UNDERCOVER LOVE

Chapter 2

Friday arrived in a wet, golden heat. Dami stood in the back of an Uber crawling along the Lekki-Epe Expressway, wearing the only good dress she owned, a dark green wrap that her mother had insisted on hemming herself. A tiny recording pen sat in her clutch, disguised as a lipstick. Folake had given it to her with one instruction: Use it only if you must. Trust your eyes first.

She rehearsed her cover story one more time. I'm Dami Adeyemi, food writer. I'm here for the experience. I'm curious about the menu, the sourcing, the story.

All true. Every word of it. That was the trick of a good cover. The best lies were built mostly of truth.

Iyanu Kitchen sat behind a wall of climbing bougainvillea, a low, warm building with hanging lanterns and a courtyard that smelled of charcoal, scotch bonnet, and something sweet she couldn't name. A line of well-dressed people waited outside, but the hostess took one look at her and smiled.

"Miss Adeyemi? Chef has been expecting you."

He had not told his staff to expect her at the door. She was sure of that, because no publicist she'd ever met was that organised. Which meant he had told them himself.

She was led past the main dining room, past tables of laughing families and couples leaning toward each other over candlelight, to a small corner table near the kitchen door. It was set for one. A single flower, a yellow hibiscus, stood in a glass of water.

A table for one.

It should have felt lonely. Instead, it felt strangely like being seen.

She sat. The kitchen door swung open and shut as waiters moved through it, and in the brief gaps she glimpsed steam, copper pots, and a figure moving among them with the quick, sure rhythm of someone who loved what he did. He wasn't wearing a chef's whites. He wore a faded blue shirt, sleeves rolled, a towel slung over one shoulder, and he was laughing at something the sous chef had said.

Then he turned, and their eyes met through the gap in the door.

He stopped.

It was a small thing. A half-second hitch in his stride. But Dami, who had spent three years reading the tiny tells that people leave in their paperwork, noticed it, and noticed the way he recovered, quickly, with a smile that began at one corner of his mouth and spread slowly, as if he was surprised to find it there.

He came out wiping his hands on the towel.

"You're early," Kelechi Nwosu said.

"You're not wearing an apron."

"It's in the wash." His voice was warmer than she expected, low and a little rough, with a laugh tucked inside it. "I'm told I'm supposed to be intimidating tonight. A famous critic. A serious palate." He tilted his head. "But I've read your reviews. You write about food like you're falling in love with it. I'm not intimidated. I'm just hoping I get to be a good meal in your story."

Dami's pulse did something inconvenient.

Facts only, she reminded herself. You are here for the numbers, not the nice words.

"Then you'd better cook well," she said, and was relieved that her voice came out steady.

"I'll do my best." He pulled out the chair opposite her. "May I?"

A table for one, she thought, and now it had two. "You don't have to sit with me. I'm sure you're busy."

"I'm always busy." He sat anyway, resting his forearms on the table. "But nobody ever asks me what I'm cooking for. They just ask what's on the menu. I'd like to tell you the real answer, if you're willing to hear it."

She should have said no. She should have kept her distance, kept her notes, kept her armour on.

Instead she heard herself say, "Tell me."

And he did.

He told her about his grandmother's kitchen in Enugu, where he had learned that a pot of soup could hold a family together. He told her about the years he'd washed dishes in London before he'd saved enough to come home and open Iyanu, a name that meant wonder, because that was what he wanted people to feel. He told her about the staff, forty-three of them, many of whom had come from nothing, and how he'd promised each of them a salary they could build a life on.

She listened. She asked careful questions about suppliers, about deliveries, about who handled the cash on Fridays. He answered every one without hesitation, without that tightening in the shoulders that liars always had.

It unsettled her more than if he had lied.

When the first dish arrived, a bowl of pepper soup with a ribbon of smoked catfish, she took a spoonful and closed her eyes before she could stop herself. It tasted like Sunday afternoons and her mother's kitchen and every comfort she had been too busy to feel in years.

When she opened her eyes, Kelechi was watching her, not with the hunger of a man seeking praise, but with the soft, quiet attention of someone who truly wanted to know.

"Well?" he asked.

Dami set down her spoon. "That," she said slowly, "is the best thing I have eaten all year."

He smiled. It was a real one, the kind that crinkled the corners of his eyes, and something in her chest, something she had locked away a long time ago, shifted on its hinges.

This is going to be a problem, she thought.

Across the room, just beyond the kitchen door, a man in a grey suit stood very still, watching them. He wasn't eating. He wasn't speaking to anyone. He simply held a phone to his ear and listened, and when Kelechi laughed at something Dami said, the man's eyes went cold.

He lowered the phone, slipped something into his jacket, and walked out through the back.

Dami didn't see him go.

But the pen in her clutch, the one disguised as lipstick, had been recording the whole time. And when she played it back that night, in the dark of her flat with the generator roaring next door, she would hear something she had missed beneath the noise of the dining room: a voice, low and urgent, saying a single sentence just beyond the kitchen wall.

"She's the one they sent. Move the money tonight."