Chapter Four :The First Test
1190 Words
The assignment landed on Zara's desk on a Wednesday.
No warning. No context. Just James appearing in her doorway at eight in the morning with a folder thick enough to be its own problem and an expression that was trying very hard to be neutral and failing.
"Mr. Voss asked me to bring this over first thing," he said, setting it down carefully. Like it might bite. "He said he needs a full strategic review and restructuring proposal by Friday."
Zara looked at the folder.
Then at James.
"This Friday," she said.
"Yes, ma'am."
She opened the front page. The Meridian account, one of Voss Enterprises' oldest partnerships, has a complicated history, three departments involved, and numbers that needed untangling before anyone could even begin to form an opinion about them.
She flipped through the first few pages slowly.
"How long has this account been sitting without review?" she asked.
James shifted slightly. "About eight months."
"And he needs it in two days."
"Yes, ma'am."
She closed the folder. Looked out her window at Lagos for a moment, the city doing its loud, indifferent, beautiful thing below, and then looked back at James.
"Tell Mr. Voss I'll have it on his desk by Thursday evening," she said.
James blinked. "That's one day earlier than"
"I know," she said. "Thank you, James."
He left.
She opened the folder again, pulled her notepad close, uncapped her pen, and got to work.
By midday she had gone through every page twice and built a picture she didn't entirely like.
The Meridian account was a mess—not catastrophically, not beyond saving, but the kind of slow, comfortable mess that happens when nobody has been paying proper attention for too long. Numbers that didn't quite add up to each other. Decisions that made sense individually and less sense together. A restructuring proposal that had been started by someone eight months ago and abandoned halfway through for reasons the folder didn't explain.
She ate lunch at her desk.
Nadia appeared at one o'clock with a container of rice and the expression of someone who already knew the answer to the question she was about to ask.
"Please tell me you're not doing what I think you're doing," she said, looking at the spread of papers across Zara's desk.
"Eating lunch," Zara said.
"At your desk. Surrounded by..." Nadia gestured at everything, "whatever this is."
"The Meridian account."
Nadia went quiet for a second. Then she set the container of rice down in the one clear corner of the desk and pulled up the chair across from Zara and sat in it.
"They gave you Meridian?" she said.
"Damien did. Yesterday morning."
"With what deadline?"
"Friday. I told James Thursday."
Nadia stared at her. "Zara."
"It's fine."
"It is not fine. That account has been sitting untouched for almost a year because nobody wanted to be the one to touch it. Three people before you looked at the brief and went back to Damien and said they needed more time and more resources." She leaned forward. "He gave it to you on your third day."
Zara looked at her steadily. "I know."
"And you're not worried."
"I didn't say that."
"But you're doing it anyway."
"Of course I'm doing it," Zara said simply. She picked up her pen. "Did you bring that rice for me, or are you eating it yourself?"
Nadia laughed despite herself, short and reluctant, and pushed the container closer.
She stayed until nine that night.
The floor emptied around her slowly, footsteps fading, lights going off in the offices down the corridor, the building settling into its after-hours quiet. She barely noticed. She was three pages into the restructuring proposal, and the shape of it was finally starting to make sense in the way that things only did when you'd sat with them long enough.
She worked the way she always worked when something mattered completely, without the part of her brain that monitored time or hunger or the fact that her neck had been at the same angle for two hours.
She didn't hear the footsteps stop outside her office.
"You're still here."
She looked up.
Damien was standing in her doorway. He had his jacket off; the first time he had that, his shirt sleeves were rolled to the elbow, no tie. He looked like a slightly more human version of himself, and it was somehow more unsettling than the armored one.
"So are you," she said.
He looked at the papers spread across her desk. Something moved behind his eyes, there and gone before she could name it.
"The Meridian account," he said.
"Mm."
"You've been at this since this morning."
"Most things worth doing take time," she said. She put her pen down and leaned back in her chair and looked at him properly. "Was there something you needed, Mr. Voss?"
He looked at her for a moment.
"No," he said.
"Then goodnight," she said pleasantly.
He didn't move immediately. Just stood there in her doorway for two seconds longer than was necessary, long enough that she noticed, long enough that she had to work to keep her face from showing that she noticed, and then he pushed off the frame and walked away down the corridor without another word.
She listened to his footsteps until they disappeared.
Then she picked up her pen and went back to work and told herself the warmth crawling up the back of her neck was because the office heating was on too high.
She delivered the proposal Thursday at six fifteen.
Not to James. Directly to Damien's desk, printed and bound and sitting in a plain folder with her name on the front. His office was empty she didn't know where he was and didn't ask. She set it down in the center of his desk exactly where he would see it the moment he walked in and left without waiting around.
She was back at her own desk by six thirty.
At six forty-eight her email pinged.
She looked at it.
One line. No greeting, no sign-off. Just
I'll need to discuss this with you tomorrow morning. Eight o'clock.
She stared at it.
Eight o'clock was before orientation. Before her first scheduled team meeting. Before anything on her calendar.
She typed back two words.
I'll be there.
She hit send, closed her laptop, picked up her bag, and walked out of Voss Enterprises into the warm Lagos night.
She was halfway to the car when her phone buzzed again.
Not an email this time. A text. Same number that had called her in Paris three weeks ago. She hadn't saved it; she hadn't needed to. She had memorized it without meaning to on the first day.
She opened it.
One line.
You should know that three people looked at that account before you. None of them finished it.
She stood on the pavement outside the building and read it twice.
Then she typed back.
I'm not three other people.
She put her phone in her bag and kept walking. Behind her, on the thirty-fourth floor, a light was still on.
- Writer
