Chapter 98: Fate or Coincidence

"Cousin, do managers actually earn that much?" On the walk back, Chloe couldn’t stop turning the number over in her head.

She’d grown up hearing her dad’s version of events, that Saint had thrown away a genuinely prestigious degree to chase something with no real future, a typical case of wasted potential.

"Depends entirely on the club. Ever heard of Real Madrid?" Saint said, half-expecting the name to mean nothing to her.

"Course, I’ve seen them on telly," Chloe said.

"Right, well, that’s the kind of club where players and managers both earn considerably more than average. Getting anywhere near that level, though, takes real standing in the game first," Saint explained.

"So are you properly good now, then?" Chloe pressed.

"Doing alright for myself. Going to get considerably better from here, though," Saint said, allowing himself a rare flash of immodesty.

"So how much do you actually make, then?" That was the question Chloe had clearly been building up to the whole walk, she’d worked the restaurant floor since secondary school, and money had never been an abstract concept to her.

"Somewhere around four million pounds a year, give or take," Saint said plainly. He hadn’t bothered hiding it, figured it was better she heard it from him than stumbled across it some other way and felt deceived.

"Four...four million?" Chloe’s face went properly slack.

Fair reaction, really, she knew the restaurant’s own numbers intimately, and even after years of steady growth, it brought in something in the range of seventy or eighty thousand pounds a year, total.

"Cousin, can I be a manager?" Her recovery was fast, though.

"Can’t see it, honestly, you’re a bit too obviously motivated by the money," Saint said, watching something close to pound signs flash behind her eyes.

While the two of them argued wages on the walk home, back on set, a couple of crew members had been having a rather different conversation.

"Didn’t that delivery lad look familiar to you earlier?" one asked a colleague as they packed up for the day.

"Now you mention it, yeah, actually. Can’t place where from, though," the colleague said.

"Championship. Aston Villa," the first one offered.

"Oh, bloody hell, that’s him! Hang on, though.. no, can’t be. Isn’t he the Premier League manager now? Middle of transfer season and he’s out here delivering lunch trays?" The colleague shook his head, dismissing the idea almost as fast as it arrived.

"Fair point. Genuinely can’t be him." Neither of them could quite make the logic work.

"Just a lookalike, probably, you see it all the time with extras, someone who could pass for someone famous if you squint," the colleague reasoned, and that settled it for both of them.

It wasn’t just the crew who’d clocked him, either. While Saint had been delivering lunch to the director personally, the director himself had taken a longer look than usual, and was now quietly discussing it with his assistant.

"Reckon we could get the delivery lad into a scene somewhere?" The director had landed on roughly the same conclusion as the crew, if considerably more decisive about acting on it.

"Could do, give him a proper close-up even, if the shot calls for it." Saint, blissfully unaware of any of this, had no idea he’d just become a minor subject of production-office speculation.

"Relax, not a word to Mum and Dad," Chloe said, nodding solemnly as they reached the restaurant.

A thirty-one-year-old university graduate earning four million pounds a year was, by any ordinary measure, the kind of number that stopped people in their tracks.

The two of them got back well after the lunch rush had cleared, the restaurant sat nearly empty, the lull before dinner service properly set in.

With nothing pressing to do, Saint didn’t bother heading out again. He had his own business to attend to regardless, during his time in Italy, he’d quietly put some of his own money into a venture back in England.

Specifically, he’d brought in a former Amazon executive, British-Nigerian, sharp, genuinely well-connected in the industry, to help build out an online retail platform from scratch.

The hire had turned out to be an excellent one. In barely six months, the whole operation had gone from nothing to a working platform, and it had already started attracting serious outside interest.

One name in particular, when it came across Saint’s desk, had genuinely stopped him in his tracks: Marcus Idowu, the founder of a retail platform called Vellum, a name Saint recognised instantly from another life, where it had grown into one of the country’s genuine e-commerce giants.

Saint had no reservations about partnering with him. If anything, he knew exactly how much his own venture lacked in domestic relationships and market presence, talks between the two sides were already well underway, and there was a real chance it ended in an outright merger rather than a simple partnership.

Saint’s company had the framework and the outside capital behind it. Idowu’s had years of built-up trust and relationships across the UK retail sector. Put the two together properly, and it looked like exactly the kind of deal that benefits everyone involved.

Negotiations, as it stood, were already going smoothly, there was a real chance the whole thing got formally signed off before Saint flew back to Birmingham. If it did, Saint fully intended to be in the room personally when it happened.

That evening, Saint and Chloe skipped the usual delivery run to the set entirely, and skipped dinner at the restaurant too, heading out instead to the town’s evening market.

The market itself had been redeveloped a few years back, and in the time since, it had properly come into its own, by the time Chloe led Saint through the entrance, the place was heaving.

"This is proper, this. Haven’t felt anything like it in years." There’s a particular warmth to a packed street market that Saint simply hadn’t encountered much of back in Italy or anywhere else in England he’d spent real time.

"Chloe?" A familiar voice called out from behind them, right as Saint took his first step into the crowd.

"Eve?" Small world, sometimes, in exactly the way that feels almost scripted.

"What are you doing here?"

"You didn’t even think to text me?"

What followed was a rapid, affectionate back-and-forth between the two of them, Saint left standing entirely on the sidelines, alongside, as it happened, another familiar face from earlier that day, Rachel, suffering the exact same fate.

"Right, you two carry on, I’m starving, I’m going to go find something to eat," Saint finally said, cutting through the standoff.

The genuine draw, if he was honest, was the smell drifting down from the nearest stall, proper, old-fashioned street food, the kind no amount of fine dining in Madrid or Barcelona had managed to replace.

Fish and chips get all the attention nationally, but every region has its own version worth defending, and this particular stretch of market had a stall doing battered sausage and chips that smelled genuinely irresistible.

Saint had never pretended to be a refined eater, happy enough with a paper-wrapped portion eaten standing up on a street corner, same as anyone.

He set off toward the stall without waiting, and the three women trailing behind him gave up their argument fast enough once the smell reached them too.

From there, the four of them worked their way down the length of the market, stall to stall, without stopping properly once, and by the time any of them thought to check, the evening had slipped entirely into night.