LOVING THE ENEMY

CHAPTER THREE

The problem with almost crying in an elevator was that you had to walk out of it eventually.

Aisha squared her shoulders, stepped into the lobby of her building, and smiled at the security guard the way she always did — warm, brief, unbothered. He smiled back. Nobody noticed anything. That was the point.

She had built her entire professional life on the art of being unreadable.

Upstairs, her office was exactly how she had left it — controlled chaos, the kind only she understood. Stacks of reports arranged by urgency, not alphabetically. Three half-finished cups of tea she kept forgetting about. A framed photograph of her father on the windowsill, turned slightly toward the door as if he was watching whoever walked in.

She sat down, pulled her keyboard toward her, and stared at her screen.

I was sick.

Three words. Eleven letters. And somehow they had rearranged everything she thought she knew about the last three years.

She had rehearsed her anger for so long it had become structural — load-bearing, like a wall she had built her whole recovery on. She had needed Kael to be selfish. She had needed him to be careless. Because if he was the villain in the story, then she was simply the woman who had survived him, and survival was something Aisha Fon was very good at.

But a man who left to protect you?

That was a different story entirely. And she did not yet know what role it cast her in.

Her phone buzzed. She glanced at it.

Kael Donovan — missed call.

She turned the phone face down.

He called again at two in the afternoon. Then at four. He did not leave a voicemail either time, which told her more about him than any message would have. Kael had never been a man who explained himself to machines. He said what he needed to say to the person who needed to hear it, or he said nothing at all.

At half past five, her assistant knocked.

"There's a Mr. Donovan in reception," Bih said, with the carefully neutral expression of someone who had learned not to ask questions. "He says he doesn't have an appointment. He also says —" she paused, consulting her notepad with a faint smile she was trying to suppress — "that he is aware of that, and he is prepared to wait as long as necessary."

Aisha looked at her assistant for a long moment.

"Tell him I have a full evening."

"I did. He said, and I'm quoting directly here — tell her I have a full life and I wasted three years of it. I can wait an hour."

The silence in the office stretched long enough to become its own kind of answer.

"Give me ten minutes," Aisha said finally. "Then send him in."

Bih nodded and disappeared without a word. She was an excellent assistant. She would make an equally excellent diplomat.

Aisha stood, straightened her blazer, and walked to the window. Yaoundé stretched out below her, golden and loud and full of itself in the early evening light. She had chosen this office specifically for this view. On the hard days — and there had been many — she would stand here and remind herself what she had built and why she had built it.

She was still standing there when she heard the door open.

She did not turn around immediately. It was not a power move. She simply needed one more second.

"You look like you own the city," Kael said from behind her.

"I'm working on it." She turned.

He was standing just inside the door, jacket off, sleeves rolled to the elbow, hands in his pockets. He looked less like a creditor and more like a man who had run out of performances and decided to just show up as himself. It was, she thought privately, a dangerous look on him.

"You didn't answer my calls," he said.

"I was busy."

"You're always busy."

"That's because I always have work to do." She gestured to the chair across from her desk. "Sit down, Kael."

He sat. She sat across from him. The desk between them felt both necessary and insufficient.

"You said five minutes this morning," she said. "You used four of them telling me why you left. You didn't finish."

He looked at her steadily. "I know."

"So finish."

He was quiet for a moment. Not the silence of someone searching for words — Kael always had words. It was the silence of someone deciding how honest to be.

"It was my heart," he said. "Literally. A condition they found during a routine check. The kind that sounds manageable until the specialist sits you down and uses words like high risk and uncertain prognosis and you realise that the life you had been building in your head might not be the life you actually get."

Aisha said nothing. She kept her face still and her breathing even and she listened the way her father had taught her — with her whole body, not just her ears.

"We had been together eight months," Kael continued. "You had just signed the lease on your first real office space. You were so happy that night. I remember you made jollof rice to celebrate and burned the bottom of it and laughed so hard about it that I thought —" He stopped. Looked down briefly. Looked back up. "I thought, this woman is going to do extraordinary things. And I was not going to be the thing that slowed her down."

"That was not your decision to make," Aisha said. Her voice was quiet but it had an edge.

"I know that now."

"You should have known it then."

"Yes." He did not flinch from it. "I should have."

The honesty of it disarmed her slightly. She had expected defence. Justification. The careful architecture of a man protecting his choices. Instead he was just sitting there, owning every mistake with the weariness of someone who had already argued this case against himself a thousand times and lost each time.

"Are you well now?" she asked.

Something shifted in his expression. Something almost soft. "Surgery, two years ago. Successful. I've been clear since."

"Good." She meant it. She hated that she meant it as much as she did.

"Aisha —"

"We should talk about the restructuring proposal," she said. "That is why you are here. Professionally speaking."

He studied her for a moment. Then, slowly, he nodded. "Alright. Professionally speaking."

She pulled the folder from her drawer and opened it between them, and they spent the next forty minutes talking about nothing but numbers. Interest rates, repayment timelines, projected revenue, market conditions. It was clean and efficient and entirely beside the point.

But just before he left, when he was standing at the door with his jacket back on and the city darkening behind her through the window, he paused.

"The jollof rice," he said. "The burned kind. It was still the best meal I'd had in years."

He left before she could answer.

Aisha sat alone in her office for a long time afterward, not looking at anything in particular. Her father's photograph watched from the windowsill.

Outside, Yaoundé carried on — golden, loud, completely indifferent to the fact that something was quietly, dangerously shifting inside the chest of one of its most composed residents.

She picked up her cold tea, took a sip, and decided she would think about it tomorrow.

She was almost certain she could keep that promise to herself.

Almost.