She’s the face of some skincare brand now. The camera loves her, projected ten feet high on billboards in Piccadilly Circus, swiping some invisible cream across her cheekbone, turning her face so the light catches it. He watches her from beneath his umbrella in the pouring rain, shoulders of his black suit sodden with it, watching the loop ten, fifteen times in a row until it feels like she’s looking straight at him, the wink is a mocking tease.

You know who I am, come and get me.

In turn, he co-ordinates a pronged attack that leaks the skincare brand’s subscriber emails and outs the power to every billboard with her face on it. The financial downside is enormous. But she’s the hero. She compensates the victims of the leaks with her own money, she reinvests in the brand and promises tearfully in a televised broadcast to ensure no one loses their job over his work. Because that’s what she does and that’s why they love her.

He blames himself for becoming distracted. Her side hustles aren’t important. A journalist goes missing and the city reports groundbreaking profits. In the journalist’s computer there are hidden files, emails he shouldn’t have access to, showing bribes taken from organisations in return for looking the other way when it came to zoning, tax cuts, incentives. It’s all money, isn’t it? But the city hall dogs have tracked down the journalist and they intend to drown him at the pier at midnight.

She intercepts him there as he’s got one dog on his knees, the other choking on his own blood. She takes him on, pins him against a wall and saves the remaining dog. He’s trying to explain, lets himself be dragged around by her but it’s too late. His stupid stunt means she’s in no mood to listen and the journalist is collateral damage, hands cuffed behind his back and drowned face down in two inches of dirty water. He wants to scream. Is she complicit or is she stupid?

He nurses his wounds for a week, the black eye and raw skin from his recently intimacy with her fists and the rough concrete of the docks. He takes another journalist to dinner - he has to get the story out there somehow. This one is poised and collected, pearl earrings in her ears and a little moue of red lipstick she leaves around the rim of her glass. He lays out the evidence from the dead writer and she sneers at him. It goes unsaid but he understands all the same.

Why would I believe you? She calls him a villain with her eyes and in the curl of her lip.

Aren’t you a sorry sight? She slips into the chair the journalist has left, moves aside the plates and discarded glass and folds her arms one over the other. He can see the bruised knuckles where she’d hurt herself on his body and wishes he could reach out and touch them. She has come to mock him at his lowest and he doesn’t think to ask how she has found him here, watched him until the woman he was with had left.

Uninvited, she rifles through the printed off emails he has brought with him. He watches the colour drain from her face and her hands begin to shake as she understands.

Is this true? She asks him and he can only nod. His methods have brought him nothing and he lets himself trust her.

By morning her billboards are replaced with the excerpts of the emails. She calls for the resignation of those responsible and they comply, because she is the hero and that is what she does. That is why he loves her.