The morning after the leak, Nora Vale bought black coffee, two newspapers, and exactly seven minutes of privacy before the world remembered she existed. It found her at the crossing outside the Merrion, where a teenager in a school blazer recognised her from a crisis-management panel and shouted, 'Are you the woman fixing Rowan Keane?' as if Rowan were a burst pipe and not a man with a son, a dead wife, and a past now foaming under every door.
Nora kept walking. Publicists who turned at every shout became content, and Nora had spent fifteen years avoiding the indignity of becoming somebody else's lunchtime scroll.
Her office occupied the second floor above a solicitor's practice that smelled of polish, toner, and ancestral disapproval. Vale House Media had begun as one desk, one kettle, and a client list composed mostly of people too broke or too difficult for London. Now it had frosted glass, three assistants, a reputation for miracles, and a printer that jammed only when journalists were downstairs.
Maeve was waiting by reception with a face that said breakfast had been murdered.
'He's here,' she said.
Nora stopped with one glove half off. 'Rowan?'
'No. Worse.'
That narrowed nothing. In music, worse had a large extended family.
The conference room door opened before Maeve could elaborate, and Ciarán Bale stepped out wearing a camel coat, a charity-pin smile, and the moral flexibility of a man who called himself a legacy manager. He had run Rowan's early career, lost him during the marriage years, and reappeared after the funeral with a tasteful wreath and a plan to monetise mourning.
'Nora,' Ciarán said, warmly enough to chill soup. 'We need to talk about containment.'
'Good morning to you too. Do you want the version where I pretend I'm pleased, or are we respecting everyone's calendar?'
Maeve coughed into her tablet. Ciarán's smile did not move.
In the conference room, Rowan stood at the window with his back to them. He wore yesterday's black coat and no visible sleep. On the table lay the brass tuning fork Nora had left in the production case during the scramble after the show. Someone had cleaned the blood from the handle. Hers, from where the prongs had bitten her palm. She had not noticed until after midnight.
Rowan turned when she entered. 'You forgot this.'
Nora took it from the table. Their fingers did not touch, which irritated her because she noticed.
'I forgot nothing. I abandoned it tactically.'
'Is there a difference?'
'Billing.'
His mouth tried to become a smile and failed with dignity.
Ciarán shut the door. 'The label wants a joint statement by ten.'
'The label can want a pony,' Nora said. 'What do we know?'
The room changed shape around the question. Maeve opened her file. Rowan stayed by the window. Ciarán sat without being invited, which told Nora he expected power to arrive late and apologise for him.
'Anonymous account deleted,' Maeve said. 'Image mirrored everywhere. Caption replicated. Three major outlets requesting comment. Two claiming they have corroboration that Rowan was involved in a missing-person case in Belfast.'
Rowan's hands went still.
Nora saw it. Ciarán saw it too, and smiled like a man spotting a door.
'Rubbish,' Ciarán said. 'We deny categorically.'
'Do we?' Nora asked Rowan.
Ciarán made a small impatient noise. 'We do not need to dignify deranged speculation.'
'I asked the person with the pulse in the headline.'
Rowan looked at her across the table. Morning light exposed what stage light had flattered: the faint bruise under one eye from exhaustion, the grey at his temples, the tightly held rage of a man who had been touched without consent by memory. 'I was questioned. Not charged. The missing girl was named Elspeth Ward. Nineteen. Backing vocalist for a summer tour. She vanished after the Belfast encore. I was the last public person photographed with her.'
Maeve's fingers paused over the keyboard.
Ciarán spread his hands. 'Ancient history.'
'Girls do not become ancient history because men find it administratively convenient,' Nora said.
Rowan looked away first.
There. The first fracture. Nora marked it privately. Not guilt, perhaps. Not innocence either. Something more exhausting: responsibility without ownership, the sort of burden decent people carried badly because they had never found a legal category for it.
'Where is your son?' she asked.
'Galway. With my sister.'
'Keep him there.'
Ciarán leaned forward. 'Absolutely not. Family photographs humanise him.'
'His child is not a throw pillow.'
'His child is sixteen and has grown up in this industry.'
Rowan crossed the room so quickly the air seemed to fold. 'Leave Finn out of it.'
Silence hit the glass walls. Outside, someone dropped a stapler and whispered an apology to no one.
Nora did not soften her voice. Softness was a tool, not a default, and Rowan Keane did not need women making him comfortable at the expense of truth. 'Then give me enough to keep him out.'
Rowan breathed once through his nose. 'The photograph was taken six weeks before Elspeth disappeared. The woman in it was Alana Moore.'
Maeve looked up. 'Your wife.'
'Before she was my wife.'
Ciarán's expression sharpened. 'That distinction is not helpful.'
'It is accurate,' Nora said.
Rowan's gaze flicked to her. Gratitude, quickly buried. She wished she had not seen that either.
He said, 'The public thinks the photograph proves an affair during my marriage. It doesn't. But the person who leaked it knows enough to make people ask about Elspeth. That's the threat.'
'And what happened after the encore?' Nora asked.
For a moment she was back in the corridor, the tuning fork ringing between them and the crowd demanding him whole. Rowan rubbed both hands over his face. When he dropped them, the star was gone. The man remained. That was more dangerous. Stars could be handled. Men could make you careless.
'Elspeth came to my dressing room crying. She said someone had been following her. I thought she was frightened of a boyfriend, maybe a dealer. I was twenty-nine and brilliant at being stupid. I told security to put her in a cab.'
'Did they?'
'They said they did.'
'And?'
'The cab never reached her flat.'
The sentence entered the room and sat down like an old judge.
Nora lowered herself into a chair because standing had become theatrical. She could work with scandal. She could work with grief. She could even work with a client whose past contained police interviews and missing women, provided the truth had edges she could see. What she could not work with was a story shaped like a grave and still breathing underneath.
Her phone lit with a message from an unknown number. No greeting. No name. Just a photograph of a cassette tape labelled in blue ink: ENCORE FOR TWO — BELFAST — AFTER.
Below it: Ask him why he kept the song.
Before the second coffee cooled, Nora made one private note she did not show Maeve: Rowan Kade is not the whole crisis. It annoyed her, because a famous man at the centre of a scandal was usually enough crisis for any sensible woman. But the rhythm was wrong. The leak had not been messy in the way grief-leaks were messy. It had been placed. Timed. Tuned to hurt the living while pretending to honour the dead.
She had learnt that distinction the hard way. Her father had been a pub singer with a saint's voice and a gambler's conscience, the kind of man who could make strangers cry with one verse and make his own child count coins for electricity by the next morning. People had called him complicated because charming men were allowed better adjectives. Nora preferred accurate ones. Selfish. Brilliant. Beloved. Dangerous. All true, all at once.
That was why Rowan unsettled her. He did not use charm when fear would do. He did not ask the room to adore him before it judged him. He seemed, if anything, embarrassed by the space his fame occupied. That could be another performance. Nora trusted nothing in public relations until it survived three follow-up questions and one silence.
The silence came when she asked who had access to old recordings.
Rowan named people carefully: Alana, Ciarán, his sister Siobhan, one former studio engineer now teaching music in Limerick, and the label's legal archive, which in Nora's experience meant one locked room, three forgotten passwords, and a man called Declan who knew where the bodies were because he had filed the invoices.
'Ciarán will say the archive is clean,' Maeve said.
'Ciarán says many things with confidence. Confidence is not soap.'
Maeve wrote that down too.
Nora looked again at the headline. Encore for Two. A song. A marriage. A missing girl. A dead wife. A living child. The public loved a triangle because it could fit three names above a photograph. Real life was less tidy. Real life had stagehands, managers, label men, sisters, sons, and women whose one line became a weapon years after anyone had bothered to protect the mouth that sang it.
Nora closed the folder and let the room wait. Waiting was a useful solvent. People poured themselves into it. Rowan stared at the table. Ciarán checked his cuff. Maeve pretended not to watch either of them and failed with theatrical commitment. The leak had given them noise, but Nora was listening for structure: who benefited, who flinched, who used grief as cover, and who wanted the conversation to stay about sex because sex sold better than complicity.
The song title kept needling at her. Encore for Two sounded romantic if you had no imagination and a streaming subscription. To Nora it sounded like a threat with harmony. An encore was what the crowd demanded after the official ending. It was not spontaneous, no matter what artists said. It was planned into the set list, rehearsed, lit, costed, and then sold back to people as longing. She wondered who had planned this return, and what they expected the room to beg for next.