Chapter Six: "The Headline"

ZARA

Thursday, 6:51pm

She read it three times.

Not because she didn't understand it the first time. Because she needed to be sure she was reading what she thought she was reading her name, in a headline, on a publication she recognised, attached to a story that was almost true.

Almost.

Billionaire Callum Arch's Mystery Companion: Paid Actress or Real Love?

She scrolled.

The article had a photograph the one from outside the courthouse, his hand at the small of her back, neither of them looking at the camera. Her name spelled correctly. The agency name Limelight in the third paragraph. A quote from an unnamed source describing the arrangement as a carefully constructed performance designed to satisfy a dying family member.

She read that line again.

A dying family member.

Marguerite was not dying. She was home. She was making shortbread and correcting people's grammar and asking questions that landed like small precise stones in still water.

Someone who knew the arrangement intimately had described her that way deliberately. Because it made the story more dramatic. More consumable. More cruel.

Zara put the phone face-down on the duvet.

Sat with the dark ceiling.

Then picked it back up and read the article again not for the hurt of it but for the structure. The way she'd learned to read a bad script. Not to feel it. To find the seams.

Third paragraph. Limelight named specifically. Fourth, the courthouse photograph, timestamped correctly. Fifth, the f*e. Not exact but close. Someone had been told or had access.

Sixth paragraph.

She stopped.

Sources close to the arrangement confirm that Ms. Mitchell was selected after several other candidates declined the role, suggesting the pairing was one of convenience rather than compatibility.

Several.

There had been four. Four was specific. Several was vague.

Isla didn't use vague when she could use exact. Vague was sloppy. Vague was someone else.

Zara got up.

Went to the kitchen. Put the kettle on not because she wanted tea but because she needed something to do with her hands that wasn't picking the phone back up.

The article was a message. Not to Callum. Not to the public.

To her.

You are replaceable. You were convenient. You can be made to disappear.

Her phone buzzed on the counter.

Callum's number.

She let it ring.

It stopped. Started again immediately.

She picked up.

"I saw it," she said before he could speak.

CALLUM

Thursday, 6:53pm

She'd already read it.

Of course she had.

"Are you alright?" He was in the car, already moving, her address already given before he'd dialled.

"I'm fine." The flatness of it told him she was and wasn't simultaneously processing, didn't want to be interrupted.

"The detail about the candidates," he said. "It's wrong."

"I know."

"And the f*e range"

"I know that too." A pause. "Callum. Who wrote it."

"I'm working on it."

"That's not what I asked."

He looked out the window. "I don't have a name yet."

"Do you have a direction?"

He was quiet a moment. This was the thing about Zara she didn't ask questions she didn't already have a partial answer to. She was checking his version against hers.

"What did you find?" he said.

"The number of candidates. They said several. It was four."

"Yes."

"Isla doesn't use vague."

"No," he said. "She doesn't."

Silence. Not uncomfortable. The kind that meant they were thinking in the same direction.

"The Reyes file access," she said. "External IP. Two days ago. Daniel said he was tracing it."

"He traced it this afternoon."

"And?"

He looked out the window. "It came from a server registered to a legal firm. Not Isla's. A different one."

"Which firm."

He said the name.

Silence.

"I don't know that name," she said.

"You wouldn't. Private client work. Very quiet. Very expensive." He paused. "They handled my father's estate planning. Fifteen years ago."

The line went still.

"Your father," she said slowly.

"Yes."

"Does he know about the arrangement?"

"He does now. But Zara" He stopped. Let the next part land carefully. "He had your name before Serena sent anything."

A beat. Longer than the others.

"How long before," she said.

"Since the day Daniel filed it."

The car turned onto her street. He looked up her kitchen window, the warm yellow light of it against the dark building. She always left it on. He'd stopped registering it as unusual weeks ago. Now he just looked for it.

"I'm outside," he said.

A pause. "I can see the car."

He looked up at her window.

She was there. Auburn hair loose, phone to her ear, looking down. For a moment neither of them moved her above, him below, the city doing what it always did around them without asking permission.

"Come up," she said.

He was already out of the car.

ZARA

Thursday, 7:09pm

She buzzed him up and stood in the middle of her apartment and looked at it the way she imagined he would.

Four hundred square feet. The secondhand rug. The string lights above the window. The corkboard above her desk with its headshots and callback notes and the photograph of Mae laughing at something off-camera. The kitchen that smelled like tea she hadn't drunk.

The sketchbook open on the counter to a page of hands.

She closed it.

He knocked. She opened the door.

Still in his suit. He looked at her face first not the apartment, not the sketchbook, not anything else. Just her face.

"You're not fine," he said.

"Fine enough." She stepped back to let him in.

He came in. Stood in the middle of her apartment tall, dark suit, taking up more space than the room was used to and looked at it. Not with the polite tolerance of someone in the wrong place.

Something else. Something that looked, briefly, like a man who had just understood something he hadn't known he was missing.

She went to the kitchen. Put the kettle on again.

"Your father," she said to the window.

"Yes."

"Why."

She heard him sit the chair at her small kitchen table. She turned. He was there with his elbows on the table and his hands loosely linked and his amber eyes on her face.

"If he put it out there," Callum said, "it's not random. It's meant to move something."

"Move what."

"Me." A pause. "Toward a decision. Before someone else makes it."

"What decision."

He looked at her. Didn't answer immediately. Which meant the answer was something he was still constructing or something he had and wasn't ready to say.

The kettle boiled. She poured. Put two cups down. Sat across from him at the small table where she'd eaten cereal for two years and never once had another person sitting opposite her.

He picked up the cup. Looked at it. Then at her.

"I should have told you about my father before any of this," he said.

"Yes."

"I didn't because I thought I could manage it separately." He said it without defence. "I managed you into the middle of something you didn't know was there."

She looked at him across the table. The kitchen light between them. Outside her window the Bronx at night familiar, unhurried, entirely hers.

"Start with why my name matters to him," she said.

He looked at her steadily. Opened his mouth.

His phone vibrated on the table between them.

They both looked at it.

One name on the screen. No title. No preamble.

Just his father's name, lit up in the dark kitchen, in her apartment, at the exact moment Callum was about to tell her something his father had spent weeks making sure she didn't know.

Callum looked at the phone.

Then at Zara.

She looked back at him.

Neither of them moved.

The phone vibrated again.