Six A.M.

Six o’clock in April meant grey light rather than dark, which was the only difference Luca had ever needed between the two. He’d had the pass wiped down before the delivery van finished idling outside, the morning’s fish already iced, and nothing left to do except the thing he’d been doing since four: not sleeping, and calling it prep instead.

The schedule from last night sat at the edge of the steel, his own initials dried into the clause-nine box beside appearance twelve, the wedding — the only entry in four months he’d filled in before anyone asked him to. Beside his finished hand, her half of the box sat as empty as it had at midnight.

The service door opened at six. Hattie stood in the doorway in yesterday’s coat, the laminated schedule folded once in her hand, and came no further in than that.

For a moment neither of them moved, the room holding the particular stillness it only kept before six, before the noise started.

“You initialled it,” she said. Not a question.

“I did.”

She crossed to the pass, set the schedule flat on the steel between them, and took a pen from her coat pocket — her own, not his, not Kemi’s, the plain black one she’d used to write clause nine into a contract in a private dining room in March — and uncapped it with the same brisk economy she brought to cutting two minutes off somebody’s toast.

She drew a line through the kissing clause where it applied to appearance twelve, not the whole of clause nine, just the wedding, just the single square Kemi had built for a camera to use, and beneath it, in the small, exact print he’d watched her use to make a hundred throwaway sentences sound final, she wrote: nothing for cameras.

Then she looked up.

“What were the initials for, Luca.”

He’d had eleven hours to prepare an answer and discovered, now the moment had actually arrived, that none of the ones he’d rehearsed were true enough to survive her asking it to his face, plainly, without the schedule doing any of the work.

“Because I wanted you to know,” he said, “before the wedding, not after it. If I ever kiss you, it isn’t going to be for Dana Kessler. I didn’t want you finding that out from a camera angle in June. I wanted you to have it now, in writing, from me, when nobody’s filming and there’s nothing in it for either of us except it being true.”

The extraction fan ticked as it cooled. Somewhere on the street a shutter went up two doors down.

He’d spent two years rehearsing sentences before he let them out in front of anyone — investors, journalists, his own brother, on a bad week — checking each one for what it would cost him if it got repeated somewhere he hadn’t chosen. He hadn’t checked this one first. It had arrived ready, the way a stock reduces itself down to what it actually is if you leave it alone long enough on the heat.

“That’s not what Kemi would call a plan,” Hattie said, and her voice had gone careful in the way he was starting to recognise as her deciding, in real time, whether to trust the ground under a sentence before she put her weight on it.

“Kemi doesn’t get a vote on this one.”

“No,” she agreed. “She doesn’t.”

She looked back down at the schedule, at his initials sitting dry and finished on one side and her strike-through fresh on the other, two different answers to the same box, and he watched her read it the way she read everything, twice, before she let herself decide what she thought of the person who’d written it.

“I’m not going to initial it,” she said. “Not the way the box wants. I’m not saying yes to a kiss in advance for a stranger’s camera, not at that wedding, not for Dana, not for anyone. But I’m not initialling ‘no’ either, because ‘no’ isn’t true, and I’ve spent two years telling brides not to put anything in a speech that isn’t true.” She tapped the line she’d struck through. “This is what’s true. Nothing for cameras. What happens or doesn’t happen after that isn’t the show’s business.”

“Agreed.”

“You’re not going to argue the wording.”

“I wrote a contract with a woman who negotiates over parsley. I’m not going to argue with the best clause either of us has ever written.” He picked up his own pen — the one that lived by the pass, capped, set parallel to the edge of the pad without his noticing he’d done it, the habit she’d caught him at months ago and never once mentioned again until now — and initialled beneath her line, small, definite, done. “The wedding’s a no-kiss appearance. On the record. That’s what we’re telling Kemi.”

“That’s what we’re telling Kemi,” she repeated, and something in the way she said it made it sound like the truer of the two sentences they’d just built.

Neither of them reached to fold the schedule away. It sat between them on the steel, appearance twelve settled in a way none of the other eleven had ever needed to be, and Luca understood, watching her not quite meet his eyes and not quite look away either, that they had just had the first entirely honest conversation of the whole arrangement, and that no part of it had involved either of them getting what a stranger watching would have called the point.

“I should let you finish prep,” she said, not moving.

“You should.” He didn’t move either. “You’ve got a screening in two days. Episode one. Kemi will want you photographed enjoying it.”

“I’m sure I’ll manage to look like I mean it.” A small, real smile there, the one with nothing to do with cameras, gone as quickly as it arrived. “Luca.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you for not making that bigger than it needed to be.”

“It was already the biggest thing,” he said, before he could decide whether that was wise to say out loud at six in the morning to a woman who hadn’t asked for the rest of the sentence. “I’m just glad neither of us tried to make it smaller.”

She left the way she’d come, through the service door into a street that had gone from grey to something closer to morning while neither of them was looking, and Luca stood at the pass with two sets of initials drying on a laminated schedule and the strange, unfamiliar sensation of having told the truth to someone and had it received, without needing to be managed afterwards, without a headline attached, without Kemi’s screenshot arriving thirty seconds later to tell him how well it had landed.

· · ·Scene break

Enzo came in at seven, still in yesterday’s fleece, and found him at the same board he’d been at an hour ago, one fillet half-boned, the knife idle in his hand.

“You’re behind,” Enzo said, hanging up his coat. “That’s not like you before a Tuesday service.”

“I’m not behind. I’m thinking.”

“You never think at the board. You think in the walk-in, where nobody can see your face do it.” Enzo washed his hands, watching him sideways the whole time. “Something’s different. You’ve got a face on you I haven’t seen since before the launch party, and I don’t mean that as an accusation, I mean it as an observation, because I’m your sous chef and observations are the job.”

“Hattie was here at six.”

“I gathered. The service door doesn’t usually open itself.” Enzo picked up his own knife, waiting, giving him the room to say more or not, which was its own kind of question. “Good six, or bad six?”

Luca thought about the schedule, the strike-through, nothing for cameras in her small exact hand, the box he’d finally answered honestly instead of managing.

“Good,” he said, and found he meant it more plainly than he’d meant almost anything he’d said out loud in two years. “We told each other something true. That’s the whole of it.”

“That’s not nothing, coming from you.”

“No,” Luca agreed, going back to the fillet, his hands finding the work again on their own. “It isn’t.”

“You nervous about Thursday?” Enzo asked, apropos of nothing, the way he did when he’d been sitting on a question longer than he wanted to admit.

“About the screening, or about the woman I’m sitting next to at it?”

“Either. Both. I’m not fussy.”

“Both, then. Slightly.” Luca set the boned fillet aside and reached for the next one. “It’s the first time either of us has had to do this in front of people who already have a version of the story they like better than whichever one we’d actually tell them.”

“Then don’t tell them a version. Tell them the truth and let the cameras catch up.” Enzo said it lightly, but there was nothing light underneath it. “You’ve had one morning of doing that. See how it goes before you decide it’s harder than the alternative.”

He finished boning the fish with the same care he brought to everything, parallel cuts, nothing wasted, and didn’t examine, until the second delivery of the morning arrived and needed signing for, how long he’d stood there afterwards doing nothing at all.

· · ·Scene break

Kemi called at eleven, between the fish delivery and the first covers, with the particular clipped energy of a woman who’d already seen something she hadn’t been told about.

“Appearance twelve,” she said, without hello. “Somebody’s amended the schedule. I need to know if I’m looking at a mistake or a decision.”

“It’s a decision.”

“Talk me through it, because what I’m looking at is a struck-through kissing clause and a note in Hattie’s handwriting that says ‘nothing for cameras,’ which is not a phrase either of you has used to me before, and I’d like to understand it before Dana asks me to.”

Luca put the phone on speaker and kept working, because Kemi managed better when she could hear he wasn’t performing calm for her benefit. “The wedding’s a no-kiss appearance. We decided this morning. It’s final.”

“You decided. This morning. Without me in the room.”

“It’s clause nine. It was always ours to decide, not yours.”

There was a pause long enough that he could hear a coffee machine somewhere behind her. “I built this deal to protect you both,” Kemi said, quieter than her usual register, which told him more than the words did. “I did not build it to survive whatever this actually is.”

“Nobody’s asking you to survive it. I’m asking you to update a schedule.”

“That’s not the same as it being simple, and you know it.” Another pause. “Is this going to make appearance twelve harder to sell to Dana, or easier?”

“I don’t know. I stopped calculating that about five hours ago, and it was the best decision I’ve made since March.”

Kemi didn’t answer straight away, and when she did, her voice had lost most of its edge. “Fine. Noted. I’ll amend the file.” A beat. “For what it’s worth, and I’m only saying this once because it’s not remotely my job to — I’m glad it finally says something true on it. I was getting tired of the version that didn’t.”

She hung up before he could answer, which was, for Kemi, its own kind of confession.

Luca set the phone face-down on the pass, beside the schedule with its two sets of initials and its single struck-through line, and found that the thing he’d been braced for all morning — some cost, some complication, Kemi’s alarm, Dana’s interest, the whole machinery of the contract objecting to a fact it hadn’t authorised — had not arrived. He had told the truth to one person at six in the morning and had it received, and told a harder version of it to another person at eleven and had that received too, and neither telling had cost him anything he could point to, which was, for a man who had spent two years believing honesty always came with a bill attached, its own kind of answer.