Behind close doors

Zara told herself the whole bus ride that she was not nervous. She told herself the same thing when she walked into the lobby of Blackwell Enterprises and the security man at the desk looked her up and down like she had entered the wrong building. She smoothed her blazer and gave him her name and stood straight while he called upstairs to confirm she was expected. She had ironed that blazer three times the night before. She was not going to let a security guard make her feel small in it. The building was tall. Forty-two floors of glass sitting right in the middle of Victoria Island like it owned everything around it which honestly it probably did. The air inside was cold, and it smelled like something expensive she could not name. She walked to the elevator and pressed the button for the forty-second floor and watched the doors close and breathed slowly. She was fine. She was completely fine. The elevator had a mirror on one side, and she looked at herself in it. Dark skin. Dark eyes. Her braids pinned up neat. The burgundy blazer over a white shirt she had pressed until there were no wrinkles left anywhere. She looked like someone who belonged here. That was the whole point. She had learned a long time ago that how you looked when you walked into a room decided half of what people thought of you before you even opened your mouth. So she always looked like she belonged. Even when she was shaking inside. Especially then. The woman who came to collect her from reception was called Temi. She was tall and moved fast and talked while walking like she had somewhere more important to be right after that. She told Zara that there were four other candidates being interviewed today. She told her that Mr Blackwell sometimes sat in on interviews for senior creative roles and sometimes did not. She said he was particular about design and that it was better to listen carefully before speaking. Zara said thank you and filed that information away. They walked through a long corridor with windows on one side showing Lagos spread out below them in every direction. She had grown up in this city. She had left it and come back, and left again and came back again. But she had never seen it from up here and for a moment she forgot to be nervous because it was genuinely beautiful from forty-two floors up. The water. The rooftops. The way the morning sun was sitting on everything like it was proud of itself. Then Temi stopped at a door and knocked twice and opened it and Zara walked into the conference room and the moment passed. There were two people already sitting at the table. A woman who was maybe fifty-something and a younger man who smiled when Zara came in. They introduced themselves. They shook her hand warmly. They asked her to set up her portfolio on the board at the front. The chair at the top of the table was empty. Zara set up her portfolio and began. She had been speaking for maybe ten minutes when the door opened behind her. She did not stop. She had learned that stopping mid-sentence when someone enters a room gave them power over her. So she kept talking about the Ikoyi residential project she had worked on two years ago and the way she had thought about light and space in that design. She heard footsteps. She heard the chair at the top of the table move. She heard the quality of attention in the room shift the way it does when someone important walks in. She finished what she was saying. Then she turned around. Adrian Blackwell was not what she had expected. She had expected someone older, maybe. Or someone who wore their money more openly the way rich men in Lagos usually did. Heavy watch. Designer shoes you could tell from across the room. That kind of comfortable arrogance that comes from having never been told no. He was none of that. He was sitting at the head of the table in a dark suit with no tie and his collar open one button, and he was looking at her like she was a document he was reading. Not rude exactly. Just very direct. Very still. His eyes were so dark they were almost black and his face gave absolutely nothing away. She looked back at him with the same energy. She had also learned that. He said continue, and she turned back to her presentation and continued. He did not speak again for a long time after that. The other two asked her questions and she answered them. She talked about her training at the Bartlett in London. She talked about the projects she had led before she came back to Nigeria. She could feel him watching her the whole time, even when she was not looking at him. It was not an uncomfortable feeling exactly, but it was a very specific one. Like being examined by someone who was genuinely trying to figure something out. Then the woman asked her what her design philosophy was when it came to luxury residential spaces and Zara was in the middle of answering when he spoke. He asked her where she had worked before London. She told him. He said she had left that company after eighteen months. She said yes. He waited. She understood he was waiting for her to explain herself. She chose not to. She held his gaze and let the silence sit there between them without filling it. Something passed across his face. She still could not read it. He said at the next slide. She clicked on the next slide. The interview went on like that for another twenty minutes. Professional. Clean. She showed him her best work, and she talked about it without apology, and she watched him the way he was watching her, and she told herself she was not affected by any of it. At the end, the woman said they would be in touch. The younger man told her she had done brilliantly and shook her hand twice. Temi appeared at the door to take her back to the elevator. Adrian Blackwell had not said goodbye. He was looking at her portfolio which she had left spread open on the table. His hand was resting beside it. He did not look up. She picked up her bag and her portfolio case and walked to the door. He said the Harbor Penthouse. She stopped. It was the most talked about development project in Lagos that year. His company had published early concept renders in three different architecture magazines. She had studied those renders carefully before coming here today. She had opinions about them. He was still looking at the portfolio, but now he looked up at her. Same direct look. Same face giving nothing. He asked what she would do differently from what had been published. The room went quiet. She thought about the advice Temi had given her. Listen more than you speak. Be careful with him. She took a breath. Then she said the eastern facade was wrong. She said that whoever approved full glass panels on that side did not understand what afternoon sun does to a living space in Lagos. By three o clock, those rooms would be too hot to sit in without blackout curtains and blackout curtains in a penthouse like that would ruin the whole aesthetic. She said the main living area needed to rotate slightly toward the south-west. You would lose a little of the harbor view, but you would gain a home that people could actually live in comfortably instead of a beautiful glass box that cooked them alive every afternoon. Silence. Then he said those glass panels were his choice. She looked at him. He looked at her. She said then you made a mistake. The younger man at the table made a short sound. The woman looked down at her notepad. Temi in the doorway had gone completely still. Adrian Blackwell looked at Zara for a long moment. Then that thing happened again at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. Something smaller than a smile but more real somehow. Like something had just been confirmed for him. He said, Thank you, Ms. Cole. He said they would be in touch. He looked back down at her work. She walked out. She held it together all the way to the elevator. When the doors closed she let her hands shake a little. Not a lot. Just enough to release what she had been holding onto for the last hour. She pressed her palms flat against her thighs and breathed and watched the numbers go down. Forty two. Thirty-five. Twenty. You just told him to his face that he was wrong. She had. She genuinely had done that. Twelve. Seven. Ground. You are not getting this job. Probably not. Which was fine. She had other work. The Ikeja contract would keep her going through the end of the year. She did not need this job. She had come to this interview because the money they were offering was more than three times what she was currently earning, and her mother had died owing to a debt that had somehow become Zara's problem, which was a whole other story. But she did not need to think about that right now. She walked through the lobby past the security man who no longer looked at her like she was in the wrong place and out through the glass doors into Lagos. The heat hit her immediately. After all that cold engineered air, the sun felt like something alive pressing down on her shoulders. She stood on the pavement and let herself breathe real air for a moment. Noise. Traffic. A man selling cold drinks from a cart at the corner. The city was going about its business the way it always did, regardless of whatever was happening to her personally. Her phone buzzed. She looked at it. Email from Temi at Blackwell Enterprises. The time stamp said it had been sent four minutes ago, which meant it had been sent while she was still in the elevator. Ms Cole. Mr Blackwell has asked me to extend a conditional offer pending reference checks. Salary and full terms are in the attachment. Please let us know at your earliest convenience. Zara read it once. Then she read it again. Then she looked up at the building. All forty-two floors of it were sitting there in the morning sun looking like it knew exactly what it was and was not apologizing for any of it. She thought about the salary figure in the attachment, which was very significant. She thought about the Harbor Penthouse and what it would mean for her career to have her name attached to a project everyone in Lagos was watching. She thought about her mother's debt and the number that had been sitting in her bank account for three months like an accusation. She also thought about the way he had looked at her when she told him he was wrong. Not angry. Not embarrassed. Interested. Like she had done something he had not expected anyone to do in a long time, and he was not sure what to do with that yet, but he was not going to stop thinking about it. That was the part she probably should not be thinking about. She opened a reply and typed that she was available to discuss terms at his convenience, and she pressed send before she could change her mind. Then she walked to the bus stop. She told herself on the whole ride home that it was just a job. Good money. Good project. Clean and simple. She had been lying to herself all day, and she was very good at it by now, so one more time did not feel like much. But somewhere in the back of her mind, where she kept the things she did not want to look at directly, she already knew that nothing about Adrian Blackwell was going to be clean or simple. She knew it the same way she had known other things she later wished she had listened to. She stared out the bus window at the city going by, and she told herself she was fine.