"No Subject"

The elevator doors were closing when Adaeze slipped through them. She exhaled, pressing her back against the cool metal wall, clutching her files to her chest like armor. Fourth floor. Marketing. She just needed to survive the next thirty seconds, and she would be back at her desk, invisible again, the way she liked it. "Hold the door." She did not hold the door. She stared straight ahead and let it close. It opened again. Kelechi Obi stepped inside. Adaeze had heard about him before she ever saw him. The whole office had. New senior manager from Abuja. Young — too young, people said, for the kind of title he carried. Charming. Sharp. The kind of man that Human Resources quietly reminded female staff to be professional around not because he was inappropriate but because he made people forget to be. She had seen him twice from a distance and decided he was not her problem. Now he was standing less than a metre away, smelling like something expensive and unhurried, and he was looking at her. "You didn't hold the door," he said. "I didn't see you," she said. He smiled. She looked away. The elevator hummed upward and then, between the second and third floor, it stopped. Not slowed. Stopped. The lights flickered once, twice, and dropped to the faint amber glow of the emergency strip along the floor. From somewhere deep in the building came the groan of a generator failing to catch. Then silence. NEPA had taken the light. As it always did. As it always would. Adaeze pressed the button for the fourth floor. Nothing. She pressed the one marked Open Door. Nothing. She pressed the emergency call button and listened to it ring into what felt like an empty room somewhere far away. "They won't answer," Kelechi said. He had loosened his tie slightly and was leaning against the opposite wall, watching her with an expression that was difficult to read. "The security desk on the ground floor runs on the main power. No light, no desk. They've all stepped outside to check the generator." "How do you know that?" "Because I've been in this building for two weeks and the light has gone four times." He slid down the wall slightly, making himself comfortable. "We're going to be here for a while." Adaeze did not slide down the wall. She stood straight and kept her files against her chest and stared at the doors as if she could will them open through sheer emotional exhaustion. "You can sit," he said. "I'm fine standing." "You've been standing since seven this morning. I've seen you." She turned to look at him then. It was a mistake. Up close, in the low amber light, Kelechi Obi was even more difficult to ignore. There was something about the way he held himself — not arrogant exactly, but certain. Like a man who had never once walked into a room and wondered if he belonged there. "You don't know what time I got in," she said. "Seven fourteen," he said. "You were at the coffee machine when I arrived. You were wearing that same grey blouse. You didn't look up." The silence that followed was the kind that had weight. "Why were you looking?" she asked. He did not answer immediately. He tilted his head slightly, as if the question deserved more than a quick response, as if he was deciding how honest to be. "Because you were the only person in the office who didn't look up when I walked in," he said finally. "Everyone else did. You didn't. I found that interesting." Adaeze turned back to the doors. Her heart was doing something inconvenient. "I was focused on my work," she said. "I know," he said. "That's what made it interesting." She sat down. Not because he had told her to. Because her legs had quietly made the decision without consulting her. She sat against the wall with her files in her lap and stared at the emergency strip glowing along the floor and told herself this was simply a situation she was managing. A professional inconvenience. Nothing more. "What's your name?" he asked. "You're my senior manager," she said. "You should know my name." "Adaeze Nwosu," he said immediately. "Twenty-four. Joined the company eight months ago. Your team lead says you're the quietest person in the department and the most consistently accurate. You've never been late. You've never caused a problem. You've never made yourself visible in any way." She stared at him. "Which is interesting," he continued, "because you are not someone who should be invisible." The air in the elevator felt different suddenly. Or maybe she was simply more aware of it. Of the small space. Of the amber light softening everything. Of the fact that there was nowhere to look that did not eventually lead back to him. "That's not appropriate," she said. Her voice came out steadier than she felt. "You're right," he said. "I apologise." He said it simply, without embarrassment, the way confident people apologise — fully, cleanly, without making it complicated. She almost wished he had been defensive. Defensive she could work with. They sat in silence for a while. Somewhere above them the building breathed — the distant sound of voices, footsteps on stairs, the muffled city outside pushing against the walls. "Why do you make yourself invisible?" he asked. "I don't." "You do. Deliberately." He was not accusing her. He sounded genuinely curious, like a man turning over something he could not quite figure out. "Every meeting you sit at the back. You send emails instead of walking to people's desks. You eat lunch at your workstation. You take the stairs unless—" he paused, something flickering across his face, "—unless you're running late. Like today." Adaeze looked at him for a long moment. "Are you always like this?" she asked. "Like what?" "Like you've already read the manual on a person before you've spoken to them." He laughed. It was a real laugh, not a polished one, and it did something to the careful distance she had been maintaining. "Only when the person is worth reading," he said. The generator caught. The lights surged back, sharp and fluorescent and suddenly very honest after the amber softness of the last twenty minutes. The elevator hummed. The buttons lit up. The doors shuddered once and then slid open on the third floor landing where two colleagues stood waiting, phones in hand, complaining loudly about the power cut. Adaeze stood quickly. Straightened her blouse. Collected her files. She stepped out of the elevator without looking back. She took the stairs the rest of the way to the fourth floor and sat at her desk and opened her laptop and stared at the screen for a full minute without reading a single word on it. Her phone buzzed. An internal email notification. She clicked it without thinking. From: K. Obi To: A. Nwosu Subject: (no subject) You still didn't tell me why. Adaeze stared at the email for a long time. She did not reply. But she did not delete it either.