LOVING THE ENEMY

CHAPTER FIVE

Aisha did not think about Kael on the drive home.

She thought about the quarterly projections. She thought about the product roadmap meeting she had scheduled for Thursday. She thought about whether she had replied to her mother's voice note from two days ago — she had not, and that was going to be a conversation — and she thought about the fact that Grace had looked genuinely happy tonight in a way that made the last three months of pressure feel worth it.

She did not think about Kael.

She was almost home when her phone rang through the car speakers. Her mother. As if thinking about her had sent some kind of signal across the two hundred kilometres between Yaoundé and Bamenda.

She answered.

"You didn't call me back." No greeting. Her mother had never seen the point of them.

"Good evening, Mama."

"It is almost midnight. What kind of good evening is this?"

"The working kind." Aisha turned into her street, the familiar row of neem trees dark and quiet on either side. "I was celebrating with the team. We had a good day."

A pause. Her mother was recalibrating — she could hear it. The shift from prepared lecture to genuine interest. "What kind of good day?"

"The company is going to be fine. We sorted the debt situation."

"Sorted how?"

"The creditor approved our terms."

Another pause, longer this time. When her mother spoke again, her voice had changed entirely — softer, lower, the voice she used when she was feeling something she did not quite have words for. "Your father would have been so proud of you. You know that."

Aisha's hands tightened on the steering wheel. Just slightly. "I know, Mama."

"He used to say — you remember what he used to say? He said that girl has a spine made of something they haven't named yet."

Aisha laughed despite herself, the kind of laugh that arrived without permission. "He said that about every woman he admired."

"He said it about you first."

She parked outside her building and sat in the quiet car for a moment, the engine ticking as it cooled, the city a distant murmur beyond her windows.

"Mama," she said. "Can I ask you something?"

"When have I ever said no to you?"

"When I wanted to drop out of university to start the company."

"That was wisdom, not refusal. Ask your question."

Aisha looked at the dark street ahead. "If someone hurt you — not because they wanted to, but because they thought it was the right thing to do — is that better or worse than if they had done it carelessly?"

The silence on the other end was the thoughtful kind. Her mother was seventy-one years old and had buried a husband and raised two daughters alone and run a small provisions store in Bamenda for thirty years. She did not give careless answers.

"It is worse," she said finally. "Because carelessness you can dismiss. Intention you have to reckon with."

Aisha stared at the steering wheel.

"Why are you asking me this at midnight, Aisha?"

"No reason. I was just thinking."

"You are never just thinking. You inherited your father's brain — it always goes somewhere specific." A beat. "Is it a man?"

"Goodnight, Mama."

"Aisha —"

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

She ended the call and sat in the silence for a long moment before getting out of the car.

She ran into him the next morning.

Not at the office. Not in any of the professional spaces where she had learned to manage his presence. She ran into Kael Donovan at the market.

She had gone early, before the crowds, the way she had done every Saturday since she moved to Yaoundé — not because she needed to, she could have sent someone, but because there was something grounding about choosing her own tomatoes, about the specific normalcy of it. She was standing at a vegetable stall in a plain yellow dress, no blazer, hair loose, holding two bunches of spinach and weighing the merits of each with more concentration than the situation probably required, when she heard him say her name.

She turned.

He looked different outside a suit. Still put together — dark trousers, a simple shirt, sleeves rolled up — but softer somehow. More like a person and less like a negotiation.

He was carrying a basket. An actual market basket. She had not imagined him as someone who owned a market basket.

"You live around here?" she asked.

"Bastos. You?"

"Nlongkak." Ten minutes apart. She filed that information under things she did not need to know. "You cook?"

"Passably." Something warmed in his expression. "I make a very decent egusi soup."

"That is a significant claim."

"I stand by it."

She turned back to her spinach and made a decision — the left bunch, fuller, darker green. The vendor wrapped it without being asked. She had been coming here long enough that he knew.

Kael fell into step beside her as she moved to the next stall, which she had not invited and had not refused, which was a pattern she was beginning to notice with him.

"You were different last night," he said. "At the bar. With your team."

"Different how?"

He considered the question with the seriousness it probably did not require. "Lighter. Like you had put something down for an evening."

She glanced at him sideways. "Is that an observation or a comment?"

"An observation. A good one." He paused at a fruit stall, picked up a mango, turned it in his hand with the focus of someone who actually knew what he was looking for. "You work very hard at being unreadable, Aisha. It was good to see you when you weren't."

She stopped walking.

He stopped too, a step ahead, and turned to look at her. The market moved around them — vendors calling out prices, women negotiating in Ewondo and Bassa and French all at once, a child running between legs with a plastic bag of groundnuts — all of it indifferent to the two of them standing in the middle of it.

"You do not get to do that," she said quietly.

"Do what?"

"See me. Like that. Not yet."

He held her gaze. There was no argument in his face, no defence. Just an honest reckoning with what she had said and what it cost her to say it.

"Understood," he said.

She nodded once and started walking again.

He walked beside her for a few more minutes, and they talked about small things — the price of tomatoes, a road that had been under construction for two years with no visible progress, whether the mango season this year was better or worse than last. Easy conversation. The kind that asked nothing of either of them.

At the edge of the market, where their routes diverged, they stopped.

"Thank you," she said. "For approving the proposal. I meant it last night but it was —" she searched for the word — "a complicated moment to say it properly."

"You said it fine."

"I say most things fine. That's not the same as saying them well."

He looked at her for a moment with an expression she could not entirely name. "You know," he said, "I spent two years after the surgery trying to figure out what I was supposed to do next. What the rest of it was supposed to look like." He glanced down at his basket, then back at her. "I'm still figuring it out. But standing here arguing about mango season with you is the least lost I've felt in a long time."

Aisha opened her mouth and then closed it again.

There were responses to that — sensible ones, careful ones, the kind that kept things where they were supposed to be. She knew all of them. She had written the manual on them.

"Enjoy your egusi soup," she said instead.

He smiled — a real one this time, not the almost-smile, a full one, and it did something entirely unfair to the morning. "Enjoy your spinach."

She walked away first.

She did not look back.

But she was smiling by the time she reached her car, small and private and entirely against her better judgement, and she did not try very hard to stop it.