Chapter 3 What Training Looks Like

He is on the pitch at 5:47 a.m.

I know because I could not sleep — my body has not adjusted to the timezone, or more precisely my body has adjusted fine and the problem is my brain, which treats the small hours like a deposition, reviewing everything I would rather not review. At some point around 4 a.m. I gave up, made coffee in the apartment the club provides, and sat at my desk working through the week's schedule with the kind of focused industry that is, if I am honest, just anxiety wearing productivity's clothing.

The apartment overlooks the training complex.

I was not intending to watch.

He runs the pitch alone in the early dark — not the full squad training, this is something else, something that has the quality of a private ritual. He moves in a way that I do not have the vocabulary for, because I do not particularly care about football, but what I can see even from this height is that it is not effort. It is something that looks like effort the way a river looks like it is trying. It is just what he is.

I watch for too long. I tell myself I am doing reconnaissance — understanding the subject's habits is a professional responsibility. I write three emails and do not look out the window.

I look out the window twice more.

By the time I arrive at the facility at eight, he has been on the pitch for two hours. He is in the recovery room when Dani finds me in the hallway with the face of someone whose situation has developed.

"The photo ran," he says.

"It is Wednesday. It was not supposed to run until—"

"Hola magazine picked it up from a photographer who was not ours." He shows me his phone. The image is — fine, actually. Better than fine. It is the moment I was looking slightly away, and Matteo was looking at me, and whatever his face was doing registers in print as something that makes my stomach do a thing I refuse to examine.

The caption reads: Who is the woman who made Matteo Reyes smile?

"He is not smiling," I say.

"In football press terms, that is a smile." Dani pockets his phone. "Twitter has been going since six. The club's social team needs your approval on a holding statement. And Matteo wants to see you."

"What did the statement say?"

Dani shows me. It is serviceable but overqualified — too many adjectives, which is what happens when PR people are nervous. I rewrite it in my head in thirty seconds. "Tell them to cut everything after the second sentence and change 'has confirmed' to 'understands.' It sounds less like legal testimony."

Dani looks at me. "You have done this before."

"Different context." I put my lanyard on. "Where is he?"

Matteo is in his office with his physio and the club's head of communications, and the energy in the room when I walk in is that particular species of tightly coiled that exists when men who are used to controlling things feel a situation moving faster than they can manage it.

He looks up when I enter. Looks at me the way he did across the restaurant — quick, assessing, then settled.

"Everyone out," he says.

They go.

I close the door. "The photo is better than expected."

"Sit down."

"I am fine standing, thank—"

"Zara." He says my name like it is a full sentence. Not sharp. Just — definite. "Sit down."

I sit.

He turns his laptop to face me. There are seventeen tabs open. Press coverage, Twitter threads, a WhatsApp preview from a contact named simply M that I do not look at, and the Marca article — not next Friday's, but a sidebar from this morning that links the dinner photo to the Marbella story in a way that is speculative but directionally accurate. Someone is feeding them information.

"They know the story is coming," I say.

"Yes."

"That means someone inside the club is talking."

Something shifts in his expression. "Or someone outside it."

The way he says it — carefully, not quite flat — lands somewhere specific. I file it. "Does it change the timeline?"

"It accelerates it. The Suarez meeting is in ten days." He leans back. His hands are on the desk, very still. "We need the narrative established before then. Not suggested. Established."

"What does established look like?"

"This weekend. There is a fundraising event at the Palau de la Musica. You will come as my guest. Not as staff." He meets my eyes. "As her."

Her. The word has an architecture. The person I am performing. I think about the photograph — the way it caught something in the angle of his face that looked, I will admit only to myself, like a man paying attention.

"The Palau de la Musica is a concert hall," I say.

"Yes."

"What is the programme?"

A pause. Very brief. "Ravel. Some Falla."

"You like classical music."

He looks at me for a moment — and there it is again, the thing I cannot quite name. The quality of his attention that makes me feel like I am being read. "Does that matter?"

"No," I say. "I am just building the picture." I stand up. "I will need background on the guest list and the event format. And I will need forty-eight hours' notice on anything that changes the schedule." I pick up my bag. "Also your physio looked stressed. He should eat lunch. People make worse decisions when they are hungry."

I am almost at the door when he speaks.

"The photo," he says.

I stop. Do not turn.

"The caption said I was smiling." There is something in his voice I cannot identify — dry, but not dismissive. Like the beginning of something being admitted. "I was not."

"I know," I say.

"But they are not wrong about the rest of it."

I do not ask what the rest of it means. I am not a fool and I am not, despite certain recent evidence to the contrary, a person who walks into things she can see coming.

I open the door. "I will have the weekend brief ready by end of day."

I walk back down the corridor with framed jerseys and the morning light cutting through the windows, and I think about a man running in the dark at 5:47 a.m. while the city sleeps, alone on a pitch with sixty thousand seats, going through the same motions over and over until they are no longer motions but simply what he is.

I think: that is not discipline.

That is avoidance.

I recognize it because it is the only sport I have ever been any good at.