She built him in a room with no window on the fourth floor, over four months, in the spring she was twenty-two.
A legend is not a name.
That is the first thing they teach you and it is the thing nobody outside the building ever understands: a name takes an afternoon. A passport takes about nine days and four people. A legend is a life, and it has to be able to be pulled on from any thread at all, by anybody, at any point, for as long as the person is inside it.
Tomas Reis. Born Setúbal, fourteenth of March.
Mother: Alzira Reis, schoolteacher, died 2019.
Father: unknown, which nobody ever asks about twice.
Sister: Marta, Coimbra. Estranged since a funeral in 2021.
Marine engineering at the polytechnic. Four years, one repeated.
Two years on supply boats out of Aberdeen, which explains the English.
A knee that goes in cold weather.
The knee is hers and it is on page eleven and it is the thing she was proudest of at twenty-two.
She put it in because a legend with no inconvenience in it is not believed. A man with a perfect history is a man who has been written. A man with a knee that goes in the last week of November, every year, since a thing that happened on a boat in a year he does not talk about, is a man.
She built the bank account.
Eleven years of transactions, seeded backwards, four hundred and eleven of them, and every single one of them is a decision: a gym membership cancelled after nine weeks. A fine for a bicycle light in 2019. A standing order of thirty euros a month to a woman in Setúbal that stops in March 2021.
She built the sister.
She never met him.
That is standard and it is absolute and there are four paragraphs about it in the handbook: the people who build legends do not meet the people who wear them, because the day you have a face in your head you start writing for the face.
She was told he was thirty when she was twenty-two.
She was told nothing else, ever, for six years.
And every year on the fourteenth of March, at about eleven o'clock at night, Ines Duarte — twenty-three, then twenty-five, then twenty-eight — sat wherever she happened to be sitting and thought about a man somewhere in Portugal having a birthday she had made up on a Tuesday afternoon in a room with no window.
She has never told anybody that.
She told him, in the end, on the seventh night, in a flat in Graça, in the dark, and it is the only thing she has ever said out loud that she wishes she had said sooner.