Tango with mr footballer

4.

Her phone buzzed.

Unknown number.

She stared at it. It buzzed again. She let it ring out. Thirty seconds later a text arrived from the same number, and whatever she had been expecting it to say, it was not this:

This is Matteo Romano. I think we should talk. I'm sorry about all of this. — M

Eden read the message.

She looked out the window.

She typed back: How did you get this number.

The reply came in under a minute. Your friend gave it to me last night. The one who found you at the bar.

Eden made a mental note to have a thorough conversation with Amara about personal data.

I saw the articles, she typed. I'm not sure what talking is going to solve.

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

I'd like to explain the situation properly before you decide that. Can we meet today? Somewhere private.

She stared at the screen. Outside, a scooter rattled past. Somewhere in the flat, the coffee maker clicked off. Everything was completely ordinary and nothing was ordinary at all.

Give me an hour, she typed back.

She turned around. Amara was watching her from the end of the bed with the expression she reserved for situations she'd seen coming from further away than Eden had.

"He wants to meet," Eden said.

"I know."

"You know?"

"He texted me too. To make sure you'd seen his message." Amara paused. "He seems very—"

"Don't."

"Determined."

"I was going to say don't call him sweet again."

"I was going to say determined." Amara picked up her coffee. "Which is its own kind of problem, isn't it."

Eden looked at her phone. At the number still on screen. At the notification count still climbing in the corner of her i********: app like a meter she had no way to turn off.

"Yeah," she said quietly.

"It really is.”

The address Matteo sent was not a restaurant.

Eden had assumed a restaurant. Somewhere public enough to feel neutral, private enough to talk, that was the logic of these things, she thought, though she had never previously been in one of these things. A corner table. A discreet booking. The kind of place with heavy curtains and a maître d' who understood that certain conversations required a particular quality of silence.

The address was an apartment building in Brera.

She stood on the pavement outside it for a moment, looking up. It was the kind of building that didn't announce itself, no signage, no concierge visible from the street, just pale stone and tall windows and the specific blankness of architecture that had nothing to prove. The kind of building that had existed for two hundred years and intended to exist for two hundred more and was not especially interested in your opinion either way.

Her phone buzzed. Second floor. The door will be open.

Eden looked at the message. She looked at the building. She thought about the eight hundred and sixty-three followers, which was now, she checked, one thousand and forty-one. She thought about the article that had used the word misteriosa and the one that had screenshotted her website and the one, the worst one, the one she kept returning to, that had used a photo of her face taken without her knowledge and run it alongside a photo of Giulia Ricci, the prime minister's daughter, as though the two of them were variables in the same equation.

She went inside and the apartment was not what she expected, which was becoming a theme with him.

She had expected something that looked like money performing itself, chrome and marble and art chosen for its price tag, the interior equivalent of a firm handshake. What she found was large and light and almost spare. High ceilings. Old parquet floor with the particular warmth of wood that had been walked on for decades. A kitchen that looked actually used. Books on the shelves that were not arranged by color. A football on the floor by the sofa with the unselfconscious presence of something that belonged there rather than something staged.

There were three other people in the room.

Matteo was the first thing she registered, because he was standing and the others were seated and because she was honest with herself about this, if nothing else her nervous system had apparently filed him under “relevant information” and continued to do so regardless of the current circumstances. He was in a plain grey t-shirt and dark trousers and he looked tired in a way he hadn't last night, which she supposed made sense. He also looked at her the moment she walked in with an expression that was difficult to read but seemed to contain something that was not purely professional.

She looked away from him.

The woman seated at the long table to the left was perhaps fifty, sharp-featured, with silver hair cut close and the particular stillness of someone who was paid to be the most competent person in the room and had long since become accustomed to it. She had a laptop open, a legal pad beside it, and a pen that she was holding but not using, which Eden found more unnerving than if she'd been writing.

Beside her was a younger man, late thirties, suit, no tie, the slightly harried look of someone managing multiple crises simultaneously and treating that as a normal state of being.

At the far end of the table, separate from the other two in a way that felt deliberate, sat a man Eden placed immediately as a lawyer. It was something about the quality of his stillness. Like he was listening to a conversation that hadn't started yet.

"Eden." Matteo crossed the room. "Thank you for coming."

"You made it sound fairly urgent."

"It is fairly urgent." He said it without apology. "Can I get you anything? Coffee?"

"I'm fine." She looked at the three people at the table. "Who are they?"

He introduced them. The woman was Carla Marchetti, his publicist, fifteen years, the way he said it suggesting this was a relationship forged in previous fires. The man in the suit was Davide, his manager. The lawyer's name was something she didn't catch and didn't ask him to repeat.

"Please," Carla said, gesturing to the chair across from her with the efficiency of someone who had not built her career on pleasantries. "Sit down."

Eden sat.

Matteo sat beside her, which she hadn't expected, she'd assumed he would take a seat on the other side, with his team, the geography making obvious where the lines were. Instead he was at her left, close enough that it felt like a choice.

Maybe it was.