THE PLUS-ONE

DAMI

She didn’t say yes.

Most people do, when I ask them something in that tone. Board members. Bankers. My mother, once, in 2019.

Amanda Okorie looked at me like I’d suggested she set the hotel on fire, said, “I have a three o’clock,” and walked away down that hideous carpet with her gold folder pressed to her chest like a shield.

I let her go.

People who give such response are usually thinking about it.

……………….

I know more about Daniel Cole than his barber does. I know where his history stops, and it stops far too recently for a man of thirty-two. I know about four small transfers out of my sister’s trust that nobody else has noticed.

I’ll show her. When she’s ready to look.

I’ll be honest. I had expected the ex-fiancée to be a problem. Bitter. Messy. The kind of woman who leaks screenshots.

Instead I got invoices.

Beautiful, irritating, itemised invoices. When I asked about the candles, she sent me a breakdown by height, burn time and fire code. When I questioned the styling f*e, she attached a photo of a ballroom before and after. I stared at that photo longer than I’d like to admit.

Then today she walked into a room, found carnations, replaced them with peonies from her own car, and sat through lunch while her ex-fiancé ate scallops at her.

I don’t respect many people. I made a note.

She still thinks the referral came from a christening in Ikoyi.

Let her.

……………….

The engagement dinner was the next evening, in my mother’s garden.

Sixty guests. Fairy lights in the frangipani. A string trio that kept playing Tems’s ‘Raindance’, the acoustic version, like it owed them money.

Amanda was everywhere.

Black dress, earpiece, clipboard. She caught a falling tray without looking at it. She steered a drunk uncle away from the champagne tower with one hand on his elbow and a smile that said ‘I will wrap you in the table linen and bury you under the floral decor.’ She fixed a wobbly table leg with a folded coaster and kept walking.

She did not look at Daniel once.

I know, because I was watching Daniel.

He was good. I’ll give him that. He laughed at Aunt Abike’s dry jokes. He knew which fork. He called my mother “Chief” until she told him to call her Mummy, and then he called her Mummy like he’d been born to it.

My mother, Chief (Mrs.) Imelda Ajayi-Williams, has buried two husbands and one hostile takeover. She does not tell people to call her Mummy. That alone should have frightened everyone at the table.

Tiwa was glowing. She’d tucked a peony behind her ear.

“Isn’t this perfect?” she whispered. “Mandy did all of it. Isn’t she amazing?”

“She’s efficient,” I said, my eyes meeting the planner’s as she directed a caterer. She looked away immediately, just as she had done since I arrived. I had been waiting for her answer since the tasting, but she had been silent.

Perhaps she needed more time to think. Though how long was one supposed to take before deciding to stick it to an ex who had pulled such a stunt on her? Not that I should have been surprised. She had already gone three months without doing anything.

“Wait. Did you just compliment someone?” Tiwa said, squeezing my arm and redirecting my eyes back to her. “Lare. After Lara, I thought you’d given up on women entirely.”

“I’ve given up on this conversation.”

Two seats down, Aunt Abike said, “Ejoo, leave him,” in the voice of a woman who had no intention of leaving me.

I drank my wine.

The empty chair beside me belonged to Iris, my mother’s goddaughter, who had been seated there with intent and had given up on me before the starters. My mother arranges tables the way other families arrange marriages.

Dessert came out. Lemon tart, sugared violets on top. Amanda paused at the head of the table to check the plating.

Daniel saw his chance.

“Everyone, everyone.” He tapped his glass. “I just want to thank our planner. Mandy, come here, don’t be shy.”

She stopped. Didn’t come closer.

“Mandy’s the best,” he went on, warm, generous, a man giving a toast. “Honestly, she’s the only person who could plan this. She knows exactly what a wedding is supposed to look like.” He smiled around the table. “She plans other people’s happily-ever-afters because she couldn’t keep her own.”

Prick.

A few people laughed. The polite kind. The kind that doesn’t know what it’s laughing at.

Tiwa frowned. “Babe?”

“It’s a joke. She knows it’s a joke.” He raised his glass at her. “Right?”

Amanda smiled.

It was a good smile. Professional. If I hadn’t seen her hands in that hallway, I might have believed it.

“Of course,” she said. “Enjoy the tart.”

She turned to leave.

I stood up.

I hadn’t planned to. I would like that on the record. I plan everything. I planned this dinner’s security rotation and the order of the toasts. I did not plan to stand up.

But I did, and sixty people noticed, because when I stand, people notice.

I pulled out Iris’s empty chair.

“Amanda,” I said. “Sit.”

She stared at me. So did my mother.

“Mr. Ajayi-Williams, I’m working…”

“You’ve been working since four. The tart is plated. The trio is stuck on Tems. Sit down.”

Daniel laughed. “Lare, she’s staff.”

He had been around this family for one year, and he thought that had earned him the right to call me Lare.

“She’s my girlfriend,” I said.

I don’t blurt. I blurted anyway.

Silence. Real silence. One of the violinists scratched a note. Somewhere, a fork hit a plate.

Tiwa gasped and put a hand to her chest. “Lare! Since when?”

“A while.”

“And you didn’t tell me?”

“You were busy getting engaged.”

Aunt Abike said, “Well,” in four different tones.

Amanda hadn’t moved. Her eyes said she was going to kill me. Possibly with a cake server.

Then she did something I hadn’t planned for either.

She walked around the table, sat down in Iris’s chair, took my hand off the tablecloth and laced her fingers through mine. In front of everyone. Like she’d been doing it for months.

Like it was her idea.

Across the table, Daniel’s smile stayed exactly where it was. But his hand had gone flat on the tablecloth. Pressing down. Like a man holding something in place.

Interesting.

“What,” she said through her teeth, still smiling, “are you doing?”

“Serving you dessert.”

“I will end you.”

“Later.”

Her thumb pressed once, hard, into the back of my hand. A warning. I had never been warned so pleasantly.

My mother set down her glass. She looked at Amanda for a long, measuring moment, the look she gives contracts before she has them rewritten. Then at our hands. Then at me.

“You are dating again,” she said.

It wasn’t a question.

“I hope you know what that means.”

“I know,” I said.

I didn’t, entirely. But my mother can smell hesitation through a closed door, and I had already given her one surprise tonight.

I leaned closer to Amanda, close enough that my mouth was near her ear and it would look, to everyone at that table, like I was whispering something sweet.

She smelled like citrus and hairspray and the smoke of forty candles she had, I was sure, lit herself.

“Smile,” I murmured. “He’s watching. And so is my mother.”