My Slavery Partner

Working Together

POV: Sola

I started moving carefully after that. Every time I was in the archive room, I looked. Every time I carried files between offices, I read what I could without stopping long enough to be noticed. I was building something, piece by piece, even if I could not yet see what the whole picture looked like.

Remi, for his part, started treating me differently without acknowledging that he was doing it. The tasks he gave me shifted. Less carrying. More thinking. He began leaving complex documents on my desk with sticky notes attached. Things like "Check the numbers on page three" or "Does this paragraph match what the contract says on page eleven?" Small things. But they added up fast.

One afternoon, he walked into the room where I was working and said, "I need a second opinion on something."

I looked up. "From me?"

"You are the only other person in the room."

"You have a whole office full of staff."

"I know what they will say," he replied. "They will agree with me because I pay their salaries." He set a document in front of me. "You do not have that problem."

I read the document. It was a proposal for a new project timeline. I could see the issue immediately. The deadlines were built on assumptions that did not match the supplier information in the file I had organized the week before. I pointed that out. He listened without interrupting. He did not look at his phone once, which I was starting to understand was his highest form of attention.

"That is what I thought," he said when I finished. He took the document back. "Good."

He walked out again. No thank you. But I was starting to understand that Remi Harrington's version of gratitude looked like trust, and trust was harder for him to give than words. I had decided that made it worth more.

The next day I called him out about it anyway.

We were walking through the corridor after a task he had asked me to help with, and something about the quiet and the smallness of the moment made me say it before I could think better of myself.

"You treat me differently depending on who is watching," I said.

He stopped walking.

"In front of guests, I am the help," I said. "In private, you ask for my opinion. Which one is real?"

He turned to look at me. His jaw tightened slightly, but he did not deny it. "Both," he said.

"That is not an answer."

"It is the only honest one I have," he said. Then he kept walking.

I stood there for a second. Then I followed, because the job required it, but also because something about that answer felt more real than anything most people had ever said to me. It would have been easier if he had lied.

Bayo found me later that week.

Remi's younger brother was nothing like him in any way that I could measure. He was loud where Remi was quiet, wide-smiled where Remi was careful, and completely incapable of minding his own business without obvious effort. He appeared at the kitchen door on a Saturday morning with a bowl of cereal and the specific expression of someone who had already decided to be your friend whether you wanted that or not.

"You are the girl who corrected Remi's report," he said, very pleased about this information.

"Yes," I said.

"He talked about it for an entire dinner," Bayo said, eating a spoonful. "He did not say he was impressed. He used a very long sentence that meant exactly that, though. I have known him my whole life. I can translate."

"He talks about me?" I asked, before I could stop myself.

Bayo grinned in the way of someone who had been waiting for that exact question. "Not out loud. But I know my brother."

He started appearing everywhere after that. In rooms where Remi and I happened to be working. Suggesting casually that I should help Remi with a particular document in the study. Leaving just before one of us arrived, like he had somewhere more important to be. He was not subtle. He had not tried to be from the very beginning.

The late night happened on a Wednesday. A shipment schedule had an error in it that nobody had caught until nine in the evening, and fixing it meant going through three months of records by hand. Remi started alone and I was still in the building finishing another task when Mrs. Kola passed and said he had asked if I could stay.

We worked on the floor of the study because the desk was covered in printed pages. Somewhere around midnight, Amara left sandwiches outside the door without knocking. Remi ate without looking up from the records. I ate and found myself thinking about something I had not planned to say out loud.

"My mother used to work three jobs at once," I said. "After my father's business went under. She never complained about any of them. I used to think that was strength. Now I think it was just habit. The kind of habit you build so you do not have time to feel how tired you are."

Remi looked up from the paper in his hand. He did not say anything immediately, which I had learned meant he was actually listening rather than waiting for me to finish.

"My grandfather built this company with two borrowed machines and a rented shed," he said finally. "He told me the story every year on his birthday. I used to think it was inspiring. Now I think he just needed someone to remember it for him, so that the version of himself that had nothing would not disappear completely."

We looked at each other across the spread of papers on the floor. It was the most either of us had said about our real lives since I had arrived at this house. It sat in the room between us like something fragile neither of us wanted to be the first to touch.

We finished the work by two in the morning. We did not talk about that moment again. But I thought about it the whole way home.

The next day, Harriet Harrington asked Mrs. Kola to send me to her private office. Her smile when I walked in was warm and slow and careful, the way a smile looks when it is covering something else entirely.

"Sola," she said. "Sit down. I wanted to get to know you a little better."