UNDERCOVER LOVE

The generator next door coughed twice, died, and took the whole of Yaba's electricity with it. Damilola Adeyemi did not look up from her laptop. She had been refreshing the same email for eleven minutes, and the only thing that moved was the battery percentage in the corner of her screen. Fourteen percent. Then thirteen. "Please," she whispered to the ceiling. "Not today." The ceiling, like most things in her life that month, did not answer. She had three tabs open. The first was her food blog, Dami Eats Lagos, where a half-written review of a suya spot in Surulere sat waiting for a final paragraph. The second was her bank app, showing a balance that made her stomach tighten. Rent was due in nine days, and her mother's hospital refill was due in six. The third tab was the email she had been refreshing, the one that mattered. It finally loaded. Dami, come in by 10 a.m. tomorrow. Bring your laptop and your good shoes. This one is different. — F.A. She read it twice. Then she closed the laptop, because twelve percent battery was not worth wasting on feelings, and sat in the dark of her one-bedroom flat with her heart doing a small, stubborn dance. Folake Ajayi did not write emails like that. Folake Ajayi wrote emails like a telegram from a very disappointed headmistress. Different was a word she saved for cases that could end careers. Or start them. The office of Ajayi & Partners Forensic Consulting was on the fourth floor of a building in Victoria Island that had a very expensive lobby and a very unreliable elevator. Dami took the stairs. It gave her time to rehearse her face. On her blog, she was the girl who found the best amala in the city and wasn't afraid to say when a restaurant's jollof tasted like it had been cooked from a rumour. Eighty-four thousand followers trusted her palate. They did not know that for the past three years, she had spent her weekdays reading bank statements for a living. They also did not know why. "You're late," Folake said, without lifting her eyes from a file. "It's 9:52." "Which is late for someone who wants to be taken seriously." Folake finally looked up. She was sixty-one, small, immaculate, and wore reading glasses on a beaded chain her late husband had given her. She had trained half the fraud investigators in Lagos and frightened the other half. "Sit." Dami sat. Folake slid a folder across the desk. On the cover was a photograph of a man laughing at something outside the frame, his head thrown back, his sleeves rolled to the elbows. He looked like he'd never told a lie in his life. "Kelechi Nwosu," Folake said. "Thirty-three. Owner of Iyanu Kitchen in Lekki. You know it?" "Everybody knows it." Dami's mouth had gone a little dry. "It's the restaurant that won Best New Kitchen last year. There's a three-week waitlist. I tried to get a table in March and they offered me a Tuesday in June." "Then you'll get in faster this time." Folake tapped the folder. "The restaurant is very successful. Too successful. Our client is a bank, and a bank does not like when a restaurant moves more money than a restaurant can cook." Dami opened the folder. Transfers. Dozens of them, sliced into neat, suspicious pieces. Cash deposits that arrived like clockwork on Fridays. A supplier she'd never heard of, paid again and again for ingredients that, according to the menu, Iyanu Kitchen barely used. "Money laundering," she said quietly. "Suspected. I want it proven or disproven. Properly." Folake removed her glasses. "I need someone inside the restaurant who can watch the kitchen, the staff, the rhythm of the place. Not an auditor with a clipboard. Someone who belongs there." "A food blogger." "A food blogger with a very large following and a reason to ask a hundred questions about where the ingredients come from." Folake's mouth moved in what, on another woman, would have been a smile. "He has already agreed to a feature. His publicist has been trying to get you to review him for six months." Dami blinked. "The emails in my spam folder." "You have a spam folder full of opportunity. That is a separate conversation." Dami laughed in spite of herself, and then stopped, because the old feeling had arrived uninvited: the cold little stone in her stomach that came whenever she remembered the last time she had trusted someone's face over the paperwork. His name had been Ifeanyi. He had been her colleague, her friend, and for eleven months, her boyfriend. He had also been the man who quietly moved her findings into his own report and took the promotion that should have been hers, then smiled at her across the office as if nothing had happened. She had left that firm with her pride in pieces and a hard rule: never fall for the subject. Never fall for the story. Facts only. "Dami." Folake's voice was gentler now. "This is the kind of case that gets you your own desk. I wouldn't ask if I didn't think you could do it." "What's the catch?" "There's always a catch. The catch is you'll have to like him." Folake closed the folder. "People can tell when you're watching them. They cannot tell when you're enjoying yourself. Enjoy yourself. Just don't forget why you're there." Dami looked at the photograph again. At the easy laugh. At the apron strings tied carelessly at his waist. "And if he's innocent?" "Then you'll be the first person to prove it, and he will thank you." Folake stood. "And if he isn't, you will have helped catch someone who has hurt more people than he's fed. Either way, you do the work. Facts only." The words landed like an echo of her own rule. Dami swallowed. "When do I start?" "Friday. Seven p.m. Wear something nice. You're going to dinner." She told her best friend Chiamaka everything except the case. "A feature?" Chiamaka screamed over the phone, so loudly that Dami had to hold the speaker away from her ear. They were at the back of a cramped Yaba buka, eating pounded yam out of paper plates because both of them were broke and neither of them was ashamed. "At Iyanu Kitchen? Dami! You'll finally pass a hundred thousand followers!" "It's just a review." "It is Kelechi Nwosu's review. Do you know who that man is? He cooks for ministers. He's on a billboard on Admiralty Way." Chiamaka's eyes narrowed. "And he's fine, Dami. Don't pretend you haven't seen the pictures." "I haven't looked at his pictures." "Liar." Dami scooped egusi with a ball of yam and said nothing. In truth, she had looked. She had looked at the one where he sat on an upturned crate behind his restaurant, eating rice from a plastic plate next to his dishwasher, both of them laughing. It had looked so honest that it had unsettled her. The man in the photograph didn't look like a criminal. But that was the first thing she had learned in forensic accounting: the people who steal from you rarely look like thieves. They look like the people you want to believe. "You okay?" Chiamaka asked. "You've gone quiet." "I'm just tired." "You're always tired. You work all the time." Chiamaka reached across the plastic table and squeezed her hand. "You deserve something good, you know. A good review. A good meal. A good man." "Let's start with the meal." The lights flickered, died, and came back, and the whole buka cheered with the weary joy of people who had learned to celebrate small things. Dami laughed, really laughed, for the first time in days. This was why she did the work. Not for the promotions, though she wanted them, or for the money, though God knew she needed it. She did it because she had grown up watching her mother count coins at the kitchen table and knew exactly what it cost ordinary people when someone cheated the system. Every naira stolen was a refill that didn't get paid, a rent that didn't get covered, a child who didn't go to school. If Kelechi Nwosu was stealing, she would find out. And if she liked him, well. She had survived liking people before.