At the beginning of the 2000s, London still carried that dirty, golden light that always seemed filtered through invisible smoke. It no longer came from factories, but from red buses coughing diesel, from stuffy pubs, from the constant sound of hurried footsteps on the pavement. It was a city that never truly fell silent—it only lowered its voice at dawn, like someone sleeping with a radio still playing in the next room. Isabella Iero liked that. She liked how the city never demanded explanations. She and Damon Albarn walked hand in hand along Oxford Street on a Saturday afternoon, weaving through tourists, shopping bags, and overly bright shop windows. Damon wore a dark coat that had seen better days, his hair falling into his face as if it were intentional, though it wasn’t. Isabella wore a light-colored overcoat, bought at a secondhand shop in Camden, and felt that particular comfort of being with someone while still keeping a territory of her own. They had been dating long enough for the initial enchantment to have turned into something denser—not less beautiful, just more real. Damon was restless by nature. He had the habit of watching people as if he were always assembling stories in his head, stealing pieces of the world to use later. Isabella noticed it when he squeezed her hand tighter upon seeing something curious: a crying child, a man talking to himself, a display window arranged a little too perfectly. It was in front of one of those windows that she stopped. “What if we went in there?” She asked, with a half-smile. Damon followed her gaze to the discreet pink sign, almost ironic amid the gray of the street: Victoria’s Secret. He raised an eyebrow, amused. “Are we going in as legitimate customers, or as two embarrassed English people pretending we know what we’re doing?” Isabella laughed, that short, genuine laugh he recognized as a sign of trust. “As legitimate customers. But with one condition.” “Conditions always worry me.” He said, tilting his head. “You choose everything.” There was a second of silence—the kind of silence in which something shifts inside a person. Damon smiled slowly, almost surprised with himself. “Everything?” “Everything.” She confirmed. The store smelled sweet and artificial, as if the air itself had been carefully trained to please. The lights were too soft for a cloudy day, and the walls seemed to absorb any trace of the outside world. Damon stepped inside as if entering foreign territory—alert, curious, but strangely comfortable. He started slowly. He ran his fingers over fabrics, studied colors as if he were choosing album covers. There was no hurry.