"Congrats, man. We need to celebrate this."
Oriol was already halfway out of his chair, laughing, both hands coming up.
"We really do. We need to celebrate this properly."
David laughed and waved him back down.
"Haha. Thank you. Thank you, really." He was still smiling, but he raised a hand. "But that is not why I came here today."
Oriol paused, halfway to standing. He lowered himself back down slowly, looking at his brother-in-law.
"It isn't?"
"Well." David tilted his head. "It is part of it. But it is not the main thing."
Oriol settled fully back into his chair, curiosity taking over now.
"Well, what is it then? Anything I can help with?"
"It is not so much help." David shifted forward. "It is more of a business idea."
Oriol's eyebrows lifted again.
"Business?"
David sat up straight.
"Yes."
And then he started.
He laid it out from the beginning, slowly and clearly, the way a man does when he has been rehearsing a thing in his own head for weeks and is finally getting to say it aloud to another person.
It was true that the restaurant had been climbing lately. In this recent stretch, this fast, insane period since everything took off, King's Palace had brought in close to 95 thousand euros. It was a sum that would have taken him months and months to touch before. On paper, it looked like a miracle.
But anybody who knows anything about hospitality knows the ugly truth underneath a number like that. As fast as the money comes in, the money goes out, and it goes out at almost exactly the same speed. A restaurant, on a good day, on a healthy day, runs a net profit margin of somewhere between three and eight percent of its revenue. That is it. That is the reality of the trade. High revenue, high cost. A machine that eats almost everything it earns.
And David knew, with a sick and precise clarity, that he was no longer even inside that three percent range.
Because as the restaurant had grown, the costs had grown with it. Faster, in fact. He had needed more staff, so he had hired more staff, and the wage bill had swollen. The kitchen was running longer hours, so the utility bills climbed, the electricity in particular, all those extra hours of ovens and burners and refrigeration and the new televisions the young man had suggested. The drinks stock had to be replenished twice as often. Linen. Cleaning. Waste disposal. Breakages, because busier rooms break more plates. Card processing fees, which nobody ever thinks about until they are paying them on triple the volume. Every single thing that had made his restaurant successful had also made it more expensive to run.
Almost all of the money that came in the front door went straight back out the back one, offsetting one cost or another.
But all of that, David could manage. All of that was normal. All of that was the business.
What had brought him here today was one issue. One single, major problem that he could not solve from behind his own counter.
Ingredients.
Food ingredients. The lifeblood of any restaurant. The one cost you cannot cut without cutting your own throat, because the moment the food gets worse, the people stop coming, and the whole thing you built collapses.
His influx of customers had increased. Naturally, unavoidably, the volume of ingredients he needed had increased with it. And that was where the trouble started.
Normally, David had a small circle of farmers he bought his produce from. His brother-in-law, sitting across from him right now, among them. That arrangement had worked for years.
But when he went out to the others, the ones outside the family, and told them he needed more, that his orders were going to double, that he wanted to expand his inventory, well.
Let us just say they used it on him.
They came back with reasons. Legitimate ones, on paper. Fuel costs were up, and running the tractors and the delivery vans cost more than it did last season. Fertiliser prices had jumped, and everyone knew it, it was in the papers. Labour was harder to find and more expensive to keep. It had been a difficult growing season, hadn't it, with the weather doing what it did in the spring. And besides, if David wanted a guaranteed larger volume, week in and week out, then that meant they would have to allocate more of their land and their harvest to him specifically, and that meant turning away other buyers, and that carried a risk, and risk had a price.
Every single one of those reasons was true. Every single one of them was also, quite deliberately, being used as a lever.
They saw a man whose restaurant was suddenly full every single day, whose name was in the newspapers, whose son was on the television. They saw a man who could not afford to walk away.
So the prices went up. All of them. Across the board.
And David, with no real choice in the matter, had swallowed it and paid.
Which cut his profit down below the average line. Below the three percent. Below the bottom of the barrel.
For the 95 thousand euros that had come in through his doors, David King had cleared roughly 1,500 euros in net profit.
That was very bad.
"Oh." Oriol let out a long breath. "I understand."
And he did understand, completely, because Oriol was in a high revenue, high cost profession himself. He knew that squeeze intimately. And more than that, he knew exactly why those farmers had done what they had done, because he was a farmer, and if it had been anybody else, if David had not been family, Oriol would have raised his prices too.
Because from the other side of the fence, it looks different.
Farming is not a trade of large margins. It is a trade of thin ones, and of years where there are no margins at all. A farmer spends an entire season with his money in the ground, and he is at the mercy of the weather, of pests, of a market price he does not control, of a bad frost that can turn eight months of labour into nothing. Fuel really is up. Fertiliser really is up. Good workers really are hard to find. And when a buyer comes to you and says he wants double, and he wants it every single week, you do not hear opportunity, you hear risk. You hear a man asking you to build your whole harvest around him, and you know that if he stumbles, if his restaurant slows down, you are the one left holding the produce that nobody else has ordered.
So you charge for that. Not out of greed. Out of survival. Because farming is a business where the ground can betray you in one night, and every farmer alive is quietly trying to build a wall against the season that ruins him.
Not that David wanted to hear any of that right now.
Still, even understanding the problem, Oriol did not yet see what he was supposed to do about it, or what any of this had to do with a so-called business idea.
"But." He turned his glass slowly in his hand. "What is the plan? What does any of this have to do with a business?"
David smiled.
"That is the thing."
He set his own glass down.
"The costs are only going to keep going up. That is a fact. The bigger the restaurant gets, the more ingredients I need, and the more leverage every one of those farmers has over me. So I sat down and I asked myself, why am I taking all of that money outside?" He spread his hands. "Why am I handing it to strangers who are squeezing me for it, when I could be handing it to family?"
He grinned.
"I mean. Why eat outside?"
Oriol's brow creased.
"Wait. I do not follow."
And it was not that Oriol was slow. He understood the shape of what David was saying. What he did not understand was where any of it was actually going, because Oriol was a farmer, yes, but not all farmers are the same farmer.
After inheriting his father's 22 hectares, Oriol had specialised. Tomatoes were his big crop, the thing his land was good for and the thing he knew better than anything else in the world. Alongside them he grew peppers, onions, and potatoes. As for livestock, he kept chickens, but not for meat. His chickens were for eggs.
That was it. That was his bread and butter. Tomatoes, peppers, onions, potatoes, eggs.
For a restaurant, that did not even cover twenty percent of what a kitchen needs. No meat. No fish. No dairy beyond eggs. No greens, no herbs, no fruit, none of it.
Which was exactly why he was confused.
And that was when David leaned forward, and the charisma came out of him, the same charisma that had been quietly filling a restaurant for a year.
"That is the thing." He smiled. "That is the business I was talking about."
He let it sit for a beat.
"How would you feel about expanding the farm?"
Oriol's brows furrowed.
David saw it, and he did not wait. He kept going.
"Look, I have been thinking about this for a while now. Months. Hear me out."
And he laid it out.
The restaurant's demand for ingredients was not going to shrink. It was going to grow, and grow, and grow, especially if the second location happened, and especially if the franchise idea ever became real. That was not a maybe, that was arithmetic. Every year, the volume David needed would go up, and every year, he would be at the mercy of whoever grew it.
So instead of paying strangers an inflating price forever, why not build the supply inside the family?
Oriol expands. He takes on more land. He diversifies beyond tomatoes and peppers and onions and potatoes. He brings in the other lines a kitchen actually needs. He scales up the chickens for eggs, and maybe more. And in exchange, he gets something almost no farmer in Spain ever gets. He gets a guaranteed buyer. A fixed, contracted, year-round customer with a growing appetite, who is not going to walk away, and who is not going to haggle him down to nothing, because the buyer is his own brother-in-law and the buyer's profit depends on the farm surviving.
No more praying that the market price holds. No more chasing buyers at the end of a harvest. No more sitting on produce that nobody wants this month.
David gets his ingredients at a stable, agreed, market-fair price, locked in, with no seasonal ambushes, no sudden increases, no leverage being used against him ever again. His food costs become predictable, which means his margins become predictable, which means for the first time he can actually plan, actually budget, actually build. A restaurant that knows what its ingredients will cost next year is a restaurant that can open a second location.
Two businesses. One family. Each one feeding the other, in every sense of the word.
Oriol opened his mouth.
"But."
And then he stopped.
He stopped because something had just risen up in his own memory, and it took him a second to catch hold of it.
He found himself again.
"The farmers around here." He said it slowly. "The ones on the plots either side of me. They have been complaining for a while now. Some of them have had two bad seasons in a row. Fuel, fertiliser, everything, and the young ones have all gone to the cities anyway, so there is nobody to work the land and nobody to leave it to. Two of them have said, out loud, in front of me, that they are thinking of getting out. Selling up. Walking away from it entirely."
David sat up like a man who had been shocked.
"Really?"
"Really."
"Oh, that is." David bounced slightly in his seat, delighted. "Oriol, that is perfect. Do you know what I thought we would have to do? I thought we would have to go and buy land somewhere else entirely, out past the ridge, some plot with no water rights and no road access, and then work out how to run two separate sites, split the labour, split the equipment, move produce back and forth between them. It would have been a nightmare. I had a whole page of notes on how we might make it work."
He shook his head, laughing at himself.
"But this. This is even better. If those plots are right next to yours, and if you can come to a price agreement with them, then you are not building a second farm. You are just making this one bigger. Same road. Same water. Same equipment. Same everything, just more of it."
He waved a hand.
"And for the technicals, the contracts, the land transfer, all of that, we just ask Andrew."
He grinned.
"What is the point of having a lawyer in the family if we cannot even use him?"
He laughed at his own line.
Ever since the restaurant had started climbing, something in David King had woken back up. The ideas were coming again. The goals were coming again. The man who had once been good enough to be at Manchester City, who had let that dream go and quietly built a smaller one, was, at forty-nine years old, finally, actually living.
Across from him, Oriol had gone quiet.
He was thinking.
He was thinking the way a farmer thinks, which is slowly, and in seasons.
Twenty-two hectares now. If the two plots either side came available, and if the price was anywhere close to fair, that could take him past forty. Maybe more. The irrigation lines already ran along that boundary, he would only need to extend them, not rebuild them. The access road was shared. He would need a second tractor, or at least a serious repair on the one he had. He would need hands, real hands, four or five of them at least, and he would need to house at least two of them if he wanted them to stay.
But the crops. He could rotate properly for once. Put the tomatoes on rested ground instead of hammering the same soil year after year. Bring in courgettes, aubergines, the beans, the greens, the herbs a kitchen burns through. Expand the chickens, put up proper laying houses. And if the restaurant kept growing at even half this pace, if David really did open a second one, then there would be a buyer waiting for every single thing that came out of that ground before it was even planted.
That was the thing that kept turning over in his head.
A guaranteed buyer. Not a hope. Not a market price. A buyer.
He would be able to grow more, because he would know it was already sold. He would be able to invest in the land, in the equipment, in the people, because the income was not a gamble anymore. And David would get his ingredients at a fair, market-rate price, steady, year round, with none of these sudden ambushes.
Both of them would win. Genuinely, honestly, both of them would win.
Oriol let out a breath.
"This could actually work," he muttered.
David heard it, and he smiled.
"Of course it would work."
Oriol looked up.
"But what about the money?"
He said it skeptically, already shaking his head.
"The money to finance all of this, David, it would be." He waved a hand at the whole idea. "It would be enormous. Land, equipment, workers, buildings. Where would that even."
He did not finish.
David cut him off.
"Do not worry. I have an idea for that."
He leaned in.
"Andrew put me in touch with a banker. This was back when I first started talking about a second restaurant, and he wanted me to have someone proper to speak to. The man knows what he is doing. And I am telling you, if he sees this proposal, if he sees a farm with a contracted buyer already attached to it, I am fairly sure you would be eligible for a loan too."
The thought of asking his brother for money never once crossed David's mind. Nor, and this was the thing, did the thought of asking his son.
"A loan," Oriol said.
He said it the way most people say it. Because for anybody, anywhere, the thought of taking on debt is not a comfortable one, and Oriol was no different from anybody else. I mean he knew for a fact for this to go through he would have to put his father's land as collateral.
He sat there, looking across at David, who was smiling back at him with that open, hopeful face.
And slowly, Oriol found himself smiling too.
Because there was a reason this was a very, very enticing proposition for him. There was a reason that even the word "loan," which would normally have shut the conversation down cold, was not making him stand up and walk out of the room.
And that reason was that Oriol Cerdà, right now, more than at any other point in his entire life, wanted
Money.
His daughter had gotten into a big school in America.
And anyone who knows anything about America knows that America is almost synonymous with money. Whether it is making it, or whether it is costing you.
Oriol had googled the school. He had sat at his own kitchen table with his reading glasses on and typed it in with two fingers and looked at the tuition. Around 60 thousand dollars a year. And that was tuition alone. When he added the housing, the meal plan, the insurance, the books, the flights back and forth, the thousand small things that America invents to charge you for, he had worked it out to something closer to 70 thousand dollars a year.
Seventy thousand. Every year. For four years.
And just like David, Oriol was in a high revenue, high cost business.
Because that is what farming is. The money comes in at harvest and it leaves all year long. Seed and seedlings. Fertiliser. Pesticide. Diesel for the tractor, which is never not going up. Repairs, always repairs, because farm equipment is a machine that exists to break. Irrigation, and the water itself. Wages for the men who come at picking season. Packaging. Transport to market. The cut the distributor takes. Insurance. The land taxes. And in between all of it, a bad frost, a bad drought, a bad price, any one of which can take a year of it and turn it into nothing.
Oriol made roughly 120 thousand euros a year in revenue.
Out of that, his actual net profit was somewhere between 20 and 25 thousand.
The tuition was already double what he made in a year.
Of course, he knew perfectly well that his daughter had money of her own. He knew exactly what she had made acting, and he knew exactly why she had done it. She had done it so that she could afford this, so that when the day came she would be able to pay her own way and not have to ask anyone for anything.
But Oriol did not want that.
He was still alive. He was still here. He was still her father. Why should his daughter have to spend her own money on her own education while her father was standing right there, breathing, with two hands that still worked?
He had done his research. He had spent evenings on it, hunched over the computer with his glasses on. He had looked at student loans. He had discovered that even though she was not an American citizen, there were still routes, private lenders, co-signed arrangements. He had discovered that the Spanish government itself offered loans and grants to Spanish citizens studying abroad, a fact which had genuinely baffled him, because student debt simply was not a culture in Spain the way it was over there. Here, you went to university, and it cost what it cost, and it was not a life sentence.
And then he had read about how the American ones actually worked, and he had sat back in his chair.
Because it was insane. You borrow the money to get the education, and then the interest starts running before you have even finished the degree, and it keeps running while you look for work, and it keeps running while you are underpaid at your first job, and by the time you are properly earning, the number you owe is bigger than the number you originally borrowed. You pay every month for years. You pay faithfully. And the balance barely moves, because most of what you pay is going to the interest and not the debt itself. He read about people in their forties still paying for a degree they finished at twenty-two. He read about people who had paid back more than they borrowed and still owed the original amount.
Well, to keep the story short, all Oriol could say about it was this.
Student loans are such a big scam.
He had already been talking with Nora about pulling from the family savings, at the very least to cover Aina's first year. That was the plan. Scrape together one year, and then worry about the second one when it came.
And now, sitting in this room, he was looking at something that might let him cover all the rest of them.
Oriol looked up at David, who was still watching him, still smiling.
And slowly, Oriol smiled back.
"Tell me more."
...
Money was in the air today.
Andrew was counting it. David was thinking about it. And Oriol was already imagining what he would do with it.
All three men, sitting in three different rooms in three different parts of the same country, were doing the same thing at the same time. Calculating money. Talking money. Turning money over in their heads the way you turn over a stone to see what is underneath.
It was the thought sitting behind the eyes of almost every man in Barcelona right now.
But for all of that, for all the sums and the figures and the quiet arithmetic going on in kitchens and offices and farmhouses across the city, not one of them was thinking about money on the scale of one particular man.
Joan Laporta.
The president of FC Barcelona.
Right now, in Barcelona, or rather in the whole of the country, there was nobody with bigger ideas about money than Joan Laporta. And more specifically, about how to get it. About how to pull it, by whatever means and from whatever hands, into the accounts of a club drowning in debt.
And this party he had put together tonight, this small, controlled, harmless little dinner he had so patiently talked his manager into allowing, was one of the biggest springboards he had.
"Welcome. Welcome!"
Laporta stood at the entrance with his arms already open before the man had even fully stepped out of the car. Beside him, half a pace back and considerably more restrained, stood Ferran Reverter, the club's chief executive.
The guest came up the steps, smiling, extending a hand.
"Congratulations on the win, Joan. What a night that was."
"Ah!" Laporta seized the hand in both of his and shook it. "Thank you. Thank you, thank you. It was something, eh? It was really something."
They laughed together, that particular laughter of important men greeting each other in doorways.
"Your table is inside," Laporta said, gesturing with an open palm, still holding the man's hand with the other. "Please. Please, go through, everything is ready."
Ferran gave the man a small, precise nod.
"Mister Gortázar. It is our pleasure to host you this evening."
The man returned the nod, gracious, unhurried, and moved on into the building with his date for the evening on his arm.
Gonzalo Gortázar Rotaeche.
Chief executive of CaixaBank.
The largest bank in all of Spain. The bank of FC Barcelona. An institution sitting on over 650 billion euros in assets.
These were the sort of heavyweights Laporta had brought in tonight.
And in a few minutes, a seventeen-year-old boy in a suit he had already outgrown was going to walk through that same door.