My Slavery Partner

Meeting Remi

POV: Sola

Remi Harrington did not look at me when he walked into the kitchen. He walked to the island counter, set down a sleek black tablet, and slid it toward me without once lifting his eyes from his phone.

"Today's tasks are on there," he said. "Don't be slow about them."

His voice was even and flat, the kind of voice that did not need volume to carry weight. He turned and walked back toward the door like my presence in the room was something his schedule had noted but his mind had already moved past.

I picked up the tablet and read quickly. The list was detailed. Every item had a time slot, a set of instructions, and a note about what would happen if it was done incorrectly. The kind of list written by someone who expected people to fail.

The third item stopped me. "Send reminder at two-fifty. Call to Grandfather at three pm sharp. Do not let me miss it."

I set the reminder. Then I kept scrolling through the document attached below it, a business report with his name at the top, and that was when I saw it. A calculation on page four that was off by a full zero. A missing digit that would make a figure look ten times smaller than it actually was.

I stared at it for a moment. It was not my job to check his reports. My job was to remind him about phone calls and arrange files and carry things from one end of the house to the other. But leaving a mistake sitting there felt wrong in a way I could not just walk past.

I opened the document editor, fixed the number, and saved it. Then I set the tablet back on the kitchen counter where he had left it and went to find Mrs. Kola for my next instruction.

An hour later, I was sorting files in a side office when I heard footsteps behind me again. I turned and he was standing in the doorway, the tablet in his hand, looking at me in a way he had not looked at me before. Actually looking, not through me or past me, but at me.

"You changed the number on page four," he said.

"There was an error," I said. "I corrected it."

A pause. "You read the whole report?"

"I read enough to notice the mistake."

He did not say thank you. I had not expected him to. But something shifted in the way he was standing, something small and hard to name, like a door that had been shut deciding, just slightly, to open. He looked at me for one more second, then at the file in my hands, then at the cabinet behind me.

"The green folders go in the second drawer, not the third," he said, and walked away.

That was my thank you. I filed the green folders in the second drawer.

I thought about that exchange all through the morning. Not because I cared what he thought of me, I told myself firmly, but because I needed to understand how this house worked. Every environment had rules underneath the rules, and the faster I figured those out, the easier the rest of the year would be.

The afternoon brought a different kind of test entirely. Remi had guests in the main sitting room, business people from the sound of the conversation spilling under the door. I was carrying a tray of drinks through when a girl turned and saw me.

She was beautiful in the sharp, deliberate way of someone who worked very hard to look like they were not working at all. She wore the kind of easy confidence that came from never having to ask permission for anything. Her name, I would learn later, was Cleo.

"Oh," she said brightly, smiling at the room like she was sharing a small, delightful discovery. "Is this the new help?" She turned the smile directly on me. "What is your name?"

"Sola," I said.

"Sola." She repeated it the way someone repeats a word they are deciding whether to find funny. "Remi's little servant. How sweet."

The room went slightly quiet. I kept my face still. I set the drinks down carefully, one by one, without rushing and without spilling a single drop, and I straightened up and looked at her.

"I am not his servant," I said, in the same polite, measured tone I would use to correct a wrong number in a report. "I work for the household. There is a difference."

Someone at the far end of the room made a sound that might have been a cough or a suppressed laugh. Cleo's smile stayed in place but the warmth behind it went cold.

I walked out with the empty tray. My hands were completely steady. I was a little proud of that.

Back in the corridor, I pressed my back against the wall and let out one slow breath. Then I straightened up and kept walking, because standing in corridors feeling sorry for myself was not something I had time for.

Behind me, through the closed sitting room door, I heard Cleo say something I could not make out. Then I heard Remi's voice, low and clipped, cutting her off with a single sentence. I did not catch the words. I did not stop to try.

The reminder I had set went off at two-fifty. I walked to the study door, knocked twice, and said through it that his grandfather call was in ten minutes. A few seconds of silence. Then a short, "Thank you." Two words. But they were the right two words, said like he meant them, and they sat differently in my ears than anything else he had said to me all day.

I was leaving through the side entrance that evening when the feeling came over me. The particular, prickling awareness of being watched by someone who is doing it carefully enough to almost hide it. I had felt it before, back home, in the market, in places where you learned quickly to trust that feeling.

I did not turn around. I kept my pace even and walked all the way to the gate. But the feeling followed me the whole way, and I knew without looking that it was not Mrs. Kola or Amara or any of the other staff watching me go.

The whole ride home I stared out the window and told myself it did not matter. I was the household help. He was the person the household belonged to. Those were the rules, printed clearly on the contract my mother had signed.

But I kept thinking about those two words in the corridor. And the way his expression had shifted when he saw I had noticed the mistake in his report. And the fact that he had been watching me leave.

I told myself very firmly that none of it meant anything. I was almost convinced by the time I got home.

Almost.