Chapter 8: Becoming the Man

It didn’t happen with ceremony. No formal invitation. Just a subtle shift in temperature.

After Madrid, I stopped feeling like a guest in Rivière’s world. And started to feel… expected.

I was no longer observed, I was placed. One seat away from a sovereign wealth fund advisor. Next to a winemaker who quietly owned a dozen ports in the Mediterranean. In the back of the room during an oil negotiation that never made the news because it never needed to.

Rivière never made a speech. But one night, over a quiet meal in Zurich, he looked at me across the table and said:

“You were never pretending. You just needed to be seen.”

Then he went back to his risotto like he hadn’t just rearranged my entire origin story.

That was how it began.

He didn’t teach. He revealed.

He taught me how to say less, how to listen for leverage, how to let silence do the heavy lifting in any conversation.

He showed me how influence travels, not with money, but with proximity.

I watched men in Zegna whisper deals across centuries-old dining tables. Women who shaped industries over candlelight and half-closed windows. I saw how real power moved: not loudly, but inevitably.

And through it all, Rivière positioned me not as his assistant, not as his shadow.

But as his successor.

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He never said it outright. But I saw it in the way people looked at me when he introduced me now.

With a pause. A shift. A flicker of calculation.

They weren’t wondering who I was.

They were wondering how soon I’d matter more.

He made me feel chosen. And for a while… I believed him.

I still wore the RM. The original. The one that had started all of this and now, Alexandre’s had joined it.

Two watches. Real ones. Tangible proof of a story too surreal to explain.

And then came the others.

A discreet Patek Grandmaster gifted by a gallery patron in Florence after a shared moment in front of an unlabelled canvas. A vintage platinum Portugieser that came wrapped in soft felt and handed to me by the widow of its original owner. No box. No papers. Just provenance written in grief.

They weren’t trophies. Not flexes. They were passports. Invitations. Keys.

I no longer spoke the language of reps. I didn’t need to.

Because the people who mattered didn’t need convincing, they just needed a glance.

My choices spoke for me. Not loudly. But in a dialect only a few recognised. A whisper that meant, you belong.

I moved through this world in tailored clothes stitched in silence, with watches that weren’t for sale, escorted by drivers who never confirmed who sent them.

I dined in restaurants where menus were considered crude. Was dressed by tailors who never asked for payment only preference. Attended events where the location was never shared only the time, and a car to take you there.

Nothing I wore screamed. But everything I carried listened.

And for a while, maybe longer than I’d like to admit, I believed I’d become the man they saw.