Too Much Lie To Be True

The Offer She Should Say No To

POV: Ada

He found me the next morning in the library before classes started. I had the academy floor plan printed from an old building permit I had found online, and I was going over it for the third time, trying to locate the archive room. The plan showed it on the east corridor of the lower ground floor, but there were two staircases not marked on it and I was working out which one led there.

Tobias sat down across from me without asking. I was starting to think he did most things without asking.

"I need to talk to you," he said.

"We already talked yesterday," I said, and did not look up.

"That was small talk. This is different." He put a thin folder on the table between us.

I looked at the folder. Then I looked at him. "What is that?"

"A problem," he said. "And possibly your solution to a different one."

I opened the folder slowly. Inside was a printed screenshot from a private social media account. The account belonged to Kofi Mensah, Tobias's younger brother, fifteen years old. The screenshots showed Kofi saying several very embarrassing things about the Mensah family that had clearly never been meant to leave a friend group. Three major blogs were about to run with it. A PR disaster for a family that lived on its image.

The Mensah PR team's solution was to push a cleaner story onto the front page fast. A stable, serious relationship for Tobias. Someone who looked real. Not someone from their world who would perform it too obviously. Someone who had nothing obvious to gain from the association.

"They suggested our social circle," Tobias said. "I said no. Everyone in it performs. You don't."

"You have known me for one day," I said.

"You told Priya her bag was fake in front of her audience," he said. "That is not performing. That is something different."

I said nothing. He slid a second piece of paper across the table. Gold border. Words printed at the top that made my breath go very still inside my chest: ARCHIVE, AUTHORISED.

"Two months," he said. "Events. Being seen together. You get full access to academy facilities, a scholarship guarantee, and a personal recommendation from my grandfather at the end."

The archive. I could hear my own pulse. The Mensah family archive was where my father's investigation had started. He had mentioned it twice in his notes, always circled, always with a question mark next to it. It was the room I had been planning to get into since before I sent my application.

"Why are you handling this yourself?" I asked. "Why not let the PR team arrange everything?"

"Because PR teams pick people who want something from my family," he said. "I need someone who doesn't."

I looked at the access pass. I looked at his face. He was completely serious, which was either honest or very well practised, and I could not yet tell which.

Say no, I thought. Find another way in.

"Two months," I said. "And we make the rules together."

He nodded once. "Deal."

The same afternoon his PR team sent me a schedule. There was an event that very evening, a youth media panel at the academy's rooftop hall. I wore a dark dress I had already packed. I sat in the front row. When Tobias stepped off the stage he walked straight to me and bent slightly to say something close to my ear.

"Four cameras. Two o'clock, eleven o'clock, directly behind us, and one above the exit. Smile when I laugh."

"That is very romantic," I said quietly.

"We're very romantic," he said, and smiled at something across the room, and I smiled too because the cameras were watching.

We were good at it. That was the first thing I noticed. The second thing I noticed was that pretending next to him was more comfortable than it had any right to be. I stored that fact somewhere uncomfortable and decided to look at it later.

That night I used the gold access pass for the first time.

The archive was a long room with grey metal shelves and box files going back thirty years. It smelled like cold air and paper and the particular stillness of a place where things were kept but not often visited. I moved fast. My father's notes had pointed to a corruption case from six years ago, a government construction deal where money disappeared and someone paid a media company to make sure it never became news.

My hands stayed steady. My heart did not.

I found it on the third shelf from the back. A folder labelled OKONKWO, CASE REF 2019. My father's name. On a Mensah Media folder. Inside was a single printed email. The sender's name had been blacked out. But the last line had not been touched.

It said: "Do not let him publish. Handle it."

I read it three times. My fingers went cold all the way to the wrist. I photographed every page. I put the folder back exactly as I found it. I walked out without running, even though running was everything my body wanted to do.

In the bathroom I ran the tap cold and put my hands under it and breathed until the shaking stopped.

"I found you, Dad," I whispered to the mirror.

I stayed in that bathroom until I was sure my face was back to normal. Then I walked the corridor back to the dormitory stairs.

But when I passed the archive door I stopped. There was a small piece of tape at the corner of the doorframe, exactly at eye level, the kind a person places with two fingers and then checks later to see if the fold has shifted. I had not put it there. I would have noticed something like that. Noticing was what I did.

I stood still in the empty corridor and looked at that small strip of tape for a long time without touching it.

Someone had set a trap on that door before tonight, before I arrived, or sometime in the hours since I had used the pass. Either they had been expecting someone to come or they had followed me and moved fast. Both possibilities told the same story in different words.

Someone inside this school knew that door mattered. And now they knew someone had opened it.

I walked to the stairs and went up without running. I was very careful not to run.