Chapter 3
Sloane
Iarrive twelve minutes early and spend eleven of them rearranging a laminated card I could recite in my sleep.
The card lives in my clutch. Six bullet points, color-coded, the campaign’s approved language for any question a stranger with a phone might lob across a restaurant.
I have read it forty times. I read it a forty-first, swap bullet three with bullet four, swap them back, and look up to find the valet watching me through the glass with the careful concern of a man deciding whether to call someone.
I am fine. I am a professional in a borrowed dress at a restaurant Priya selected for its sightlines, about to eat dinner on a live-stream with a man I have now met three times and cannot account for once.
I am thriving.
Because here’s the problem, and it’s been the problem for thirty-six hours. Eleven seconds after my own boss described me to a room as the version of her we’re paying for, Carter Reinhardt leaned into frame and made four people laugh about a mascot.
There’s a professional term for that. It’s called burying a line. It is the most useful thing anyone has done for me in a meeting in three years, and he did it unasked, at a cost of roughly the entire dignity he walked in with, and never mentioned it.
Men do not do things for me at a cost. That isn’t bitterness. It’s a data set.
Then he sent me a winking emoji.
The restaurant is the kind of place that charges you for the privilege of being looked at. Low gold light, a camera crew tucked behind a planter pretending to be furniture, a comment feed somewhere out in the world already filling up with people who have opinions about my collarbones.
Atlanta in June, the heat pressing against the windows like it wants in. Peachtree Stadium on every screen in the bar, the tournament counting itself down in the background of my entire life.
Marcus’s voice from this morning sits under all of it. Keep it clean, Sloane. He’s not here. He doesn’t have to be. He’s the kind of boss who installs himself in your spine and lets you do the watching for him.
The host straightens at the door. I know what that means before I turn.
Carter Reinhardt walks in four minutes late.
I file the lateness where it belongs: under of course. The dark curls he hasn’t fixed and definitely fixed. The jacket that shouldn’t work and does. The grin that arrives at the host like she’s the best news he’s had all day, and she lights up, because that’s what the grin is for.
Lucas walked into rooms exactly like this. I catalogued that ease once and called it warmth, and it cost me eight months and a career I had to rebuild brick by brick.
I am not doing that again. I have a card.
He spots me. My eyes find him a beat before I authorize the search, which I note and resent.
“Vega.” He drops into the chair across from me like the furniture has been waiting for him. “You’re early.”
“You’re late.”
“Four minutes.” He checks a watch he isn’t wearing. “I like to let the room settle.”
“You like to make an entrance.”
“Same thing, better lighting.” He leans back. “How long have you been here?”
“Twelve.”
“So one of us is early and one of us is late, and we’re both performing punctuality at strangers.” The grin again, slower, like he’s enjoying the math. “We have so much in common already.”
“We have a contract in common. That’s the entire list.”
A man in headphones materialises at my elbow. “Mics, if you don’t mind. We’re live in ninety.” He threads a wire up my back with the intimacy of a tailor and is gone before I can dislike him properly.
Carter watches the wire disappear under my dress and has the decency, or the strategy, to look away.
“About yesterday,” I say.
“Which part.”
“You know which part.”
“I really don’t.” He unfolds his napkin. “Yesterday I got taken apart on a video call by a professional, which I’d been warned about ninety minutes earlier and did nothing to prevent, and then I made a joke about a mascot. Was there another part?”
There it is. He’s going to make me say it.
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“Do what?”
“Reinhardt.”
“Vega.” Perfectly pleasant. Not moving an inch.
And I understand, sitting there with a wire up my spine and a card in my clutch, that he is not going to let me thank him, because thanking him would require both of us to agree out loud that something happened, and he has decided — for reasons I would give a year of my life to have documented — to spare me that.
“I’m still keeping the approval rights,” I say.
“I’d think less of you otherwise.”
“For the record, I’d do it again.”
“For the record,” he says, “I know.”
“We’re live,” says the headphone man, and the table goes warm with a light I can feel on my face.
Carter turns it on like a tap. He tells the camera the restaurant is his favorite, which I know is a lie because Priya picked it, and makes the lie charming.
He riffs about rival clubs learning to share a dinner table, lands a joke about whether the breadbasket is neutral territory, and somewhere out in the dark a comment feed loves him for it.
I watch the Fun One do the thing the league pays him to do, and I do my job, which is to be the clean, factual, slightly-too-sharp foil who keeps the narrative from floating off into nonsense.
“So how did you two meet?” Carter asks the camera, and then me, with a grin. “Tell them the truth. We met in a contract.”
“We met in a calendar invite,” I say. “Romance is dead and PR killed it.”
The comment feed, per the producer’s later report, does something seismic.
“See, this is what I’m talking about.” Carter spreads his hands. “Most people would soften that. She just says it. To a live audience. While she’s the head of communications.”
“I contain multitudes.”
“You contain a spreadsheet.”
“It has six columns and one of them is you.” I sip my water. “It’s a narrow column.”
He laughs — a real one, too loud, the kind a person doesn’t decide to do. He covers it fast, the way you’d catch a glass before it tips, and for a second the polished thing on his face is just a face. I file that too.
He has a hundred faces. The unguarded one is only the one between performances.
The producer, sensing gold, cues a card I never approved: HOW WELL DO YOU KNOW EACH OTHER?
“We don’t,” I tell the lens. “We met Wednesday.”
“Ignore her, she’s shy.” Carter cracks his knuckles like he’s about to attempt a personal best. “Hit me. First question.”
“Her coffee order,” the producer calls from behind the planter.
And I watch it happen.
He has it. He asked me for it on a bench on Wednesday and I gave it to him, more of it than the question required, and it is sitting right there behind his teeth and it would be the easiest laugh of the night.
“No idea,” Carter says.
The producer waits. Carter picks up his water.
“Come on—”
“Genuinely no idea, and if I guessed I’d get it wrong, and then two hundred thousand people would watch a woman correct me on camera, which is not a thing I’d survive twice in one week.” He grins at the lens. “Next.”
Nobody in that restaurant knows what just happened except the two of us.
Term two. Nothing goes out that I haven’t cleared. Thirty-six hours old, tested for the first time in public, in front of a producer, at a cost of one easy laugh he had every professional reason to take.
I feel something in my chest turn over, once, like an engine in a cold garage.
“His pre-match meal,” I say, before the producer can choose the next one. Two can play. “Chicken and plain white rice, same plate every time, eaten at the same minute on the clock, because he’s superstitious and would deny it to your face.”
Carter’s fork stops halfway to his mouth.
I have no idea how I know that. It was three lines in a profile I skimmed for the brief weeks ago, filed in the part of my brain I keep strictly for ammunition, and it has just strolled out of my mouth on a live feed and made me sound like a woman who pays attention.
He used nothing. I used everything.
“Okay.” He sets the fork down, slow. “That was a little bit terrifying.”
“It’s research.”
“The feed’s calling it romantic. Look at them. They’ve decided we’re soulmates because you know my rice schedule.”
“The feed is wrong about everything. That’s its entire function.”
The producer cues the rivalry next, because the rivalry is the thing this whole machine was built to sell.
“Real talk,” Carter tells the camera, conspiratorial. “Our clubs hate each other. Genuinely. There are grown men in two cities who won’t say certain words at the dinner table because of this.”
“He’s underselling it,” I tell the lens. “It’s worse.”
“That’s the New York in her. Atlanta would soften it. We’d call it spirited.”
“We’d call it correct. You lost to us twice last season.”
There’s a silence — the good kind, the kind a comment feed devours whole. Carter presses a hand to his chest like I’ve put a knife in it over the breadbasket.
“On camera,” he says, wounded. “She brought up the standings. In front of my city. On a romance stream.”
“Someone has to keep the record accurate. Consider it a public service.”
The food arrives mid-volley, plated like a small expensive city. Carter eats. I relocate a single seared scallop two careful inches and gaze at it like it’s the great love of my life.
“Unbelievable,” he says, off-mic, openly delighted. “You really won’t eat it.”
“Message discipline.”
“Eat the scallop, Vega.”
“Make me, Reinhardt.”
His grin drops out for exactly one second — and a beat too late I hear what that sounds like, out loud, on a hot June night, on a live feed, and so does he, and so, according to the producer’s report the next morning, does a meaningful percentage of the eastern seaboard.
The producer cues a topic card: the city. Carter tells the camera Atlanta in summer is the best place on earth to fall for someone.
“You’re contractually required to say that,” I say.
“I’d say it anyway. I’m from here. I’m allowed one sincere thing per appearance.”
“You’ve spent it. The rest is press release.”
“Brutal.” He grins at the lens. “She keeps me honest, folks.”
“Someone has to. It’s not in the brief.”