✦ Naomi ✦
She did not react immediately.
The photograph stayed between them on the table. The kitchen was very quiet except for the sounds of Accra that came through the window — a dog, a radio somewhere three streets over, the irregular percussion of a city settling into its late-evening rhythms. She looked at Bernard Achampong's face, younger by twenty-five years, standing in a room with Aldric Voss and an unidentified second man, and she breathed through the specific cognitive work of receiving something unexpected without allowing the receiving to show until she had finished processing it.
She had learned this in the Cole house. The management of her own face. The gap between information arriving and response following, which was the space where she did her best work.
The photogr
