As he waited in the lobby for George, who was stuck in traffic, an alert he’d set up on his phone popped up. He’d been following something that had caught his eye about Yash Raje’s campaign. A small piece tucked away on Bloomberg about Yash’s long-term girlfriend had been nagging at Rico since he’d read it in the car this morning.

He knew he should stop being obsessed with the campaign, given that the man’s cousin held the power to trample Rico’s heart again, and the more connections there were between them, the more it was going to hurt. Problem was, Yash was fearless. His stand on immigration, on health care, on the environment, it was a blast of unvarnished truth and brilliant policy, and Rico couldn’t help but get excited every single time he learned more.

Except, there was something deeply disturbing going on with this girlfriend thing. Obviously, a bunch of conservative journalists were digging away at the story and softening the soil of public opinion with these seemingly harmless pieces with suggestive undertones hinting at salaciousness. Rico had never been wrong about preempting an oncoming scandal. He had to find out what was going on.

Zee was right, being a know-it-all was definitely an affliction Rico suffered from. He dialed his mate and checked his watch. Tanya and Zee had to be back in London by now.

“What’s wrong?” Zee said the moment Rico said hello.

“Why does something have to be wrong? I’m just checking in to make sure Tanya didn’t decide to give you back after the honeymoon.”

“You miss me. You want me back. Admit it.”

Rico laughed.

“How’s your lady love?” Zee asked.

“She’s not.” That was the problem.

“Does she know that?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about her anymore.” Except he knew. He knew more than he needed to know. “That’s not true. But there’s no going back. I have no idea how to go back.”

“You know that season when you put Sunderland back in the Premier League? You were such a bloody pain about reviewing game footage. You had to identify why we didn’t make every single goal we missed. You were a beast about figuring out mistakes and making sure we avoided them in the next match. You were such a pain in the arse that we all wanted to kill you.”

“And your point is?” Although he had a sense of where this was going.

“Be the arse you are and figure out what went wrong.”

Shit.

“What? You just figured out your best mate’s a bit of a genius, didn’t you?”

Rico had to laugh at that. “I’ve been an idiot.”

“Apparently we’re all idiots. But my old woman tells me that when we see it we can fix it.”