Chapter 4 The Palau

The thing nobody tells you about performing a relationship is that the performance is the easy part.

What is hard is the infrastructure. The decisions that happen before anyone sees you — the negotiation of proximity, the calibration of how much history to perform and what kind. You can rehearse the moment someone photographs you. You cannot rehearse what happens in the car on the way there, when it is just you and the other person and forty minutes and the city going past the windows, and the absence of an audience makes every word feel more honest than you intended.

Matteo drives himself. I did not expect this — I expected the club car, the driver, the buffer. Instead it is his car, a dark grey thing that is expensive without being loud, and he drives the way he moves on a pitch: clean lines, no wasted motion, entirely comfortable.

"You are quiet," he says.

"I am thinking."

"About?"

"Our story." I have my phone open with the notes I have been building — a timeline of how we might plausibly have met, what I would know about him that is not public, what he would know about me. "If anyone asks tonight, we met in June. You were in London for the Champions League draw. I was at the same hotel for a legal conference."

"What kind of legal conference?"

"Contract law. Continuing education." I glance up. "You do not need to know the details. Just nod if it comes up."

"I do not nod," he says.

"Then look like you know what I am referring to. You are good at that."

He is quiet for a moment. "You have been studying me."

"It is my job."

"Most people would call it something else."

I decide not to follow that thread. "The woman at the Suarez table — his wife, Lucia — she will ask questions. She does it at every event, Dani has briefed me. She is charming and she is testing, and if she likes you the contract is safe. If she decides you are unstable the clause gets exercised regardless of the press situation."

"I know Lucia."

"Then you know she does not like performers. She likes people." I look at him. "So do not perform tonight. Just — be wherever you actually are."

He glances at me sideways. "And where will I actually be?"

I do not have an answer for that. I look back at my notes.

The Palau de la Musica Valenciana is the kind of building that makes you feel the smallness of the argument you were having inside your own head. All ceramic and light and the specific beauty of a century's worth of care. We arrive to cameras — ours and theirs and some that are neither — and Matteo does the thing that he did outside the restaurant, which is nothing overt. He simply places his hand at the small of my back as we walk up the steps, and it is such a small and unremarkable gesture, a thing done by couples everywhere on every evening, and I feel it in my spine.

I do not react. I am very good at not reacting.

The event is what fundraising events always are — champagne and conversations that cost more than they reveal, everyone's generosity on display like a second outfit. Matteo moves through it with the ease of someone who has done this for years without ever becoming comfortable with it. He speaks when spoken to, deflects with a precision that is not rudeness and is not warmth, and stays close to me in a way that reads, to every camera in the room, as proprietary.

Lucia Suarez finds us at the third champagne rotation.

She is seventy, small, and carries the authority of a woman who has watched decades of men perform certainty and learned to see directly through it. She kisses Matteo on both cheeks with genuine warmth.

Then she turns to me.

"So," she says. "You are the one."

"That is what I am told," I say.

She assesses me with dark eyes that have the quality of a final answer. "What do you do?"

"I am in contract law." Partly true. Used to be. Working on it. "Currently in a transitional period."

"Transitional." She says the word like she is testing its weight. "You gave something up."

"Something gave itself up," I say. "I am rebuilding."

A pause. She looks at me and then at Matteo and then back at me. "He does not smile," she says.

"I have noticed."

"But he is different with you." She says it like it is an observation about weather — factual, mild. "I have known this one for six years. Different is interesting." She pats my arm. "My husband will want to talk football with him. Go. Come find me after."

Matteo is steered away by the gravitational pull of Rodrigo Suarez and I am left standing with a glass of champagne and the mild shock of having survived that conversation.

"She likes you." A voice at my shoulder. Male. Easy. "That is not nothing. She has hated all the others."

I turn.

The man is tall, dark-haired, with the kind of face that has been arranged into handsomeness with such precision it looks like effort — because it is. He is smiling in the way of people who have perfected smiling. He is wearing a burgundy jacket that on anyone else would be too much.

"I am sorry?" I say.

"The ones before you. Matteo's — companions." He says the word with the calibrated lightness of someone who has thought about this word before choosing it. "None of them made it past Lucia." He extends a hand. "Andres Villareal. I played with Matteo at Sevilla, years ago. We are old friends."

I shake his hand. His grip is warm. "Zara."

"Zara." He says it like he is sampling it. "How long have you been in Valencia?"

"A few weeks," I say. Vague on purpose.

"And how are you finding it?"

"Warmer than London," I say. "In more than one sense."

He laughs. It is a good laugh — practiced, but not unpleasant. "I hope Matteo has been part of the warmth." He glances across the room to where Matteo stands with Rodrigo Suarez, listening. "He is not always easy."

"Most worthwhile things are not," I say.

Andres looks at me — and something flickers in his expression, something I cannot name, something that passes too quickly to hold. Then the smile again, easy and warm.

"No," he says. "They really are not."

When Matteo comes back forty minutes later, I am at the edge of the mezzanine with the music starting below — Ravel's Bolero, building from nothing into everything — and he stands beside me and does not touch me and we watch the orchestra together.

"Andres Villareal introduced himself," I say, keeping my voice low.

A pause. Long enough to be a response. "Yes."

"He said you are old friends."

"He said that."

Not: we are. Not: we were. He said that. I notice this. I file it.

"Lucia approved," I say.

"I know." And then, after a beat, in a voice that is quieter than the previous one: "What did you say to her?"

I think about it. "The truth. A version of it."

He is quiet for a long moment. Below us the music is building the way Bolero builds — inexorable, compounding, adding one layer at a time until what was a simple pattern becomes a force.

"Which version?" he asks.

I look at him. The light in here is amber and old, and he is looking at the orchestra with an expression I have not seen from him before — open, almost. Not guarded. Like the music has taken something down a fraction.

"The one where I am rebuilding," I say. "That part is real."

He turns his head. Looks at me. And whatever is happening in his face right now is something I do not have a category for.

"I know," he says.

He could not know that. He has not asked. I have not told him.

But he says it with the certainty of someone who has been watching, and the part of me that I keep very carefully locked starts paying attention in a way that is, I will tell myself later, strictly professional.

It is not strictly professional.

I know that right now, standing in the amber light with Bolero climbing toward its peak, his shoulder three inches from mine and Andres Villareal's smile still sitting wrong in the back of my mind like a word in a contract I have not identified yet.

I know it, and I watch the orchestra, and I say nothing.

Below us, the Bolero breaks open.