Precious Deceit

Before Ethan Voss was CEO, before he was even Ethan, he was a small boy standing at his mother's elbow in a shop on Broad Street that smelled of polish and old paper, watching her turn a raw emerald over and over in her palm like she was reading it. Adaeze Voss, née Adaeze Okonkwo-Bello, had not been born into gemstones. She was born in Onitsha, third daughter of a textile trader, in a house where money came in unpredictable waves and everybody learned early to swim or sink. She met Klaus Voss, a Belgian gem buyer twenty years her senior, when she was twenty-three and selling coral beads to tourists near the Lagos marina to pay her way through university. He thought she had an eye. She thought he had capital. They were both right, and within six years they had built Aurevia out of a single rented stall into a company with its name on a glass tower in Victoria Island. Klaus died when Ethan was fourteen. Heart, sudden, in the middle of a phone call about a shipment from Kono. Adaeze did not cry in front of anybody, not even Ethan. She buried her husband on a Saturday and was back in the office by Monday, because, as she told her son without looking up from her desk, "Grief does not pay staff salaries." That was the lesson Ethan absorbed before any other: feeling things was a private matter, and business did not wait for anybody's heart to catch up. By the time he was thirty and sitting behind his father's old desk, now his own, Ethan had learned to carry his mother's steel and his father's precision in the same body. He did not remember a version of himself that did not belong to Aurevia. He had never taken a real holiday. He did not know, if he was honest with himself in the two or three minutes before sleep took him each night, whether he had ever wanted one. His mother, for her part, had decided long ago that a man with that much control over a boardroom needed a woman to manage everything a boardroom could not. That was where Victoria came in. ✦ Victoria Laurent had grown up in Ikoyi, in a house with two generators and a gateman who called her "Aunty Vicky" from the time she could walk. Her father was a retired permanent secretary; her mother sat on the boards of three charities and one bank. Victoria had gone to boarding school in Surrey and university in Lagos, because her mother believed a girl needed the polish of abroad and the roots of home in equal measure, and she had returned with both a British accent she wore like jewellery and an unshakable sense that certain things were simply owed to her. She was not stupid. People underestimated her for the handbags and the lashes and mistook her silence in meetings for having nothing to say, when in fact she was usually deciding whether a thing was worth her breath. She had worked hard to earn her position at Aurevia, harder than anybody in that glass tower gave her credit for. But somewhere along the way, being Ethan's girlfriend had become easier than being merely excellent, and Victoria, like most people offered an easier road, had taken it without much interrogation. She told herself she loved him. She was not entirely sure that was a lie. What she knew for certain was that Helena, Ethan's mother, had chosen her, personally, deliberately, the way Helena chose everything, and being chosen by Helena Voss was not a thing a sensible woman gave up without a fight. ✦ Nadia Afolayan had a harder road to that same glass tower, and she had walked every meter of it herself. She grew up in Ibadan, in a face-me-I-face-you compound where six families shared one long corridor and everybody knew everybody's business before breakfast. Her father, Tunde, had once run a small gemstone-cutting workshop, three tables and a generator that coughed more than it ran, until a foreign buyer's agent underpriced an entire shipment of his stones by half, claiming the valuations were "market standard," and there was nothing Tunde could do about it because he did not have the paperwork, the language, or the lawyer to fight a company ten times his size. Nadia was eleven when she watched her father close that workshop for the last time. She remembered the exact sound the padlock made. She was not the kind of child who forgot things like that. She grew into the kind of woman who carried a small, quiet fire everywhere she went, the kind that did not need an audience to keep burning. She studied gemology on a scholarship she fought three committees to get. She worked two jobs through university, one of them grading stones for a wholesaler who paid her half what he paid the men doing the same work, until she learned enough to walk away and never look back. She did not join Aurevia because she admired Ethan Voss. She had barely thought about him at all before her first week. She joined because Aurevia sat at the center of the exact market that had swallowed her father whole, and if she was going to understand how that market truly worked, if she was ever going to build something of her own that people like that foreign agent could not touch, she needed to learn it from the inside. She told herself this was temporary. Learn, absorb, leave. She had not planned on anyone in that building actually listening to her. ✦ "You're thirty, Ethan." Helena Voss set her teacup down without a sound, the way she did everything, like the world owed her silence. "Aurevia needs a face people can trust for the next twenty years. Not just a name on a door." "The market trusts profit, Mummy." Ethan didn't look up from the report on his desk. Under it, his knee was bouncing, a habit he'd never quite managed to kill. "Aurevia posted numbers this quarter that no competitor in this market can touch. I'd say the face is doing just fine." "You know what I mean." Her eyes didn't move from him. "Victoria has stood beside you for two years. The board likes her. I like her. What exactly are you waiting for?" He knew what she meant. He'd known since he was twenty-eight and his mother had first sat him down in this same office with the same tea service and told him, gently but with the particular finality that meant it was not actually a discussion, that Victoria Laurent would make him a good partner. He hadn't fought it. Fighting his mother cost more than it was worth, and there had never been anyone else he wanted badly enough to spend that cost on. So Victoria became his, in every sense that mattered to the press, to the board, to Lagos society, and in almost no sense that mattered to him. "Nothing," he said now. "I'm not waiting for anything." Helena studied him a moment longer than was comfortable, the way she used to study raw stones before deciding whether they were worth the cut, and then she let it go, because she had learned patience was often a sharper tool than pressure. ✦ He first heard Nadia's name attached to trouble on a Tuesday. "She's questioning the Kinshasa numbers, sir." Marcus Reyes stood in the doorway with the stiffness of a man who had rehearsed this sentence in the lift. "Says the valuations don't match the shipment weights." Ethan set his pen down slowly. "Do they match, Marcus?" "They're within normal variance." "That is not what I asked you." Marcus shifted his weight. "There is always some variance, sir. Raw stone is not an exact science." He's protecting somebody, Ethan thought, watching the man's eyes dart everywhere except forward. Question is who. "Get her up here," he said. "Now, not after lunch." He expected the usual. Apologies dressed up as explanations. Maybe a little flattery, the kind every new hire eventually tried once they learned exactly whose name was on the building. What walked into his office instead was a young woman holding a folder like it was the only weapon she'd been issued and she intended to use every bullet in it. "Mr. Voss." She did not sit when he gestured at the chair. "Let me save us both time. I am not here to cause wahala for anybody. I am here because something in the Kinshasa figures does not add up, and I would rather tell you myself than let it sit quiet until it becomes a bigger problem than either of us can manage." "Marcus tells me it's normal variance." "Marcus is wrong." She opened the folder and laid three sheets on his desk, turning them so the numbers faced him instead of her. "The shipment weights from March match every previous month, almost to the gram. The valuations do not. Somebody adjusted the per-carat estimate on four separate lots, and all four moved in the exact same direction. That is not variance, sir. Variance does not have a favorite direction." Ethan looked at the numbers. Then, for a beat longer than was strictly professional, he looked at her. She is not shaking, he thought. Everyone in this building shakes a little when they stand where she is standing. She is not shaking at all. "You've been here three weeks," he said. "Does that change whether I am correct?" Something in his chest did something he did not have a name for. He filed it away, the way he filed everything he didn't have time to examine. "Leave the folder," he said. "I'll look into it myself." "With respect, Mr. Voss, somebody already looked into it. That is precisely how it ended up marked as normal variance." She held his eyes, steady, unbothered by the fact that she was one sentence away from unemployment and clearly not counting sentences. "I would rather you look into it yourself. Properly. Not the way it was looked into the first time." He almost smiled. He caught it before it reached his mouth. "Fine," he said. "Nine o'clock tomorrow. Bring everything." She nodded once, sharp, and turned to go, and it struck him only after the door had shut behind her that she had nothing left to gather. She'd already placed every card she had on his desk and walked out with empty hands and a straight back, and somehow that was the part he couldn't stop replaying.