Chapter 9: The Visitors' Book

There is a particular kind of courage that does not look like courage at all. It looks like making coffee. It looks like pulling up a client list. It looks like choosing, for the fourth morning in a row, to get out of bed and go toward the thing that frightens you instead of away from it. Nobody writes songs about that kind of courage. It does not photograph well. But it is, in my considerable experience, the only kind that actually holds.

Z Cole, notes kept on purpose and without apology

She found out about the lobby at noon.

Not from Kola, though he called at twelve-oh-three with the information delivered in the same even, weatherless tone he used for everything, as though reading a man photographing a residents' directory off a false name visitors' entry was simply another item on a routine report. Not from Damien, who she suspected had known since earlier and had been deciding how to tell her in a way that would not make her feel like a liability.

She found out because her neighbour, Mrs. Obiageli Fashola, seventy-one, retired schoolteacher, keeper of a suspicious quantity of cats and an encyclopaedic memory for faces, knocked on her door at noon with a covered plate of fried plantain and the information that a young man had been in the lobby that morning asking very specific questions about which flat belonged to the lady who was always leaving early with a big clipboard.

"I told him nothing," Mrs. Fashola said, with the energy of someone who had once managed a classroom of forty twelve-year-olds and still had reserves. "I told him I am not a receptionist. I told him this is a building of private citizens and he should take his questions to someone who has the time." She presented the plantain. "Eat. You look like you are thinking too hard."

Zara took the plantain. "Did you get a look at him?"

"I got a very good look at him. Young. Well-dressed. The kind of well-dressed that is trying to look like it isn't trying." Mrs. Fashola settled into the doorframe with the authority of someone who had nowhere to be and no intention of rushing. "He had a tattoo here" she indicated the inside of her left wrist, "a small one. A bird of some kind. And he was left-handed. He held his phone in his left hand when he took the photograph."

Zara stared at her.

"I taught observation for thirty years," Mrs. Fashola said mildly. "Eat the plantain."

She relayed every detail to Kola eleven minutes later, which he received with the quiet satisfaction of a man whose estimation of her had just increased considerably.

"Left-handed. Bird tattoo, inner left wrist. Young, early twenties, well-dressed in the trying-not-to-look-it way." He was already typing. She could hear it. "That's more than we had this morning."

"My neighbour is seventy-one and previously terrorised an entire school system. She's an asset."

"I'll note that." A pause. "Ms. Cole, Mr. Voss would like you to consider relocating temporarily. As a precaution."

She had been expecting this. She had been expecting it since the cars, if she was honest, which she was trying to be.

"Where?" she said, which was not a no, and they both noted the distinction.

"He has a property. Secure. Staff. You'd have full independence, he was very specific about that. Your own floor, your own entrance, your own schedule."

"My own floor."

"It's a large property."

"Kola."

"Ms. Cole."

"Tell him I'll think about it."

"He said you'd say that. He also said to tell you that thinking about it and doing it are two different things and that he would appreciate it if, this time, the gap between those two things was not three weeks."

She paused. "He said that?"

"Verbatim. He also said" a brief, almost-imperceptible hesitation, "to tell you the kitchen there has a proper spice rack. He said you'd know what that meant."

She did know what that meant. She pressed her lips together very firmly.

"I'll think about it quickly," she said.

Adaora's response, delivered from across the office where she had been listening to the entire conversation with the unconcealed attention of someone who had given up pretending otherwise, was to say nothing for exactly four seconds and then:

"You're going."

"I haven't decided."

"You smiled at the spice rack."

"I did not smile at the spice rack."

"Zara. My love. My business partner of six years. The woman who once told a mother-of-the-bride that her feelings were valid and her seating arrangement suggestions were not, with a smile so professional it should have been framed." Adaora turned fully in her chair. "You smiled at the mention of a spice rack belonging to a man who replaced three hundred flowers and cannot swim and laughs like a person who forgot he knew how. You are going."

Zara opened her mouth.

"The Adeyemi contract is suspended, not cancelled," Adaora continued, before she could. "The other eleven are holding. I can manage the next two weeks from here. The Benson Okafor consultation is Thursday. I'll take it. The Afolabi site visit is Friday I'll take that too." She folded her hands on the desk with the serenity of someone who had already made everyone's decisions and was simply waiting for the paperwork to catch up. "Go. Be safe. Let him have the satisfaction of knowing you are not doing this alone."

Zara looked at her for a long moment.

"You're very annoying," she said.

"Yes. Go pack a bag."

She packed one bag.

This was, she told herself, a practical decision. A security-informed, professionally-considered, entirely-rational response to a demonstrable threat. It had nothing to do with the spice rack. It had nothing to do with the fact that when she imagined walking into that kitchen she felt something settle in her chest that she had no clinical term for. It was simply the sensible thing.

She was on the third floor of his Ikoyi property by seven p.m., standing in a kitchen that was warm and well-lit and smelled faintly of the same firewood and something-good that the estate had smelled of, which was information she was filing away and not examining.

The spice rack was extraordinary.

Forty-three individual spices, alphabetically arranged, every label handwritten in the same precise script. She stood in front of it for longer than was strictly necessary.

"You're staring at my spices," Damien said from the doorway.

She had not heard him come in. This was becoming a pattern with him appearing without announcement in doorways, as though he moved at a frequency just below the range of normal detection.

"Cardamom," she said, without turning around. "You have four kinds of cardamom."

"Green, black, white, and ground. They're not interchangeable."

"Most people don't know that."

"Most people also can't swim and own waterfront property. I contain contradictions."

She turned then. He was leaning against the doorframe, dark shirt, no jacket, the version of himself that only existed at midnight and in kitchens and apparently now also at seven p.m. in his own home. He was looking at her the way he had at the estate at sunset. Like she was a thing he was allowing himself, finally, to look at directly.

"Thank you," she said. "For this."

"You don't have to thank me."

"I know I don't have to. I'm choosing to." She turned back to the spice rack. "It's a very good spice rack."

"I'll tell it you said so."

She laughed, the real kind, the unguarded kind, and heard him cross the kitchen, and felt him stop just behind her left shoulder, close enough that the warmth of him was a thing she was aware of before she was aware of thinking about it.

"Zara."

"Damien."

"I'm glad you're here."

She looked at the forty-three spices, alphabetically arranged, every label in his handwriting.

"I know," she said quietly.

And for the first time in as long as she could remember, that was not a thing she needed to manage. It was simply true, and she let it be.

At ten-fifteen that night, Kola sent a message to Damien's phone.

Damien read it in the study, alone, with the door closed.

Then he read it again.

The young man from Zara's lobby had been identified. Left-handed. Bird tattoo, inner left wrist. Early twenties. He was not, as they had assumed, from the Hargrove family office.

His last known employer was listed in the file Kola had attached.

Damien stared at the name on the screen for a long time.

Then he closed the file. Walked to the kitchen. Stood in the doorway for a moment, watching Zara at the counter, she had found a cookbook from somewhere and was reading it with the focused pleasure of someone filing information they intended to use.

She had not heard him. He did not announce himself.

He simply stood there and made a decision.

Whatever was coming, he was not going to let it reach her.

He went back to the study. Picked up his phone. Called a number he had not called in four years.

It rang twice.

"I need a meeting," he said. "Tonight."

The voice on the other end said nothing for a moment.

Then: "I was wondering when you'd call."