LOVING THE ENEMY

CHAPTER SIX

The thing about being almost kissed was that it had not actually happened.

Aisha reminded herself of this on Monday morning, standing in front of her wardrobe with a cup of tea going cold in her hand. Nothing had happened at the market. Nothing had happened at the bar. A man had said honest things and she had walked away from them, which was the correct and reasonable response, and she was not going to spend another minute turning it over in her mind like a stone she expected to find something under.

She chose the grey suit. Severe, clean, no room for interpretation. Armour.

The Monday morning team meeting ran for ninety minutes and covered three product milestones, a hiring decision, and a disagreement between Sule and Grace about the user interface of their newest feature that had the energy of a much older argument wearing a professional disguise. Aisha let it run for seven minutes before she cut through it with the precision of someone who had learned that the cleanest resolution was usually the most direct one.

"Grace is right about the interface," she said. "Sule, your instinct about the timeline is right. Both things are true. Move on."

They moved on.

After the meeting, Patrick appeared in her doorway with a spreadsheet and the expression of a man delivering good news he was mildly suspicious of.

"The first repayment tranche goes out Friday," he said. "On schedule. Donovan Capital acknowledged receipt of the payment plan this morning."

"Good."

"They also sent a revised communication protocol. All future correspondence regarding the debt goes through their legal team — except for strategic reviews, which Mr. Donovan will handle personally." Patrick paused. "Quarterly."

Aisha looked at her screen. "Quarterly."

"Four times a year."

"I know what quarterly means, Patrick."

He set the spreadsheet on her desk with the careful neutrality of someone who had noticed something and had made a professional decision to keep it entirely to himself. "Shall I confirm the arrangement?"

"Yes. Thank you."

He left. She looked at the word for a moment longer than necessary.

Quarterly.

Four times a year she would sit across a table from Kael Donovan and discuss numbers. Four times a year she would have to be composed and professional and completely unbothered. It was manageable. It was perfectly manageable. She had managed harder things.

She pulled her keyboard toward her and went back to work.

He called at noon.

She answered on the third ring, which was one ring fewer than she had intended and one ring more than she had wanted to.

"I wanted to make sure the communication protocol was acceptable," he said. "Before Patrick confirmed it."

"It's fine."

"If you would prefer someone else to handle the strategic reviews —"

"I said it's fine, Kael."

A brief silence. "Alright."

She clicked through her emails with her phone wedged between her ear and her shoulder, a habit her physiotherapist had told her three times to stop. "Was there anything else?"

"I'm calling to apologise," he said.

She stopped clicking. "For what?"

"Saturday. At the market." He paused, and she could hear him choosing his words with care. "I said something that wasn't fair to say in that setting. About feeling less lost around you. It was honest, but honesty without timing is just another way of making someone uncomfortable, and that wasn't my intention."

Aisha sat back in her chair slowly.

This was the thing she had forgotten about Kael — or perhaps not forgotten, just buried under the easier narrative of his absence. He was a man who examined his own behaviour. Who came back afterward and said, clearly and without theatre, I got that wrong. It had been disarming three years ago. It was considerably more dangerous now.

"You didn't make me uncomfortable," she said, before she had fully decided to.

"No?"

"You made me think. Which is different." She paused. "I'm not sure it's better."

A quiet sound on his end that might have been a laugh — low and real, nothing performed about it. "Fair enough."

She turned her chair toward the window. Yaoundé was bright and loud below her, indifferent as always. "The protocol is confirmed. I'll see you at the first quarterly review."

"When would you like to schedule it?"

"Patrick will be in touch."

"Of course." Another pause, shorter this time. "Aisha."

"Yes."

"Thank you for answering."

She considered that for a moment — the smallness of it, the weight it carried anyway. "Goodbye, Kael."

She set the phone down and looked at it for a long moment as if it had done something without her permission.

Then she picked up her tea, found it completely cold, and went to make a fresh cup.

It was Bih who noticed first.

She did not say anything directly — she was too perceptive for that. But on Tuesday she started leaving two cups of tea on Aisha's desk in the mornings, which she had never done before, and when Aisha raised an eyebrow she said simply, "You've been going through them faster," and disappeared before any follow-up questions could be asked.

On Wednesday, Aisha caught herself reading the same contract clause four times without retaining a single word of it, which had never happened to her before in five years of running a company on focus and controlled anxiety.

On Thursday, she made a decision.

She was not going to let this become a thing. She was not going to let Kael Donovan — his honesty, his market basket, his low careful laugh, his three years of absence and his two years of recovery and his one word spoken in a quiet bar — she was not going to let any of it take up more space in her life than she had specifically allocated to it.

Which was none. She had allocated none.

She pulled up her calendar and scheduled three new meetings, replied to seven emails she had been deferring, and called her mother back properly for the first time in two weeks. Her mother talked for forty minutes about the new pastor at her church, the price of groundnut oil, and her neighbour's son who had passed his bar exams, and Aisha listened to all of it with genuine warmth because it was the exact right frequency of normal that she needed.

"You sound better," her mother said, near the end.

"I'm fine, Mama. I was always fine."

"You were managing. There's a difference." A pause. "Are you eating?"

"Yes."

"Real food? Not that sad office food?"

"I made egusi — " She stopped.

Her mother waited.

"I was at the market on Saturday," Aisha said carefully. "I got fresh spinach."

"Good. Spinach is good. Did anything else happen at the market?"

The silence lasted exactly one second too long.

"Goodnight, Mama."

"Aisha —"

"Sunday. I'll call Sunday. I love you."

She ended the call and sat in her quiet apartment, the evening settling around her, the city doing what it always did — moving, breathing, entirely unconcerned with one woman's very sensible attempts to feel nothing.

Her phone buzzed. A message, not a call.

Kael: The egusi soup was good, for the record. I didn't burn anything.

She stared at it.

She typed: That is a low bar.

She deleted it.

She typed: Good for you.

She deleted that too.

She put the phone face down on the coffee table and picked up the report she had been meaning to read all week.

She lasted four minutes before she picked the phone back up.

Aisha: The bar for egusi is not low. Either it's good or it isn't.

She sent it before she could reconsider.

His reply came in less than a minute.

Kael: Come and judge for yourself.

She set the phone down again. Picked it up. Set it down.

She did not reply.

But she was smiling again — that same small, private, entirely inconvenient smile — and this time she did not even try to stop it.

Some battles, she was beginning to understand, were lost long before you noticed you were fighting them.