TERMS OF ENGAGEMENT

CHAPTER THREE: TERMS OF ENGAGEMENT

Anaan met her in a conference room on Adeola Odeku Street. Glass table. Leather chairs. A view of the harbor if you turned your head at the right angle. He had arrived first, which was his habit, and stood at the window until he heard the door.

He had expected something more yielding, perhaps. Someone who arrived already half-persuaded by the weight of the Cole name, who would look at the room and the view and the quality of the furniture and understand which direction the calculus pointed. He had dealt with enough people who performed independence while privately being quite easily impressed.

Nancy Mawethu walked in and looked at no one but him.

She was not tall, but she occupied her height completely. The gray dress was neither formal nor casual but existed in some precise middle distance, and her hair was pulled back in a way that left her face entirely visible — every expression available, nothing obscured. She looked at him the way an architect looks at a building that has been presented as extraordinary: with interest, with skepticism, and with the understanding that she had her own measurements.

"Mr. Cole," she said.

"Miss Mawethu." He gestured toward the chairs. "Please."

She sat and placed her bag on the table and did not fidget with it. He sat across from her. His lawyer, Marcus, occupied the chair to his left like a piece of furniture that might speak if required.

"You've read the will," Anaan said.

"I have."

"Then you know what's being asked."

"I know what your grandfather arranged without consulting either of us." She held his gaze. "I also know it isn't the first time a Cole made a decision that affected my family without their knowledge or consent."

The directness of it was not what he had anticipated. He paused, recalibrated. "I won't insult you by pretending this arrangement is conventional."

"Good. Then let's be clear about what it is." She opened her bag and set a single folded sheet on the table — her own notes, written in a firm, angular hand. "A contract. I'm willing to honor the terms of your grandfather's will. But I have conditions of my own."

"Which are?"

"I maintain my employment. I maintain my flat in Surulere for the duration. We live under the same roof as the will requires, but my space within the house is my own. There will be no performance of intimacy beyond what is necessary in public. And we do not lie to each other." She paused. "About anything."

Anaan studied her for a long moment. Then he looked at his own lawyer. "Add a clause ensuring her current salary is supplemented from the household account if her firm presents any conflict of interest. Her professional independence is guaranteed."

Nancy looked at him — briefly, a flicker of something that was not quite surprise but was adjacent to it.

"There is one more thing," she said.

"Name it."

"I want access to the Cole Holdings archive from fifteen years ago. Employment records. Internal correspondence from the period surrounding my father's dismissal." She did not look away. "I want to know what actually happened to him. And I suspect you already know part of the answer."

The room held itself carefully.

Anaan's jaw tightened — almost imperceptibly, but she was watching with the precision of a woman who reads structures for a living, and she caught it.

"We can discuss the archive," he said.

"I'm not asking to discuss it. I'm asking for access."

Another pause. Then: "You'll have it."

She nodded once. She picked up her notes, folded them back into her bag, and looked at him with an expression he would spend the next several weeks attempting to interpret.

"Six months," she said. "We honor his terms. Then we decide what comes after."

"Agreed," said Anaan Cole.

And that was how two strangers, in a glass-walled room above the gray harbor of Lagos, agreed to build a life together from the ruins of someone else's guilt.