my little secrets

What She Searches For

CHAPTER TWELVE

What She Searches For

— CAMILLE —

She did it at eleven forty-three on a Wednesday night, which was late enough that she could not pretend it was a practical decision.

She had been working — genuinely working, a licensing agreement with the Tokyo team that required her careful attention — and then the work was done and she closed the document and opened a new tab and typed his name before she had consciously decided to type it.

Kofi Mensah.

She told herself this was reasonable. She conducted due diligence on everyone she employed, and this was simply overdue due diligence, delayed by the urgency of the hiring and the competence he had demonstrated immediately, which had made the formal background check feel less pressing. This was a completely professional impulse and she was acting on it at eleven forty-three on a Wednesday night because this was when she happened to have a spare moment.

She was aware of how this sounded. She searched anyway.

The results were sparse — sparser than she was used to, in a world where most people left a considerable digital trail simply by existing. A LinkedIn profile: minimal, accurate, listing his previous positions in Lagos and Accra with dates and brief descriptions. No photograph. No summary. Just the facts, which was somehow entirely consistent with everything she knew about him.

A mention in a Lagos architecture journal from four years ago — a short piece about sustainable restoration practices, citing Kofi Mensah as having contributed to the structural assessment of a heritage property in Victoria Island. She read the paragraph three times. He had not mentioned this. It was not on his CV. He had done it and not mentioned it.

A f*******: profile that appeared to belong to him but had not been updated in six years, the privacy settings locked so that only the name and a blurred cover image were visible. She could not see the cover image clearly enough to determine what it was.

She searched his name plus Lagos. Plus estate management. Plus architecture. She found variations on what she had already found — the LinkedIn, the journal mention, a brief reference in an Accra property management newsletter from three years ago that confirmed a previous employer's name.

And then, on the fourth page of results, a photograph.

It was from a community event in Surulere — a neighbourhood clean-up, according to the caption on what appeared to be a local Lagos news site. A group of perhaps twenty people, some in gloves, some holding refuse bags, standing outside a row of painted houses in the particular late-afternoon Lagos light she had heard him describe. And in the back row, taller than most of the people around him, a man she recognised by his posture before she was close enough to the screen to confirm his face.

He was laughing.

Not the controlled, quiet near-smile she had seen occasionally in professional moments. A full laugh — head slightly back, completely unguarded, turned toward the woman beside him who was, from the resemblance, unmistakably his sister Amara. They were both laughing at something outside the frame, the way people laugh when the joke is so familiar it barely needs a trigger, when shared history is the punchline.

Camille sat very still for a moment.

She thought about the photograph of herself in the library. The one he had found and replaced without mentioning. The one where she was twenty-two and laughing exactly like that — fully, without management, turned toward her grandmother.

She closed the laptop.

* * *

She did not reopen it.

She sat at her desk in the quiet of the house at nearly midnight and she looked at the closed laptop and she thought, with the particular clarity that comes at midnight when you are too tired to maintain your usual defences, about what she had been doing.

She had searched his name. She had gone four pages deep into the results. She had felt something — a warmth she did not want to name — when she found a photograph of him laughing in a street in Surulere with his sister. She had compared that laugh to her own laugh in the photograph in the library, the one he had found and held privately and replaced with care.

She was, she understood, looking for him. Not professionally. Not as an employer conducting overdue due diligence. She was looking for him the way you look for someone when they occupy more of your thinking than you have officially permitted, when the information you have is not enough and you find yourself reaching for more in the spaces between the things you should be doing.

This was new. Not the wanting — the wanting had been there since October, since he had turned her question back on her in the interview without apology, since he had sat in her library during a storm and said *it must get very quiet*. But this reaching into his life through a screen, this collecting of details he had not chosen to give her — this was different. This was the beginning of something she did not want to examine too closely because examining it would require her to name it, and naming it would make it real in a way she was not ready for.

She was a thorough woman. She knew her own tendencies. She had been thorough in her marriage, thorough in her work, thorough in her friendships, which had become, over fifteen years, fewer and less complicated because fewer and less complicated was easier to be thorough about. She had a way of going deep into things. Of wanting to understand them completely. Of, when she could not understand them completely, finding ways to gather more information until she could.

Kofi was not a person who gave information easily. She had noticed this from the beginning — the LinkedIn with no photograph, the journal mention he had not included on his CV, the community event photograph that existed only because someone else had taken it and posted it on a local news site. He lived lightly in the world's record of itself. He did not perform his own existence for an audience.

She thought: he is the opposite of my world, where everything is image and everything is documented and the difference between who you are and how you appear is managed like a budget.

She thought: I am going to be careful about this.

She got up from the desk. She turned off the study light. She went upstairs and she was careful and disciplined and she did not reopen the laptop.

* * *

In the morning she was herself again — composed, precise, the day's agenda already assembling behind her eyes before the alarm sounded.

She showered. She dressed. She went downstairs and made coffee and stood at the kitchen window and looked at the courtyard in the early grey December light.

He was already out there. This surprised her slightly — it was not yet seven, and his hours did not officially begin until eight. He was checking something on the north outbuilding roof, standing on a ladder she had not seen before, moving with the careful deliberateness of someone who is working at a height and is neither frightened by it nor careless about it.

She watched him for a moment. Then she looked away and drank her coffee.

Léa arrived at seven thirty and set the schedule on the desk. "The Tokyo licensing confirmation came through overnight. Everything is in order."

"Good."

"And there's an estate note from Monsieur Mensah — he found a section of loose roofing on the north outbuilding. He's assessed it as non-urgent but flagged it for the January maintenance window."

Camille set down her coffee cup. "He flagged it through you?"

"Yes, Madame. As per the new protocols."

She nodded. "Fine."

Léa made a note. Paused. "He was on the roof at six fifteen this morning, according to Dominic. He wanted to assess it before the rain forecast for this afternoon."

Camille said nothing.

"Dominic mentioned it because he was concerned about the ladder — he offered to hold it but Monsieur Mensah had already secured it independently." Léa's voice was entirely professional, entirely neutral. "Just for your information."

"Thank you, Léa."

The door closed.

Camille stood at the window. The courtyard was empty now — he had come down from the roof and moved on to whatever was next on his list. The ladder was gone. The outbuilding looked exactly as it always had, the loose section invisible from this angle.

He had been up there at six fifteen in the morning in December to assess something before the rain came, because the rain would make it harder to see and he wanted to see it properly. He had not mentioned it in advance. He had not made it significant. He had simply — gotten up early and gone to look at the roof because the roof needed looking at.

She thought about four pages of search results. She thought about a laugh in a Lagos street that she had recognised because she had once laughed the same way.

She thought: I searched his name at midnight and he was on a roof at six in the morning and neither of us knows anything about the other that the other has not decided to give.

She turned back to her desk.

She had a company to run. She had always had a company to run.

She opened her laptop and went to work.

She found, midway through the morning, that she was reading the Tokyo agreement more carefully than it required. She was a fast reader — it was one of the things she was proudest of, professionally, the ability to move through complex documents at speed without sacrificing comprehension. Today she read the same clause four times. It was not a complicated clause.

At ten she had a call with the Brussels creative director about the spring collection colour palette. She gave her full attention. She made three decisions and deferred two and ended the call in eighteen minutes, which was efficient. Then she sat at her desk for a moment in the silence after the call and she thought about a blurred cover image on a f*******: profile that had not been updated in six years.

She thought: I want to know what the image was.

She did not reopen the laptop.

Instead she pulled the estate log from the correspondence stack — she had been reading it daily now, which was not the protocol but which she had quietly made her own habit — and she read his note about the roofing assessment. *North outbuilding, northeast corner: three tiles showing movement. Non-structural. Recommend inspection and resealing during January maintenance window. Will monitor for water ingress during this week's rain.* Below that, in the same neat hand: *Orangery east panel — minor condensation buildup noted. Monitoring. No action required at present.*

He was monitoring the orangery panel. He had noted it in the log without making it significant, the way he noted everything, just another thing he was watching and attending to with the same quiet care he brought to every part of the estate.