Life
Minimum Word Goal: 90,000
Timespan: March–May
Locations: Frankfurt, Germany; Brussels, Belgium; Corsica, France; additional European locations
Main Characters: Will Erkens, Chloë Hoedemaker
Background Information:
Born the youngest of two sons to a Belgian-British father and a Dutch mother, Will has endured a lot of devastation in his life, beginning with his parents’ divorce when he was seven, following which he and his brother were moved from the city in Belgium where they’d been born to their mother’s hometown of Rotterdam despite their desire to remain close to their father.
Since his maternal grandfather had no sons of his own, however, Will and his brother were enrolled in football1 by their grandfather, which they enjoyed, although it brought about an even worse devastation when Will was nine.
His older brother was twelve at the time, and was playing in a prestigious U13 tournament with a chance of winning the title in Rotterdam. In support of his sons’ football pursuits, Will’s father meant to attend the game, but never arrived, prompting Will’s mother to contact the police for information after the game.
Will and his brother learned the following morning that their father had been killed in a car accident on a rain-slicked motorway, which brought them deep grief, and prompted them to visit his grave regularly, especially when they won any titles with their teams as they progressed through the football ranks.
The loss of their father not only prompted Will and his brother to get very close, but also caused Will to make a new friend on his football team in the form of an African-born boy whose father had been killed in Africa while the family had been fleeing for their lives from violence.
Both Will and his brother were quite successful in football, winning many junior-level titles, while their mother developed a relationship with a wealthy Dutchman who had a part Curaçaoan daughter from a past relationship.
Eventually Will’s family moved in with his mother’s boyfriend, who took them on annual vacations to his property in Curaçao, which was were the next tragedy befell Will when he was thirteen, as his brother fell in love with a Curaçaoan young woman.
The late hours he kept with her displeased his and Will’s mother, leading to conflict between the two of them which went unresolved, as Will’s brother went out with his girlfriend to a party where he ended up overdosing on drugs because he didn’t know how many was too many, and no one at the party realised he wasn’t familiar with drugs.
As a result, Will bonded even closer with his African friend, who soon sought to spend as much time as he could with Will because his mother had become engaged to a man whom he didn’t get on with well at all.
The two were married despite Will’s friend’s dislike of the man, who was a stricter Muslim than his father had been, which soon led to a confrontation between him and his stepfather.
Will’s friend’s younger sister had fallen in love with a man who wasn’t considered a devout enough Muslim for her stepfather’s liking, prompting him to try and cut off the relationship, but Will’s friend saw nothing wrong with the relationship and contended with his stepfather to the point that they came to blows that landed his friend in hospital in critical condition, leading to his death at the age of seventeen.
Although Will had ended up making the acquaintance of a pretty young Croatian woman while at the UEFA U17 tournament in Croatia the year before, Will was left otherwise friendless by his friend’s death, and quite devastated.
Nevertheless, he managed to continue playing football, which functioned as an escape from all the senseless loss he’d suffered, graduating to the top-level side of Feyenoord, whom he’d been with from the day he’d been enrolled because they were his grandfather’s favourite team, at the age of eighteen, where he excelled at his position as a defender.
After two years with Feyenoord, Will was transferred to Anderlecht in Belgium, where he ended up making the acquaintance of two players, a Kenyan-born goalkeeper who made his home in England and was the same age Will’s older brother would’ve been if he were still alive, and a French-born defender who was eleven years his senior.
It didn’t take long for Will to notice that the defender had taken him under his wing, mentoring him on how to be a consistent, level-headed defender, to the point that Will felt like the defender was the closest thing he’d ever had to a father since his father had died — not that he disliked his stepfather, but they’d never had a father-son type of relationship — despite the fact that the defender wasn’t nearly old enough to be his father.
Despite his developing relationships with his teammates, Will’s girlfriend informed him recently that she feels since his African friend’s death the two of them have grown further apart, as opposed to closer, prompting her to beg Will to be more open to her.
Will hasn’t noticed a drift between the two of them, and feels like his girlfriend is just trying to be unnecessarily nosy, telling the defender as much, prompting the defender to suggest he maybe keep his eyes open to see if there’s a different girl he likes somewhere.
As of yet Will hasn’t found anything, but he has settled in to his role as one of Anderlecht’s top young defenders, as well as representing the Dutch national team in various international tournaments.
In his first season with Anderlecht, the team nearly won the Belgian First Division A, but ended up coming in second, which entered them into UEFA League2 play for the following season.
His second season with Anderlecht hasn’t gone quite so well as his first to the present, but they’ve done well in UEFA League play, making it to the Round of 16, where they beat their higher-placed opponent, Eintracht Frankfurt, 1–0 at home.
Now the time has come to play Eintracht in Frankfurt, which, if they win, will send Anderlecht to the quarterfinals, which many Anderlecht fans are anticipating, although considering that Anderlecht are the lower-placed team, and haven’t been having the greatest season in their own league, people aren’t getting too carried away with themselves.
Born the only daughter and youngest of two children to a lawyer and his interior decorator wife, Chloë has spent her entire life with Brussels as her primary residence.
Because of her parents’ busy work lives, she and her brother were often cared for by both sets of grandparents on an alternating schedule, with both of them finding their devoutly Catholic paternal grandparents to be the grandparents who would never let them do anything fun, while their maternal grandparents would let them do all the fun things.
As a result, Chloë and her brother bonded with their maternal grandparents, who would much more willingly play with them, and even take them on fun outings, where her grandfather was always snapping photos that he would later compile into albums that they spent many happy hours flipping through.
Chloë, in particular, became quite fascinated with photography, to the point that her grandfather bought her a camera for her birthday and taught her how to use it to take more basic photos than his camera was capable of.
After a couple years Chloë became competent enough with the camera she had that her grandfather bought her a slightly fancier model which allowed her to control things such as the zoom and focus, and when she’d mastered that camera, he got her one with even more things to play around with.
When digital cameras came onto the scene both Chloë and her grandfather got digital cameras and took some classes together at a photography shop to learn how the new cameras worked.
Owing to her knowledge of photography, Chloë liked looking at photos in magazines, with fashion magazines being a particular interest of her and her friends, who used her camera to try and recreate some of the glamour shots from the magazines.
They managed to do quite well, which led to some of her friends getting contracts as teen models, while Chloë was actually given the opportunity — thanks to the stubbornness of her best friend — to participate in a proper fashion photo shoot.
When she graduated from school, Chloë went to a professional photography school, where she was considered a very talented student, following which she ended up being hired onto the crew of the professional photographer alongside whom she’d shot the fashion photo shoot as a teenager.
Within a couple years, the professional photographer — who was very much Chloë’s mentor — was hired to shoot some fashion photos in Paris. As a member of the crew, Chloë went along, and was quickly entranced by a handsome model she learned was the son of a famous female model she’d actually photographed before and the man who owned the fashion company who’d hired them, as well as that he was actually a professional footballer who did modelling on the side.
She, as it happened, caught his attention as well and the two entered into a relationship that prompted him to seek a transfer from the Paris-based football club he played for to a Belgian-based club, which ended up being her hometown club of Anderlecht.
The two were married after about three years and enjoyed a happy life together both in their home in Brussels, as well as homes in Paris, and on the islands of Corsica and Martinique for the first three years of their marriage.
During their third year of marriage, however, two major events happened. The first was the divorce of her in-laws, an event her husband had been dreading for years, with her father-in-law immediately taking a new girlfriend who was younger than his own daughter.
For Chloë, however, the second was far more devastating, as it was the death of her beloved maternal grandfather of cancer she’d not even known he’d had, as he’d deliberately withheld the information from his grandchildren in order to prevent them from being worried or troubled.
Chloë was sure that if she would’ve known he were dying she would’ve adjusted her priorities to spend more time with him, and even if she understood why he’d done it, it still plunged her into a deep grief to which her husband didn’t seem sympathetic.
She suspected that since he’d been able to get over his parents’ divorce quickly, he was annoyed that she wasn’t getting over her grandfather’s death as quickly, which prompted her to be grateful when one of her husband’s teammates expressed tender, sympathetic condolences to her.
Indeed, the teammate ended up becoming a confidante for her, whom she spent a good deal of time with — especially when her husband was away with modelling commitments that she hadn’t been hired to photograph — with the relationship becoming quite close and personal.
It only came to an end because the teammate was transferred to a Greek-based club, and even though she felt it was for the better that the relationship had come to an end, Chloë found herself feeling incredibly guilty about what she’d done.
Thus, when her husband suggested they pursue having a child together, she agreed, hoping that having a child would reinvigorate her bond with her husband and alleviate the guilt she felt.
She was able to conceive relatively quickly, but the pregnancy was a miserable ordeal for the barely twenty weeks it lasted before she miscarried the baby and nearly died herself, leading to the doctor cautioning them against trying again.
As a result, the bond between Chloë and her husband has continued to languish, to the point that Chloë has decided that, come the end of the football season, she means to divorce her husband, as she feels like their marriage has become nothing but a show they put on for those around them, with the feelings between them having completely died.
Pronunciations:
Erkens: airkehns
Hoedemaker: hoodehmehkeh
Anderlecht: ahnderleckt
Eintracht: aentract
1as this story is set in Europe, football is being used in this story to refer to what is elsewhere known as soccer; 2although there are multiple different UEFA Leagues, the lack of specificity is deliberate.
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