The Cottage Door

Adaeze gets there first.

She drives herself, which she never does in Lisbon, because what she needs to say to Veira is not something she can say with a third person in the car. Not because it's secret. Because it requires a quality of privacy she has not often allowed herself, and the drive is where she finds it.

She finds the village by postcode and the cottage by walking the one main street until she sees a grey-and-white cat in the window of a stone building at the end of a lane. The cat looks at her with the expression of an animal who has been briefed.

She knocks.

Veira opens the door. They look at each other. Adaeze has been preparing for this moment for three weeks and finds, standing here, that preparation was largely useless. You rehearse the version of the conversation where you say the right things in the right order. What actually happens is a door and a face and the complete realisation that there is no version of this that doesn't start with being honest about why you're here.

Veira steps back from the door. She puts the kettle on. Variable watches Adaeze from the armchair with the focused reserve of someone who has already formed an opinion.

They sit at the kitchen table. The cottage is warm and spare and smells of coffee and sea air. Through the window the cliff path is visible and below it a strip of grey water.

"I chaired the Florence meeting," Adaeze says.

"I know."

"I want to take responsibility for that in a way that doesn't turn this into an exercise in my absolution, so I'm going to say what I'm responsible for specifically and then stop."

"Go ahead."

"I wrote the agenda. I sourced the venue. I set the format and kept the meeting on task and drove it through its items with full professional efficiency." She looks at her hands on the table. "At no point did I introduce the question that wasn't on the agenda. The question of what you wanted. I didn't introduce it because it didn't occur to me to introduce it, and it didn't occur to me because I had been thinking about you for six months as a strategic asset and strategic assets don't have preferences that need to be consulted, they have characteristics that need to be managed." She pauses. "You are not a strategic asset. I knew this. I filed it and kept moving."

Veira says: "Why."

Adaeze considers this properly. "Because I have spent fifteen years building something in a world that did not expect me to build it, and I learned to be efficient above other things because efficiency was the quality that allowed me to survive the rooms I was in. I stopped asking certain questions because certain questions slow things down, and slowing down, in those rooms, cost me." She pauses. "That is an explanation. It is not an excuse. The rooms I was in were not the room in Florence, and you were not an obstacle to be worked around. You were a person I had chosen to know, and I managed you anyway."

There is a silence. Veira is looking at her with the building quality of attention that Adaeze has observed since their first meeting constructing a model in real time from whatever is being given to it.

"Thank you for being specific," Veira says.

"I have a lot of practice at specific."

"I know. I've read your market analyses." Something moves across Veira's face that is almost amusement. "The 2022 European bond assessment. Section four was exceptional."

Adaeze says: "I was particularly pleased with the momentum modelling."

"So was I. I had three questions about it I never got to ask."

They look at each other. Something settles not warmth yet, the ground is too newly turned for warmth, but the specific recognition of two people who, under different circumstances, would have found each other interesting without any of the complications.

"I'm going to ask you something," Veira says.

"Yes."

"The man in the corner chair. The neutral investigator. Emre Yildiz."

Adaeze says: "What about him."

"What do you know about him."

She considers this carefully. "Less than I should, I think. He's been trusted by all five bloodlines for seven years. He attended Florence. He said almost nothing. He asked to be the one to find you, when we discussed it in Edinburgh." She pauses. "He knows things about you that none of the rest of us know. I don't know the source. I haven't pushed for it, which I'm retroactively not comfortable with."

"He called me."

Adaeze looks at her.

"Three days ago. Said he needed to come and tell me something." She looks at the window, the cliff. "I told him I'd let him know when."

Adaeze says: "And?"

"And I'm making him wait a little longer. Not cruelly. Just long enough that when he comes, he comes having sat with it. People say better things when they've had to live with the alternative for a while."

Adaeze looks at this woman in a cottage on the Scottish Borders coast, managing the most important conversation of her own life with the same clean precision she applies to everything else, and she thinks: we all underestimated her. Every single one of us, in every single way, consistently and comprehensively.

She finishes her coffee. She says: "I'd like to come back. Not about the Folklore. Just I'd like to come back."

Veira says: "The 2022 bond assessment. Section four. I had those three questions."

"I'll come back next week."

She goes. Driving back north through the Borders hills, grey-green and vast on either side, she thinks about the meeting in Florence. The agenda she wrote. The item that wasn't there. She thinks about what it would have changed if she had stopped the meeting once and said: we should probably talk about what she actually wants.

Everything. It would have changed everything.

She drives faster.