LOVING THE ENEMY

CHAPTER SEVEN

She did not go.

Obviously she did not go. She was a grown woman with a company to run and a contract application under review and approximately forty-seven better uses of a Friday evening than sitting in Kael Donovan's kitchen eating soup and pretending that was a normal thing to do.

She went to the gym instead, which she had been neglecting for three weeks, and ran on the treadmill for forty minutes with the focused aggression of someone processing something they were not ready to name. Then she came home, showered, made herself a proper meal, and was in bed by ten with a report she actually managed to read this time.

It was a perfectly reasonable Friday.

She told herself this several times.

The message came Saturday morning, early enough that the city was still deciding what kind of day it wanted to be.

Kael: No judgment then. I'll assume the egusi passed by default.

She read it in bed, still horizontal, still in the grey morning light, and made the mistake of smiling before she was fully awake and therefore had no defences in place.

She typed: Default is not the same as passed.

Kael: You're very particular about soup for someone who hasn't tasted it.

Aisha: I'm particular about everything. You know this.

Kael: I do know this.

She stared at those four words for longer than they deserved. There was something about the simplicity of them — no performance, no agenda, just the quiet acknowledgement of a man who had paid attention. Who still was.

She put the phone down and got up to make tea.

The call from her lawyer came at eleven.

"I need you to look at something," David said, without preamble, because he was the kind of lawyer who charged by the hour and considered pleasantries an inefficiency. "I've been going through the original loan documentation — the one TechNova signed before the debt was sold to Donovan Capital."

"And?"

"The sale was not straightforward, Aisha." A pause, the kind that meant he was choosing how to deliver something. "Standard debt sales require notification to the borrower within thirty days. You received yours on day twenty-nine. That part is clean. But the original lender — Meridian Finance — sold the debt at a significant discount. Forty percent below market value."

She set her tea down. "That's unusual."

"It's more than unusual. Institutions don't sell performing debt at that kind of loss unless they're under pressure to move it. Or unless someone made it worth their while to sell to a specific buyer."

The morning felt different suddenly. Sharper. She moved to her desk without thinking, the instinct that had kept TechNova alive these five years — the ability to shift from warmth to precision in a single breath.

"You're saying someone engineered the sale."

"I'm saying the numbers suggest it. I don't have evidence of who or why. Not yet." David's voice was careful, measured. "I thought you should know before you get any deeper into the restructuring arrangement."

After she hung up, Aisha sat very still for a moment.

Then she opened her laptop and pulled up everything she had on Meridian Finance.

She did not call Kael.

She thought about it — the direct approach, the clean confrontation, the question asked plainly and his answer weighed on its own merit. But she had built a company on the principle that you did not show your hand before you understood the game, and that principle had not failed her yet.

Instead she called Sule.

"I need a favour," she said. "Unofficial. Nothing that touches the company."

Sule had been her first hire — a product manager who moonlighted as the most resourceful person she had ever met, with a network that extended into corners of Yaoundé's business world that Aisha did not officially know about. "What kind of favour?"

"I need to know who benefits if TechNova fails. Investors, competitors, anyone with a financial interest in seeing us go under. And I need to know if there is any connection between them and Meridian Finance."

A silence. "How deep do you want me to go?"

"Deep enough to find something if it's there."

"Give me a week."

She thanked him and hung up.

Then she sat at her desk and looked at the city through her window and allowed herself, for the first time, to consider the possibility that Kael's arrival in her life had not been coincidence. That someone had put him there deliberately. And that the question she could not yet answer was whether he knew it.

She was still at her desk at seven in the evening, surrounded by documents and three cold cups of tea, when her buzzer rang.

She frowned at it. She was not expecting anyone.

She pressed the intercom. "Yes?"

"It's Kael."

The silence that followed lasted approximately three seconds, which was two seconds longer than she would have liked.

"I didn't invite you here," she said.

"I know." His voice through the intercom was slightly distorted, but the steadiness of it came through clearly. "I brought egusi soup. And I won't stay if you don't want me to. But you didn't eat last night — I'm guessing — and you've been working all day — I'm also guessing — and it seemed like the kind of evening where someone should check on you even if you'd never ask them to."

Aisha stared at the intercom panel.

The thing was — and this was the inconvenient, poorly timed, entirely unwelcome thing — he was right. About all of it. She had skipped dinner last night and she had been at her desk since nine this morning and nobody had checked on her because she had spent five years making herself the kind of person nobody thought needed checking on.

She pressed the button and let him in.

He arrived at her door carrying a covered pot and a quiet confidence that suggested he had not been entirely certain she would buzz him up but had decided to try anyway. He was in a plain dark sweater and trousers, no suit, no armour of any kind, and it struck her again how much more like himself he seemed outside of professional settings — less constructed, more present.

"Kitchen?" he said.

"Straight ahead."

She followed him in and watched him move around her kitchen with the ease of someone who understood spaces — opening the right cabinet for bowls on the second try, finding the serving spoon without asking, turning the hob on to the correct temperature without being told where the knob was. Small things. The kind of small things that meant something she did not want to examine too closely.

She sat on the kitchen counter the way she did when she was in her own space and not performing anything, and she watched him.

"How did you know where I live?" she said.

"The proposal. You listed the company's registered address and your personal address for correspondence."

She had. She filed that information under things she needed to stop putting on documents.

"Kael." She said his name with a steadiness she had to work for. "I need to ask you something and I need you to answer me honestly."

He turned from the hob to look at her. Something in her tone had changed and he heard it — she could see that he heard it. "Ask."

"Did you know about TechNova's debt situation before Meridian Finance approached you?"

He was still for a moment. Not the stillness of guilt — she knew what that looked like — but the stillness of a man taking a question seriously.

"No," he said. "Meridian came to us. The terms were unusual enough that my team flagged it, but the asset was sound and we proceeded." He paused. "Why?"

"Because the sale price was forty percent below market value."

Something shifted in his expression. Rapid and precise — the calculation of a man whose mind worked quickly and did not like what it was arriving at. "Who told you that?"

"My lawyer."

He turned the hob off and set the spoon down and gave her his full attention, which was an uncomfortable thing to be given by someone whose full attention felt like a beam of light pointed directly at you. "You think someone arranged it."

"I think it's worth asking."

He was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke, his voice was measured but there was something underneath it — the particular tension of a man who was also, she realised, rearranging things. "I'll have my team pull the full transaction record. Every communication, every intermediary. If someone built a road to bring me here, I want to know who paved it."

She looked at him.

"You believe me," she said. It was not entirely a question.

"I have no reason not to." He held her gaze. "And every reason to want the same answers you do."

The kitchen was quiet. The soup smelled extraordinary — deep and rich, the kind of smell that belonged to Sunday afternoons and people who cooked with intention.

"Fine," she said, after a moment. "We look into it together."

He nodded. Picked up the spoon. "Eat first."

She almost argued. Then she looked at the soup and decided that some concessions were worth making.

"It had better be good," she said, sliding off the counter.

"It is," he said simply.

It was.