Chapter 99: Uncle, My Mum’s Gone Missing

"Cousin, you’re really not coming in?" Chloe asked, standing outside the production’s gates the next morning.

"Not today," Saint said, shaking his head.

There’s something about a shared meal that tends to loosen things up fast, and after last night’s trip round the market, the four of them had genuinely warmed to each other.

Good thing, on its own. Except the next morning, Saint noticed the director giving him an oddly appraising look, one that left him mildly unsettled.

Everything has a light side and a shadow side, and the entertainment world is hardly an exception, rife with people whose intentions don’t always match their smiles. In another life, Saint had spent enough time following celebrity gossip and online drama to have developed a fairly cynical reflex about exactly this kind of attention, and his mind went straight to the least charitable explanation.

Chloe hadn’t exactly helped matters either, she’d come back from set mentioning, offhand, that the director had actually floated giving Saint a small background role in an upcoming scene. Which only deepened the suspicion.

Fair enough, really, given where Saint’s instincts came from, in his old life, he’d been an ordinary bloke with an ordinary appetite for celebrity news, and plenty of that news hadn’t painted certain corners of the industry kindly.

What he clearly hadn’t factored in, though, was just how much profile he himself had quietly built up back home over the past year, because none of this had anything to do with him personally.

By the end of the season just gone, Saint had taken a club into the Premier League. He was, by any measure, now a genuinely recognisable manager in the country’s top division.

And a dedicated feature on exactly that story was due to air the following evening, on one of the national sports channels, a programme they’d been teasing for the better part of a fortnight, building real anticipation among football fans back home.

To put the piece together properly, the channel had actually sent a crew out to Italy earlier in the year, pulling footage from a dozen of Saint’s matches and interviewing several of Villa’s own staff along the way.

Through the business end of the season, with results coming thick and fast, nobody had managed to pin Saint down for a sit-down interview of his own. Once the campaign wrapped, he’d gone straight into recruitment mode instead, and the whole thing had simply drifted on his to-do list ever since.

Saint’s continued silence had given a certain kind of national press plenty to work with, too. Several outlets had made a show of it; ’we offered you the spotlight, and you turned your nose up at us? Do you genuinely think you’re some untouchable figure just because you’re the first manager of your kind to pull this off?’

Most of that coverage, tellingly, didn’t come from genuine football media at all, anyone who properly understood the sport knew exactly how difficult the path Saint had walked actually was, and wouldn’t have reached for that framing in the first place. The outlets piling on tended to be the ones furthest removed from the game itself.

Only someone who’d actually lived through that climb; the scrutiny, the doubt, walking into rooms where nobody expected someone like him to belong, could properly understand how hard-won it all was.

Plenty of people, certainly, chalked Saint’s rise up to simple luck. Fair enough, to a point, there was undeniably some of that in the mix. But opportunity tends to favour the prepared, and luck alone has never once been enough on its own to actually finish the job.

Saint himself hadn’t given the domestic interview requests a second thought. Jasper had, though, and so had Villa’s own club. Jasper’s reasoning was straightforward enough: the faster Saint’s profile grew back home, the more leverage that gave both of them going forward, and Saint was, whether he liked it or not, becoming a genuinely valuable name to attach to things.

Villa’s interest was just as simple, Whitlock, a shrewd enough businessman in his own right, wasn’t about to let a wave of genuine domestic media interest go to waste. Good publicity for the club, free of charge.

Saint, for his part, had genuinely enjoyed this stretch of downtime more than almost anything in recent memory. Since the accident that brought him into this life, every spare hour had gone toward coaching badges, credentials, clawing his way up Villa’s hierarchy one rung at a time.

Without exaggeration, these had been the freest, most unburdened days he’d had in years. Beyond the occasional delivery run with Chloe, there was nothing demanding his attention at all, nothing to plan, nothing to fix, nothing to prove.

"Derek, please don’t tell me you’re calling with bad news." Given the time difference, it would still be early morning back in England.

"Lee, just reminding you, you promised those outlets an interview once the season wrapped up." As it happened, Sallow wasn’t even in the country himself right now.

With Villa’s business for the summer essentially finished, Sallow had finally taken the chance to get his own family away for a proper break, understandable enough, given Villa were heading back to the Premier League.

"Ha, completely forgot about that, honestly," Saint admitted. If Sallow hadn’t rung to remind him, there was no version of this where he remembered on his own.

"Are you free the next few days?" Sallow asked.

"Send me the list of whoever you want me to sit down with, and I’ll pick whoever makes sense." Saint liked to think of himself as reasonably generous and easy to work with. Where the press was concerned, though, he kept a genuinely long memory, and even from across the Channel, it wasn’t hard to keep track of who’d earned which treatment.

While Sallow had his assistant forward the list, Saint’s phone buzzed again almost immediately, Jasper this time, with nearly the identical message, making sure Saint hadn’t forgotten his own commitments either.

Jasper’s call came with a different flavour, though. As Saint’s agent and genuine business partner, he understood better than most exactly how much this stretch of downtime actually meant, he’d deliberately held off sending his own staff to chase Saint down directly, letting him have the space rather than pile straight back into work.

"Uncle..." Right as the call with Jasper wrapped up, a small, piping voice cut through from somewhere near Saint’s feet.

He looked down to find a little girl standing there, having apparently appeared from nowhere.

Five or six years old, by the look of her, round-faced, big eyes, dressed in a white top with denim dungaree shorts, hair in two plaits, a lollipop parked in one cheek. Properly sweet, the sort of kid who draws attention without trying.

"What’s up, love?" Saint crouched down to her level.

"Uncle, my mummy’s gone missing. Will you help me find her?" The girl reached up and took hold of his hand without waiting for an answer.

"Are you sure it’s your mum that’s gone missing, and not the other way round?" Saint asked, a little helplessly.

"Yeah. My mummy got lost," she said, nodding with total confidence.

"Right, and where exactly did your mum go missing?" Something in Saint’s expression shifted, faintly amused despite himself.

"Over there, I think," the girl said, pointing vaguely off to the left, not entirely certain of it herself.

"Come on then, let’s go have a look." Just as Saint started walking in the direction she’d pointed, a woman came hurrying toward them.

"Lily! You can’t just wander off with a stranger, you scared me half to death!" The woman rushed over and scooped the girl up, visibly rattled.

"You’re not my mummy, uncle, this lady isn’t my mummy," the little girl said, entirely unbothered, and Saint found himself genuinely caught off guard by the whole exchange.

Worth noting, the woman standing in front of him was, by a conservative guess, at least a decade older than Saint himself, and here she was getting called "lady" by a six-year-old in the same breath Saint got called "uncle."

"Lily, don’t be silly, remember, Mummy promised you ice cream after this." The woman reached out to take the girl properly into her arms.