Chapter 2 Dinner for the Cameras

The restaurant is called Salero and it is exactly the kind of place where being seen is the point.

I know this before I arrive because I am thorough — I have been thorough since the age of eight when I realized that preparation was the only reliable substitute for confidence, and I have never stopped. I have read three reviews, located the most photographed table on Instagram, and identified the paparazzi agency that holds the door contract. I have also done something I did not strictly need to do, which is spend forty minutes reading Matteo Reyes's Wikipedia page and then immediately feel strange about it in a way I cannot explain.

I am wearing a dress that is dark green and costs more than I paid for it, because consignment shops in South London are one of the few places where the world still makes financial sense. My hair is up. My earrings are gold. I look like someone who belongs in a restaurant like this, which is the point, and I learned years ago that looking like you belong somewhere is mostly about deciding you do.

He is already there when I arrive.

This surprises me. I was five minutes early.

Matteo Reyes is sitting at the corner table with a glass of water and an expression of settled patience, wearing a dark blazer over a white shirt with the collar open, and he looks so unreasonably composed that I slow my walk by a fraction to gather myself before he sees me.

He sees me before I slow down.

His gaze comes up from his phone and finds me across the restaurant, and something in the quality of his attention changes — it does not warm, exactly, but it focuses in a way that makes the back of my neck prickle. I walk the rest of the way with my chin up because that is what I do.

He stands when I reach the table.

I was not expecting that.

"You are early," he says.

"So are you."

He pulls my chair out. I sit. He sits across from me, and for a moment we are simply two people at a table in a restaurant, which is a lie that already has the texture of truth.

"There is a photographer," he says. Not looking at me. Looking slightly past my shoulder in a way that is too natural to be practiced — he has been doing this for years. "By the bar. He has been there since before I arrived."

I do not turn around. "Our side or their side?"

"Ours." The faintest edge of something — not quite contempt. Professionalism. "Dani arranged it. We need the first image to be controlled."

"What do you need from me?"

He picks up the menu. "Lean forward slightly when you talk to me. Do not look at the camera. Laugh once — not at anything specific, just once, sometime in the next hour. Make it real."

"Any other directions?"

He looks at me over the menu, and it is the same look from this morning — the one reading for information. "What made you take this job? Specifically this part of it."

I look back at him. "That is a personal question."

"It will inform how I work with you."

"No it will not." I pick up my menu. "Order the wine. Tell me about the press situation. That is what this dinner is for."

A pause. Very brief. "The photo was taken at a hotel in Marbella in July. She is an actress. She is married." He says this with the flatness of someone reciting facts, not defending them. "The story has been suppressed for two months. It is going to break in Marca next Friday regardless. The Suarez contract — my shirt sponsorship — has a morality clause. Forty million euros if it terminates early."

I absorb this. "So the controlled narrative is — you have moved on. You are seeing someone. The Marbella photo is old news before it is published."

"The timeline needs to feel organic. We need three to four weeks of visible history before the story breaks."

"It has been two days since I arrived in Valencia."

"Which is why we are here tonight."

The waiter comes. Matteo orders without looking at the wine list — a specific vintage, spoken in fluid Spanish that slides into Italian at the end because the sommelier is Neapolitan. He orders for both of us, glancing at me once for confirmation. I nod. He does not know that I am cataloguing every small data point about him the way I used to catalogue case law.

"What are the boundaries?" I ask, when the waiter leaves.

"Defined in the supplementary clause."

"The clause covers legal scope. I am asking about the practical ones."

He sets down his glass. "Public appearances, coordinated photography, joint events as required. No private contact beyond what is professional." He meets my eyes. "The same rules as any other part of the job."

"Fine," I say. And then, because he said the laugh needed to be real and I need to practice calibrating honesty into this: "This is the strangest job interview I have ever had, and I once interviewed to be a legal assistant for a man who conducted the entire thing via interpretive whiteboard drawing."

Something happens to his face.

It is not a smile. It is the shape a face makes just before a smile, the muscles beginning to move and then stopping, like a word thought and not spoken. It is faster than a blink.

But I catch it.

"That one," he says.

"What?"

"That is the laugh. Whatever you just did." He picks up his fork. "That is the one that reads as real."

I did not laugh. I said something, and his face did something in response, and apparently what registered to the photographer across the room was something that looked like two people being genuinely at ease with each other.

This is, I think, the first sign of trouble.

Dinner lasts three hours. It is supposed to last ninety minutes. We talk about things that are not personal — the club's upcoming season, the logistics of the arrangement, the story we are constructing and the beats it needs to hit. He is precise and intelligent and does not waste words, and I like this in a professional sense in the way that I like clean contracts and well-indexed case files.

It is the other thing I notice that I am less comfortable with.

The way he listens.

Not nodding, not waiting his turn — actually listening, tracking, following the shape of what I am saying. People who do this are rare. They are also, in my experience, dangerous, because attention is not neutral. Attention is a form of pressure, and I have been pressed in ways I am not prepared to be pressed again.

"We should go," I say, when the second bottle is mostly gone and the restaurant has softened around us.

He looks at me across the table and I cannot tell what he is thinking, which is unusual. I am generally very good at reading people.

"Yes," he says.

He walks me to my car — the club car, the one Dani arranged. He stands on the pavement outside Salero and there is a camera somewhere, I can feel the shape of it like a change in air pressure, and he does nothing overt. He simply stands close enough that the photographs will tell a story, and then he says, very quietly, so only I hear it: "You were good tonight."

"I was professional," I say.

"Same thing."

"Not always."

He holds my door. I get in. He closes it.

I watch him walk back toward the restaurant in the side mirror, and I am already doing the thing I told myself I would not do, which is turn him over in my mind like evidence.

Temporary, I remind myself. Paycheck. Out in six months.

I am still reminding myself when I fall asleep.