Static Hour

Faulty Lines

They did not go back to the gantry. Kamsi led her down through the stairwell to a service exit on the ground floor, out into a side street slick with the rain that had finally decided to fall, and did not speak again until they were back inside his apartment, the bronze locked away in a floor safe she hadn't known existed beneath his drafting table.

"You're not going tonight," he said, before she'd even shut the door behind her.

"Not to the gallery. Not to Emeka. Not anywhere Balogun can put you in a room and decide what happens next."

"That wasn't a request I made you," Adaeze said. "This is my job. My life. You don't get to decide what I walk into."

"I get to tell you what you're walking into is dangerous."

"You've been telling me things are dangerous since the moment I met you, and every time, you're the one who walks me toward the danger anyway."

He flinched at that, small and real, and for a moment she almost regretted the shape of it, the way it landed. Almost. She was still holding her phone, Balogun's message glowing accusingly on the screen, and beneath the fear there was something colder now, something that had been building since the stairwell.

"How long have you actually been watching my gallery," she said. Not a question. A demand.

He didn't answer right away, and the silence told her more than any answer could have. She crossed to the drafting table while he was still deciding what to say, and her eyes landed on a folder half-hidden beneath a roll of blueprints, the edge of a letterhead visible where the cover had slipped.

She knew that letterhead. She'd seen it on her own offer letter two weeks ago, the elegant serif font, the gallery's crest in the corner.

"Adaeze, don't."

She already had it open. Photographs. Shipping manifests. A timeline written in his own careful hand, dates going back eight months, and her own name, added in ink that looked newer than the rest, tucked into a margin beside a line reading new hire, curatorial research, possible access.

Her stomach dropped through the floor.

"Possible access," she read aloud, and her voice came out smaller than she wanted it to.

"Is that what I am to you? A line item?"

"It's not what you think."

"Then tell me what I'm supposed to think, Kamsi, because right now I'm standing in your apartment holding a folder with my name in it, written before you ever said one true word to me on that balcony, and I don't know what part of tonight was real."

"All of it was real."

He crossed the room fast, closing the distance she'd put between them, his hands coming up like he meant to take her by the shoulders and thinking better of it at the last second, letting them fall instead. "I wrote your name in that margin the day I found out who'd been hired. I was afraid for you before I ever met you, Adaeze. That's not the same as using you."

"It looks exactly the same from where I'm standing."

Something in his face went very still, the particular stillness she was starting to recognize as the place he went when something hurt more than he'd let himself admit.

"Then I understand if you want to walk away," he said quietly. "But before you decide that, you should know the rest of what's in that folder. Because it isn't only my investigation in there."

She looked down at the pages still in her hands, really looked this time, past her own name in the margin, and found beneath it a second set of documents she hadn't clocked at first glance. Bank transfers. A name she recognized instantly, because she had read it a hundred times on staff paperwork, on gallery emails, on the very offer letter that had brought her to Lagos in the first place.

A. Balogun.

Payments, going back years, from an account registered offshore, routed through three shell companies before landing in her director's name.

"She's not just connected to this," Adaeze said slowly, the floor of her understanding shifting under her. "She's running it."