Chapter 1

1

March 2023

T here was nothing Sol liked more than a tight schedule with just the right amount of much-needed leisure time in it. And that Monday morning, the week ahead looked finally promising. She wasn't planning on writing anything else that day, having just addressed all the suggestions her editor made to her last Oscars reaction piece.

It had been a long busy weekend following Hollywood's glitziest movie celebration and writing about it. And even if, for the most part, she'd been working from her sofa, the whole affair had been exhausting.

At least this year she hadn't had to attend the actual ceremony. She hated red carpets and schmoozing in equal measure—and awards ceremonies were essentially that plus extremely uncomfortable attire and unbearable footwear.

Fortunately, awards season was finally over and Sol decided to celebrate by decompressing before the hecticness of the afternoon. She was already dreading the social media strategy meeting scheduled for 2 p.m., and she needed to start pitching stories that would answer such pressing queries as "Oscars 2024 Predictions: The TK Movies to Watch" and "The Best and Most Talked-About Movies of 2023 So Far," even if it was barely mid-March. Just thinking about it made her want to go back to bed; it had been a long night made even longer by the eight-hour time difference between London and Los Angeles.

After a light breakfast of yogurt, seasonal fruit, and her customary Mariage Frères French Breakfast tea with almond milk, she dressed in her most stylish athleisure wear and grabbed a big gray designer weekender bag. Nothing was ever too hip when she went to see Josie. And since spring wasn't making too much of an effort yet, Sol completed the ensemble with a quintessentially classic Burberry trench coat.

By the time she left her small terraced two-story cottage in the South Bank, it was mid-morning. She didn't normally have the luxury to escape to see Josie in the middle of the day, but she relished her walk through the quiet streets and across Waterloo Bridge, with its imposing views of the London Eye and the Houses of Parliament on one side, St. Paul's Cathedral and the City borough's skyscrapers on the other.

The short peregrination to Covent Garden from her house in Roupell Street was absolutely worthwhile. Before finding Josie, she had tried all the studios within a thirty-minute walk from her place. She had even braved the Tube and trekked to Islington to find a much-raved-about instructor dull and the session insufficiently arduous. Josie was the absolute best.

She'd found Josie's boutique Pilates studio, which catered mostly to a movie-and-TV-centric clientele, through a source. That piece of information had been by far the best part of a tedious interview with the semi-famous CEO of the dominant streaming service Supreme Video.

Josie's studio wasn't otherwise advertised and lacked any social media presence, so Sol was still thankful to the CEO even if she'd begrudged the many hours spent reading the manual they were promoting on the nature of the hypercompetitive business of streaming, and writing an article which she and her editor knew well wasn't exactly her best piece.

The man who'd been standing on a quiet corner of Roupell Street for the previous two hours was starting to resent some of his professional choices and lose feeling on his toes. Not even his usual perusal of real estate porn on the app Rightmove could appease him that chilly morning.

He had a new, slightly better-paying job and still absolutely zero chances of affording a one-bedroom flat in a neighborhood like that one, even if he'd never choose to live on that side of the river voluntarily. He was despairing at the pictures of a place where the micro kitchen hadn't been renovated since the nineties and the asking price was still of palatial proportions, when he saw the mark leaving her place at an unusual time. He made sure to remain invisible, put the phone away, and followed her.

She would typically be huddled up in her home office this time on a Monday morning, which was why he'd been caught by surprise. She was wearing leggings and an ultra-cropped oversized sweatshirt underneath a long honey-colored trench coat. She looked chic even if the ensemble was casual. But fashion appreciation thoughts aside, the outfit indicated that Sol was probably on her way to their main place of interest.

He trailed her from a safe distance for about twenty minutes as she walked briskly between the narrow streets and crossed the river.

The studio was on the second floor of a Georgian building on Henrietta Street. She got there with only five minutes to spare.

He followed Sol inside to see who else was there. Since he had been assigned to that particular job, he'd been in the habit of carrying a holdall that could also double as a commuter bag. Inside the bag were a pair of slim-fit, sweat-absorbing joggers and an equally fashion-specific and ridiculously pricey T-shirt. Something more ordinary would have cast suspicion in a place like that.

He barely had time to get his alter ego, Greg Knight, enrolled in the half-past-eleven Pilates mat group class, get changed, and try to get a spot preferably next to the mark. If only that would bring him closer to figuring out whether the journalist had been the one pulling off the theft.