Chapter Text
It is a horrible no good Wednesday and Ilena is yet to speak to a new client. Her blouse had been streaked with coffee from being knocked around in the subway and there is nothing decent nor gentle left in her. If the client turns out to be a piece of work, she will react in such a way to have a new law named after her.
The whispering inside the office had been unbearable when she stepped foot in it. Even the Boss is strolling through the corridors, though usually he's very indulgent of the noise. Ilena complained in innumerable ways that the noise can exist, it needs to coexist with an optimal working environment. Viv called her a killjoy and booed. Rodri, as one of the named partners, with actual authority that he never exercised, had shrugged, palms turned up. Ilena texted Mikel, the real neck of authority to complain. Mikel took everyone out to dinner to mediate and then gently sent her on two weeks of stress leave. She came back with less bite in her disposition.
"Please tell me the client cancelled," she begs the receptionist, Hortensia, who pats her hand pityingly and shakes her head. "Watch the noise!" She barks down the corridor and the noise intensifies. Rodri rounds the corner to meet her head on. She crosses her arms.
"The client that's coming," the Boss begins, "an old work colleague, friend adjacent. Mikel had always been closer to him."
"Okay?" Ilena frowns. "Is this going to be a conflict of interest?"
Rodri shakes his head. "I haven't given advice. We barely spoke." Ah, Mikel must have been held back from giving this friend extensive advice. Ilena had been given advice against her will, both personally and professionally. She can barely sympathise.
"So what is it?" She needles. "Kids? Divorce? Property? Spousal maintenance?" Rodri smiles at her blandly and indulgently. Fair. She could get that out of the friend and more. "And what friend is this?"
"A senor Torres," Hortensia can't help but chime in with a giggle. Ilena's unimpressed look galls Hortensia and amuses Rodri in equal shares.
"Am I supposed to know every one of their friends?" She gestures to Rodri and the absent Mikel, they who have too many friends.
"It's Ferran," Rodri decides to rescue her. She rolls her eyes. Yeah right, and my uncle's the Pope.
"What, like the footballer?" Hortensia nods and widens her eyes. Rodri's smile cannot get any wider physically. Ilena blinks. They are serious. "The Ferran Torres is coming here?" That explains the noise and buzz in the office. "He knows we don't do sports law contracts or defamation, yes? He should already have an inhouse legal team for that."
"Ferran contacted us for legal help," Rodri shrugs. "After we explained that our firm only helps with family law, we've booked him in for an appointment. He may not look it, but Ferri will take a secret to the grave." For good reasons. Rodri would probably snitch to both his current and previous partner, and by the next day, half the city would know Ferran Torres' family law issues. Ilena does not have the capacity to care or know about footballers – she's treated like an anomaly to resist such a prevalent feature of her environment by families and friends, but it is this anomaly that makes her work so effective. Being hired by an ex-footballer-now-turned-lawyer was another day for her. She knew her colleagues socially and professionally, not through a screen watching them kick a ball around. There were display cases of trophies and medals in Rodri's house and tales of the good ol' days. All of which meant nothing to her.
The vast amount of money paid was the main deciding factor in Ilena treating these grown manchildren like a consummate professional. Oh, and the piping hot tea, which she could hardly tell anyone. Most of the time it's incredibly abusive tea and the women in these relationships leaving with white hands. Occasionally though, the tea is great. Ilena is yet to know the direction of the tea today.
"I'll go in by myself. You'll only make it worse. Will an agent be there? I will tell this friend that interview is not privileged if there's a third party," she taps her nails on her battered laptop. Rodri waves her in as she squares her shoulders.
Despite her best efforts, Ilena cannot escape football gossip and talks. She must have spent many years having Ferran Torres' face shoved in her line of sight and bowing out of conversations when the direction turned into gossip about every single thing the guy did. It is surreal to meet the man behind the noise after years of being tortured with unasked facts about him and not feel jarring. He looks both thirty and fifty-five, greying around his temples, with a dark beard. He could be called objectively attractive, but under the harsh closed-room lighting, his sunken and red-eyed look renders him incredibly pitiful.
Ilena places her laptop down and tries for a neutral, non-combative expression. Ferran Torres makes a face which gossip magazines would call broodingly handsome, but Ilena would call grown ass man having a sulk. His arms are crossed, a sliver of a friendship bracelet showing from the cuffs of his suit jacket.
"Hi, I'm Ilena Young," she introduces herself. "I'm a senior family lawyer at Hernandez and Oyarzabal. I understand you are a friend of the partners, Mikel and Rodrigo."
The agent makes a face. Ferran's expression sours.
"I don't need to introduce myself then."
She powers through. "I understand you are here for an appointment about a family law matter. As this is a preliminary meeting, during this appointment, I will be finding out information about your situation to assess if you have a case and if we can assist. To do that, you will need to cooperate and provide details that I request to help me help you. If your matter requires further legal assistance, I will discuss with you about the next steps. It may be myself or another colleague who will be allocated your matter. However, anything you tell me during this appointment is confidential and will be disclosed to your future lawyer with your express permission." Ilena turns to the agent acting like a decorative house plant. "I'm bound by professional conduct not to disclose any of this interaction, but that does not extend to you. Before any sensitive details are revealed, do you, senor Torres, consent for a third party to be present?"
Ferran Torres sends the agent away.
Ilena enjoys the pinched look the man gives her when she asks him to ring up a smoothie for her from next door.
She sprawls into her chair, a conference table separating her and this new client. Ilena has heard all sorts of sordid celebrity and regular people's family dramas, enough to desensitise her from all the sensitive details. All day, what she does is family law, but everyone else, even famous footballers with faces plastered on advertisements, only have family law problems once in their lives.
"Do you want a tea or coffee?" She asks in Catalan. He stares at her. "Not Catalan?" She tries Aragonese.
He sits up. "I'm Valencian."
"Cool," she nods. "Never been. Mi pareja, they're from the Pyrenees." He slumps again, one hand fiddling with the now visible friendship bracelets. She notes, with neutral interest, that his ring finger does not have a tan line. "Tea would be good to hold when you're having hard conversations." She adds.
"I might burn myself if I hold any hot liquid right now," he laughs without any humour, looking at a spot on the table. Then, without fanfare or preamble, he says - "I'm here to talk about getting a divorce."
Her stock standard response rolls off her tongue. "I'm very sorry to hear. This must be a tough time." Then, in a normal voice, she asks. "When did you get married?"
He stares at her, eyes wide. She matches his stare.
"You don't have that information on file?" Lawyers should be acting on instructions. Ilena has no desire to blunder into sports law, but usually her source of information should be 1. The client and then 2. Official reports. Perhaps with defamation and sports laws the sources and gossip precede the client's instructions, which is a horrific way to conduct business, to always be on the back foot.
"I act on instructions, which means simply that I will receive the information from you first and fact check with the authorities after. With marriages and divorces, I will need to obtain a sealed copy of your marriage certificate. So, you can tell me now or we can both find out together when the Civil Registry forwards me with a copy." Injecting a little humour in her voice, Ilena adds. "Sometimes the spouse that my clients instructed that they are married to turn out to be someone different when comparing with the records."
Ferran cards a hand through his long hair. "The media doesn't know I'm married. Nor do our parents and friends. I didn't know if I or whatever got out or not, sorry, I'm just trying to get things under control."
Ilena's face assumes what she hopes is a kind and approachable expression. "The divorce will not be a headline on the evening news. The media will not be permitted to report on confidential family law proceedings, because the media is not above the law," she sits back in a sprawl. "How did the marriage happen?" Ilena asks very seriously. "And do not tell me it was one of those Vegas weddings." That gets her a startled laugh.
"You're right that it wasn't the traditional church wedding," the sound of shuffled feet. That sounds like a Vegas shotgun wedding. "It was legal. Still legal, apparently. Have been a legal partnership since 2026." It is now November of 2035. A whole decade had almost gone past.
"Have you ever lived together under the same roof after registering the marriage?"
He blinks, recalling the timeline. "It was the World Cup in 2026. July. After the victory parade in Madrid." Then, avoiding her eyes, he looks at another spot in the room's corner. "We were blindingly drunk and had access to both our birth certificates, passports and my sister witnessed the registration." Ferran runs both hands through his hair and powers on. "It was half a joke and then some of a bet with the guys. No one thought we would go through with it and when we became sober after exchanging rings, no one would really believe we went and got legally married. We never really lived together. I work in France and my spouse's work is in Spain, so nothing about our lives changed drastically. I don't think we planned it to be, like, this permanent legal thing."
There are worse reasons to get married, but this is pretty up there. What a dumb and reckless statement. A permanent legal binding and two idiots had done it whilst inebriated and as part of a bet. She quickly ran the numbers for Ferran's age. He would have been twenty-six years young, but not young enough to be this stupid. They don't pay her enough to suffer like this.
Ilena opens her mouth, after seconds of consideration. "It may be a long marriage, nearing a decade, but the fact that you were not living together will be considered by the court. Can you confirm that you weren't intending to be married from the start?"
"Yes," he says, empathic. Ilena whistles softly. The poor soul who's stuck with this guy. "I pretty much flew to France right after the paperwork was filed away. I found a copy of it in my spouse's home recently when this all came about."
"Were there attempts to reverse the marriage at the start?"
Ferran shrugs, turning noticeably pink. "I wish I could even say that but, on my part, I genuinely forgot about it. I'm paid to play sports, not to be smart. I barely went to school." At least at his thirty-five years, a footballer has gained a sense of self reflection.
Her tone is dry and matter-of-fact. "And no legal advice at any point either?"
The man shrugs and offers her a raised shoulder. "If there's no problem, don't go find a lawyer?" Which might be the first smart thing he's said.
"So at any point," she begins, slowly, like approaching a witness on the stand, or rather, an animal in the wild. "Did you present as a couple or have knowledge that this was a legal union?"
Ferran shrugs. "We only meet a few times per year after I transfer to France. Not a lot of talking when I return to France. We are lovers. Or were, to our inner circle. It was important that only the right people know about us. To the public eye, we have a long-term friendship. It's literally never been brought up until very recently, when I realised that we are still married when I was operating on the assumption that we were unattached. Luckily, neither of us have been trying to get married to other people in the ten years we've clearly been married together."
Ilena needs something stronger than a smoothie. A man would want to be fuckbuddies for a decade and the minute he finds out he got married to you while drunk, his backpedalling includes lawyers and a lot of money thrown at the problem he created at twenty-six years of age.
"I understand your concerns that the premise of this marriage stems from drunken decisions and that up until recently, you forgot it exists at all. You want to match the legal reality to the social perception that you are both unattached. Should you, quite reasonably, want to marry another spouse in the future, you would need to be divorced from this current spouse. When one spouse wants a divorce and the other doesn't, that relationship needs to either end in a separation or a reconciliation. You have chosen to end your legal relationship with a divorce. Divorce is a permanent separation, legally and financially, Senor Torres. Our firm will be able to guide you through the process and application of divorce. Do you know what your spouse's attitude is in regard to separation and subsequent divorce?" At the face he's making, she smothers a sigh. Poor girl.
"Not keen," Ferran admits, shame-faced. "I don't think I helped, playing up the work husband joke for nine years in a row."
"You work with your spouse?" Ilena confirms. He nods reluctantly. "Does the HR department of Spain's football federation know about ...?" She can't characterise it as anything than 'bundle of shitfuck that you've got going on'. She barely even wants to draft his application.
"Marc?" He supplements. "Marc Pubill. I never told them anything about my marital status. I'm not sure if Marc told them."
She commits the name to memory. "What does Marc do for work? Physio, nutritionist, consultant, analyst?" At Ferran's continuously wide-eyed look, Ilena powers through. "Is he a coach? Because that may be a different lawsuit you're looking at for employment law."
Her client looks at her with slack-jawed. "Marc is a man."
"I'm aware, Senor Torres."
"I'm married to a man."
"Very legally, as you told me. I will need to verify with the registry for the administrative details, but nothing is dissuading me now from taking you at your word." His baffled expression remains, with a tinge of something like relief. No one alive says I'm married to a man and meant it as a joke, not when it is Ferran Torres, notorious footballer, two-time World Cup champion. "Sometimes, Senor, what is legal may not be socially acceptable. It is legal for two men to marry in all territories of Spain since 2005."
Ferran Torres locates his tongue. "Marc is a footballer. At the national level," he reiterates. "We have common interests and he was cool with marrying another man."
Ilena stops typing. Breathes in deeply. Technically, they are coworkers and there are no power dynamics. Legally, she will need to check with the registry. Privately, she shifts all her previous laments for this boy, Marc Pubill, who thought he was married to Spanish champion and instead has to face upcoming divorce litigation.
"I need to return to the point I made about presenting as a couple. Publicly, that wasn't possible, but you were, up until recently, lovers to your inner circle." She confirms.
"Lovers, but not married couple," he emphasises. May God deliver her from evil.
"When and how did you know that you're still married?"
"Recently he got hurt. Marc told the hospital to call me. I asked him when he woke up why I was allowed in and he said we're next of kin, I have all the rights. I was still jetlagged so it took me a while, then when I was signing his discharged form, I was horrified that he put me now as 'legal spouse' because we were married, he's not done anything wrong legally. I said to him 'Marc, I totally forgot about us being legally married' and he laughed, because apparently that was hilarious, but this was no laughing matter. He told me he didn't forget, and he memorised my number every time I changed it so I could be called in as his next of kin since his parents are too far away."
Ilena exhales roughly. "Senor Pubill and you never talked about the legitimacy of the marriage during the length of it, but you think it was founded on an illegitimate reason, that you now want to delegitimise it, for completeness sake."
"Yeah," Ferran agrees miserably. "That's exactly that. I know you'll get it."
"How did he react to you wanting to divorce?" It can't have been a resounding "okay babe let's do that" because they'll both be in this office. Marc Pubill sounds like an easygoing man from the sounds of it – easy to marry and easy to divorce.
His face pinches. "I told him when he got discharged that it's not right that we're still married and I am very sorry I put him through that. I think it's come about at a good time because we're at settling down ages and we should be getting married to our actual life partners. Which I don't think we are. He thought I was joking around, like I would, and he was saying shit like "Ferri, meu estimada, don't say upsetting things to your husband". I was so upset I think I almost threw up several times, but I kept repeating that we should be getting divorced. I've never been on the other end of Marc's anger. He was saying stuff like "you cannot be seriously doing this ten years into a commitment" and "how could you forget you were married?" "Ferri, can't we work on things?" When I wasn't engaging, he made me drive him to our closest friend's Marcos' place." He says around an eyeful of tears. "I am going to lose Marcos in the divorce."
She pats around for a handkerchief and offers the fabric pinched between her fingers. Ferran hesitates but she flaps the fabric until he accepts it.
"You won't be getting a divorce that easily if you think you beat him in getting a lawyer first," Ilena explains.
Ferran sneezes into her mother's handkerchief. "Wha – what?"
"Usually, when both spouses want to be divorced, they would file one application for divorce. To the court, the divorce would be a matter of procedural approval. However, if only one spouse wants a divorce, they will need to complete a sole application for divorce and then alert the other spouse that a divorce application is happening. The other spouse can object, or agree to apply jointly for a divorce. My concern is that Senor Pubill will object, and you both will need to attend an objection hearing where oral submissions are made as to why the divorce should go ahead." The procedure is as standard to her as breathing, but to the increasingly distressed Ferran Torres, where he is learning for the first time how the legal system works, it cannot be fun to know.
"What do I do then?" He asks her, miserably.
Don't get married to your friends as a joke, she thinks. "We can write to him and his legal representative to propose a joint application to divorce to reduce costs to the overall process. I want to confirm that you definitively wish to be divorced. If not, I recommend that you and Senor Pubill participate in couple's counselling or mediation."
More heavy breathing into the handkerchief. He has his whole face squashed into the fabric. Ilena looks at the ceiling.
"It's the right thing to do," Ferran emerges from the handkerchief. "I love him, and I have been an idiot about everything. This is the right thing to do. For him, mostly. He deserves a happy, lifelong partnership with a partner of his choosing and not as part of a decade long joke and scam."
She understands some of the reasoning, even if she does not agree with her unwitting involvement in the process. The crux of the dilemma is that this particular client had recently realised he was married and is taking steps to annul what could be argued as a fraudulent union. She does not want to argue this point because it is a thorn in her side. What isn't a great point in his favour is that he had been sitting on his hands for ten years, but better late than never. These footballers might start adopting kids legally and Ferran Torres would be none the wiser.
"Concurrent to the legal separation, I recommend that you finalise any outstanding financial matters within this relationship so that you do not have to lodge an out of time application for property settlement. You may not think of it at the time of marriage, but even short marriages have assets to settle." She sighs, switching over to property and praying that there will be less emotional outbursts.
He squirms. "We signed a prenup. I brought it here with me." He turns to take out a folder. A single piece of rumpled carnival flyer, illegible handwriting and stylised footballer signatures at the bottom. She can genuinely only be able to understand the date the agreement was signed: July 2026.
Ilena squints. "Thank you... Very brief. There's not a lot that you wrote on here. Can you summarise the agreement?"
"Oh," Ferran shrugs tearily. "Each spouse to keep their respective properties and investments, I'm pretty sure. We didn't want to rob each other." They probably make the same amount anyways, even if Ilena suspects Ferran was raking in way more with all the ads and endorsements. "I think I need to get back my family ring and necklaces though. Marc has them."
If Marc Pubill is going to be cooperative. Ilena's unprofessional assessment of this matter is that there isn't a divorce and the parties need to attend couple's counselling.
"I have assessed that you have a case and that we will be able to assist. Our paralegals will get some forms for you to sign, set up a trust account and allocate your matter to a lawyer. When that is done, you will need to provide your husband's contact details so that our firm can begin serving him with the applications and begin negotiations." At Ferran's ashen face, she slows down the explanations. "The last part does not need to happen now. I will return you to your agent."
As she rises, Ferran also does. He's tall, light eyes, an objectively beautiful Mediterranean sight. It is highly unprofessional, but Ilena will have to look up Marc Pubill's photos to see what that spouse looks like. Then compare photos of them together posing as friends and coworkers.
"Will you be my lawyer?" Ferran asks, soft, eyes pleading.
Ilena actually has quite a lot to do, but after some quick cost benefit calculations, she thinks she might as well see this to an end. The property and divorce may not eventuate. Why not have the firm owners owe her a favour?
"I'd be honoured. Pleasure doing business with you, Senor Torres," she extends a hand.
He takes her hand in his, grip firm and callused. "Please, it's Ferran."
"Then I insist that you call me by first name too." Ilena responds. Then, because her whole afternoon is pretty much over, she asks winningly – "Do you mind following me inside and saying hi to a few people?"