Bitterness spills all over Andrew's dreams of a better future as he buys into the belief that his presence in Barcelona can be a real threat to Pablo's burgeoning athletic career. After that incident in the park, he starts thinking that, if he moves over, there's no way they will be able to keep even their friendship, let alone their real relationship, in privacy. He didn't see it that way before, but he understands that this is how Pablo sees it. He understands how scared and ashamed Pablo is about his inability to balance his public life with being true to himself. As anyone in true love, now he believes Pablo and takes his perspective. Pablo's celebrity status stands in the way of their future together, and Andrew believes him when he says that there's no way out. On the other hand, now Andrew already cannot visualize his better future in Spain without Pablo. His hopes of professional self-actualization have fused with his hope of truly loving and being truly loved back. He cannot let go of his love for Pablo. So instead, he feel like destiny forces him to give up on his dreams altogether. Just as Pablo told him in the midst of his homophobic shame storm, he decides to settle for what he has in Russia and focus on raising his daughter.
His feelings do not go away, but just like after Pablo's confession four years ago, he again tries to run away from them. After getting laid off from the hospital, he is left with the remaining low-paid job in the out-patient clinic, and his financial situation starts to worsen slowly but steadily as he cannot find a better alternative. More exactly, he knows for sure that a better alternative does exist in Spain, but now he feels like he is banned from there. He feels like he is banned from the reality where he belongs. And instead of challenging this ban existing only in his mind, he accepts it and settles for misery. Even though he misses Pablo, he starts to feel coldness and disengagement on his part in their correspondence. Without understanding how much Pablo's internalized homophobia drives his behavior and helping him work his way out of it, Andrew starts making up a story about himself being unlovable and their relationship being an illusion. With no way to reality-check these claims, he just suffers in silence.
In the meantime, during his trip to Italy for another game, Pablo meets Monica, an incredibly beautiful young girl who is a beginner fashion model. Although deep down he is aware that he is still in love with Andrew, after the flashlight incident in Moscow his shame gremlins hold a tight grip on his mind. Being the only unmarried and single man in his team, he feels increasing pressure from Spanish gossip outlets speculating about his sexuality. Now, he regards meeting Monica as a perfect opportunity to dispel his public's doubts. Moreover, he cannot deny that he is physically attracted to her to a certain extent. He uses his handsomeness and charming skills to rush into a relationship with her. They make a picture-perfect couple whose photos fill up celebrity media in the next few months. Pablo enjoys being in the spotlight matching the image of a man he believes he is supposed to be. He is oblivious to the fact that Monica now uses his money and celebrity to promote herself while there's no real trust and emotional intimacy between them. Instead, he proposes to her, and she says yes.
Ironically, Pablo's parents, the very people who have long pressured him about finding a girlfriend and marriage, now are deeply worried about his choice. After they meet Monica, they notice telltale signs of her fakeness and her disrespectful gestures towards them that seem lost on Pablo. They reasonably convince Pablo to slow down with his plan to marry a girl he met just a few months before. They cannot make sense of his rush given that he has been shrugging off the idea of marriage for years. At the same time, for the first time in years they watch their son to stop following his rigid training schedule. Pablo tells them that the head coach of his team Pedro González, who rubbed him the wrong way one year before, now again treats him as a favorite and even gives Pablo the license to regularly be absent from coaching sessions without taking a leave. As a result, Pablo has a lot of time most of which he spends on impressing Monica with his wealth as he splurges money around. Enjoying being in the spotlight, he cannot wait to see of the news of his luxurious wedding make headlines in the media. Living in denial of his true love, he trades in his authenticity for maintaining his celebrity.
Andrew gets the news of his upcoming marriage in an email he receives from him in February, 2009, one year after their dreamlike week of reunion in Barcelona, the time when Andrew's bright future seemed to be within an arm's reach from him. In the email, Pablo asks him to come meet his bride. Instead of asking Pablo about his feelings, Andrew drowns himself in pain thinking that their relationship has come a definitive end. At the same time, he can't escape another gloomy presentiment. He feels like this marriage will cause a great misery to Pablo, but he silences this feeling chalking it up to jealousy. After months of coldness and withering correspondence, his love for Pablo is still afire in his heart. And it still keeps him paralyzed from moving on with his life.
Upon his arrival to Barcelona, Andrew understands that his premonition is not ungrounded. When Pablo's father picks him up at the airport and drives him to the their house, where Andrew had the overwhelming feeling of belonging one year before, he finds out that Pablo no longer lives with them. Andrew is shocked, since he knows about the warm relationship Pablo has always had with his parents and about Pablo having bought this big townhouse with the intention to one day always live there with his folks, his spouse, and his kids as one big family. Now it turns out Pablo spends almost every night at the downtown hotel where he pays for Monica's luxury suite. She stays there since she doesn't want to move in with his parents. Andrew goes to sleep with a heavy heart, and the next morning as he talks to Doña Juana and Don Alberto, he realizes that they strongly oppose their son's marriage because they see his model girlfriend as a mercenary opportunist who, most importantly, doesn't really love Pablo. They say that Pablo dismisses their arguments and is blind to see Monica's behavior with his own eyes, as if he is under a spell.
Andrew does not believe that Pablo could have made the wrong choice until they meet and he gets to see it with his own eyes that his loved one is actually as if enchanted and unable to reason soberly. Andrew asks himself if Pablo is actually straight and could be this much enslaved by physical attraction to a woman. His heart races before the dinner where Pablo is going to introduce him to his fiancée. When this happens, Andrew sees that Pablo's parents were most probably right in their judgement. In the conversation they have over the meal, he sees that Monica is an extraordinarily attractive yet shallow girl without a clear vision, not bothering to disguise her disdain for work and her excitement about Pablo's material status. He can hardly imagine that a woman like this can see Pablo's real worth rather than his net worth, truly love him, and be loyal to him for better and for worse, for richer and for poorer, in sickness and in health. He feels overcome by the fear that Pablo is rushing into making one of the biggest mistakes in his life, and he sees that this fear for Pablo's future is bigger than his jealousy — after all, he already accepted that they won't have a future together. After the dinner, they drive Monica to the hotel, and Andrew insists that they go for a stroll and have a face-to-face conversation. Avoiding public places where Pablo can get recognized, they go to the same desolate spot in the wilderness of the Montjuïc park where Pablo confessed to him four years before. When they get there and find themselves alone in silence, Andrew tries to dissuade Pablo from marrying Monica this soon, saying that he sees a reflection of the young version of his own wife in her. He tells Pablo that he is probably infatuated and needs to know her better as a person before making commitments. Andrew doesn't understand that Pablo acts from homophobic shame rather than infatuation. Legitimately, his arguments piss Pablo off, and Pablo manipulates him into believing he is simply being selfish and jealous. Their fight escalates when Andrew reminds him of the love words Pablo wrote in their correspondence and their blissful time together in Greece. Pablo's internalized homophobia reaches its boiling point and finally he offloads his shame upon Andrew by telling him to spend the savings he's been amassing for emigration and educational course in Spain over the years on a few weeks of sex with prostitutes in Barcelona's gay neighborhood, because, as he says, "dirty lust" is what Andrew needs the most to be happy. Andrew cannot believe what he hears, but in a split second his own anger explodes as he punches Pablo in the face and leaves. Running away from the person he's loved the most in his life, with the deepest pain he has ever felt in his life, he goes through the same wilderness of the Montjuïc park that he went through four years ago, when Pablo confessed to him. He thinks that this is how their love story was destined to end, or, yet more probably, that this love only existed in his heart and for Pablo it was just a fling. The remains of his dreams about a better future in the brighter reality of Spain now have come to a catastrophic, miserable tumble. He catches a bus to Pablo's parents' house, hurriedly packs his stuff unable to say anything sensible to them, and rushes away from the place where one year before he hoped to find his true home. He leaves it feeling degraded and expelled by the person who he believed to be his best friend, his soul mate, and his loved one. He buys a bed in a cheap hostel, and spends the next day getting drunk in a bar. His pain is too overwhelming to drown it, and as he boards the plane back to Moscow, he hopes to amputate it from his shattered heart and never look back. Even if there's nothing good waiting for him ahead in Moscow.
Pablo does not explain to his alarmed parents what happened between him and his friend, and he carries on with his marriage plan nevertheless. His wedding ceremony takes place in April, 2009, exactly on the day when he and Andrew met at the beach five years before. Much like Pablo anticipated, the event receives extensive media coverage and he gets the long-craved kick of being a wealthy man in the spotlight with a pretty woman by his side. However, as the celebrity fuss settles down, truth starts to sink in. Pablo and Monica spend the honeymoon traveling across the United States, and this is when Pablo learns the first sad news from his wife. She completely rejects the possibility of getting pregnant anytime soon because of her body image anxiety — she claims that her body is her money-making tool, to which Pablo can hardly object given her occupation. Strangely, even though having children has always been one of his biggest dreams in life and one of the the reasons why he believed his relationship with Andrew was "wrong", he failed to discuss this topic issue with Monica before marrying her. When they return to Barcelona, Monica sticks to her decision to live separately from Pablo's parents even though they have more than enough space in his big townhouse. Pablo has to agree and rents an apartment in the city downtown's most expensive neighborhood, though it creates a lot of inconvenience in his daily commutes to the coaching ground. As their shared life begins, the mist of his excitement about creating a perfect public image fades and he realizes that there is no real emotional connection between them, while their physical connection doesn't have any meaning in and of itself. With time, Pablo notices that, despite what she told him before marriage, Monica is not willing to look for a permanent job in Barcelona. Her professional life mostly remains a mystery to him. During the conversations over the phone that she calls "agent negotiations", she only speaks Italian and French — the languages Pablo doesn't understand. In the meantime, the realization of guilt for humiliating Andrew emerges in his mind with increasing clarity. He goes higher on his inner shame spiral as he comes face-to-fact with the reality that he is still in love with Andrew but sees no way to contact him and ask for reconciliation. At the same time, he understands that his current family life is nowhere near the picture-perfect heteronormative visions he imagined as a growing boy. He starts noticing small yet evident lies in Monica's words. He understands that while he always fully trusted Andrew with his vulnerabilities and Andrew never betrayed his trust, now he cannot build trust with his wife, the woman who is supposed to be the closest person to him.
During the summer of 2009, his team starts preparations for an important national league game against their perennial Madrid rivals, and his training schedule is intensified. Pablo sees that again, for no apparent reason, his head coach picks on him and forces him to put forward more and more energy on the field — way beyond the amount Pablo's position in real games normally requires. Over the weeks, Pablo gets physically exhausted, and on cue, Monica offers him to try a Chinese drug that he never heard of, which, according to her words, contains ginseng and quickly restores physical strength and which in the past she "used with excellent result during sleepless shooting weeks". The drug is administered intramuscularly, and Monica claims she knows how to give the shots. After some hesitation, Pablo agrees and in fact his physical stamina notably improves in a few days. It is at this time that he accidentally finds out that his wife maintains secret communication with the sister of his head coach and the mother of Julio, that mediocre player who González tries to promote into the club's primary team. Clues suddenly emerge in Pablo's mind. He remembers that Julio lived in Italy for many years with his mother, who sought the career of a fashion designer there, and it was after her failure and coming back to Barcelona that she decided to take advantage of her familial connection and try making a sports star of her son. He remembers that when he met Monica's family in Italy, he heard Monica's grandmother occasionally mention that her previous boyfriend was also a footballer, and Monica got nervous and quickly steered the conversation away. Now Pablo realizes that for more than a year González might have sought to vacate a place for his nephew in the primary team. Perhaps he wanted to do so by dropping out Pablo?
The seemingly paranoid suspicion of scheming behind his back grows into grim evidence when a week before the game, while keeping mum in Monica's face, he brings a sample of her injection drug to a lab for chemical analysis and it reveals that instead of a herbal extract it contains erythropoetin, a widely known and universally prohibited dope. He is appalled as he understands that compulsory medical clearance tests before the upcoming match will reveal his usage of the dope and disqualify him from professional sports for several years aside from bringing a disgrace to his public image. He believes that his career is ruined, his wife being the one who backstabbed him.
Realizing this unexpected outcome of his marriage, Pablo goes psychotic. Because deep down he knows he never wanted this marriage in the first place. Deep down, he knows that he gave in to the voice of shame and traumatized the only person he's ever truly loved to make this fake pageant happen. He feels liks he is trapped and sees no way out of the situation as his mind slips into fury. He smashes furniture in their apartment and pummels Monica as soon as she shows up. He rushes to his house and briefly tells his parents about what happened. As they try to calm him down and constructively deal with the situation, he fights with them saying that his life is over and he is going away forever. He breaks his cell phone in front of them and races away in his Mercedes-Benz.