What the Numbers Won't Say

Ada did not scream.

She did not slam the laptop shut either, because a guilty woman slams things. She tapped one key, let the transfer record vanish behind a harmless spreadsheet of fuel costs, and turned her chair with all the calm of a woman who had been reading about trucks all afternoon.

"Mr. Okafor."

"Mrs. Okafor." Damian closed the door behind him and the glass walls hummed back into silence. "Mr. Eze tells me you have not eaten since morning."

"Mr. Eze talks too much."

"Mr. Eze reports to me." He crossed the room slowly and stopped beside her desk. He did not look at the laptop. That was what frightened her. A man with nothing to hide would have looked. "You found something."

It was not a question.

Ada folded her hands in her lap so he would not see them shake. "I have found a great many things. Your accounts payable are a mess. Your fuel contracts are overpriced."

"Ada."

It was the first time he had said her name. Not Miss Bello, not Mrs. Okafor. Just the two syllables, low and plain.

"Do not play with me," he said. "Not here. You found a transfer. Two hundred million naira, March the third, three shell companies, one offshore account."

The air left the room.

"You knew," she whispered.

"I have known for fourteen months."

"And you let me find it." Her voice climbed. "You gave me a security badge, and a corner office, and you let me find this, and you stood there and watched me—"

"Lower your voice."

"Why? Afraid someone will hear?"

"Yes."

The single word stopped her. His face had not changed, but something in his eyes had sharpened to a point. He glanced at the glass wall. Beyond it, at the far end of the floor, Mr. Eze sat very still at his desk with a phone pressed to his ear, his gaze fixed, with studied carelessness, on this office.

Damian reached past her, lifted the laptop lid, and typed one line into the search bar. He turned the screen toward her.

Do not speak about it here. They listen.

Ada looked at the words. Then she looked at him.

He deleted the line.

"Dinner," he said, in a perfectly ordinary voice. "At seven. My father is hosting a charity event at the Eko Grand Hotel and he expects us both. You will need something to wear. Tobi has arranged a stylist."

"I did not agree to a dinner."

"It is clause six." He straightened. "Public appearances, as required."

"I want to know what that transfer was."

"You want to know whether I signed it."

"Did you?"

For a long moment he said nothing. The late sun cut through the window behind him and left his face half in shadow.

"My signature is on it," Damian said.

"That is not an answer."

"It is the only one I can give you today." His jaw tightened. "I know what you think. I know what it looks like. You have three months of rage and one piece of paper, and the paper says what you want it to say. I am asking you to look further."

"Why should I trust a word you say?"

"You should not." He said it simply, without defence. "That is exactly why I want you to keep looking. Do not trust me. Trust the numbers. They have no reason to lie to you."

He walked to the door and paused with his hand on the frame.

"Do not copy anything. Do not email anything. Do not use this laptop at home. And Ada." He did not turn. "Mr. Eze is not the only one watching."

He left.

Ada sat in the humming quiet with her pulse thudding in her ears.

He wants me to keep looking.

It made no sense. If he had ruined her father, he would be burying the evidence. If he were innocent, he would tell her the truth. Instead he had put the proof in her hands and told her not to trust him.

Unless it was a trap. Unless he wanted her to find only what he had planted.

She pulled the laptop closer and reread the record, line by line, the way her old mentor had taught her. Do not look at what is written. Look at what is missing.

And she saw it.

The transfer had been authorised on March the third at 11:52 p.m. A Sunday night. But the building's access log, which she had open in another tab for an unrelated reason, showed no one on the executive floor after seven.

Damian's signature had been used. It had not been used by him, at least not from this building.

That did not clear him. A man could sign from home. A man could sign from anywhere.

But it was a crack. A hairline one. She would take a hairline crack over a solid wall.

* * *

The stylist was efficient and unsmiling. By six forty-five, Ada stood in front of a mirror in an emerald gown she could not have afforded in ten years, her hair swept off her neck, her face made up so carefully that she barely recognised it.

"Mrs. Okafor looks beautiful," the stylist said.

Mrs. Okafor. Ada nearly flinched.

Downstairs, the car waited. Damian stood beside it in a black tuxedo with one hand in his pocket, and when she came down the steps, he looked up, and for a moment forgot himself.

It was brief. Barely a heartbeat. His eyes travelled from her bare shoulders to the green silk at her waist and back to her face, and something in his expression went unguarded, a flicker of raw, startled hunger, before he locked it away.

Ada's stomach dipped.

"Clause four," she said coolly, lifting her chin. "Neither party shall develop emotional attachment."

"I am aware of the clause."

"Then stop looking at me like that."

"Like what?"

"Like you have forgotten it."

His mouth curved, very slightly. "Get in the car, Mrs. Okafor."

She slid into the back seat. He followed. The door shut with a soft, expensive thud and the city began to slide past the windows in ribbons of gold and red.

For ten minutes, neither spoke.

Then Ada's phone buzzed in her clutch.

She almost ignored it. But the screen showed a number she did not know, and the preview was only six words long.

She opened it. Read it. Read it again.

He was there the night your father died.

Her blood turned to ice.

Another message arrived before she could breathe.

Ask him about the pen.

Ada did not move. Beside her, Damian was scrolling through his phone, his profile calm and still, the streetlights sliding over his face.

He had not noticed. Or he had, and he was waiting.

She slid the phone back into her bag with fingers that felt like someone else's.

Where did you get this? she had wanted to ask him, in the penthouse, with her father's pen in her hand.

Not yet, the voice in her head had said.

But now someone else knew about the pen. Someone who knew things about the night her father died. Someone who wanted her to be afraid of the man sitting three inches away from her in the dark.

And Ada, who trusted numbers over people, suddenly could not tell which of the two of them was lying.