Static Hour

Exposure

The crash below had stopped. That was worse than the sound itself, Adaeze thought, the sudden silence, as though whoever had broken into the storage unit had found what they needed and simply left, unhurried, certain no one would stop them.

"We know her." Three words meant to do exactly what they'd done, land in her chest like a fist and stay there. She looked up from the phone to find Kamsi already at the door, already checking the lock, already moving through the apartment with the tight, economical urgency of a man recalculating every plan he'd made in the last hour.

"You need to leave the city," he said. "Tonight. I have a contact in Ibadan who can put you up until this settles."

"No."

He turned, and whatever he saw on her face made him stop moving entirely. "Adaeze, this isn't a negotiation. They know where you live. They know what you look like. This is exactly the danger I told you about on the gantry, and it's not theoretical anymore."

"I'm not running to Ibadan to hide while you and Balogun finish this without me." Her voice came out steadier than she felt, but she meant every word of it, and saying it out loud made her believe it a little more.

"I have spent two weeks being someone's line item, Kamsi. A possible access point. A name in a margin. I'm done being managed by people who think I'm too fragile to be told the truth until it's already happened to me."

"This isn't about fragility."

"Isn't it?" She crossed the room to stand in front of him, close enough that he had to look down to meet her eyes, close enough that neither of them could hide behind distance anymore.

"You've spent eight months planning around me without me. Balogun's spent two weeks doing the same thing from the other direction. I am done being planned around."

Something shifted in his face, respect fighting with fear and losing, slowly, to something that looked almost like relief.

"What do you want to do," he said. Not what should we do. An honest question, handed to her without a script attached.

She thought of the message on her phone, still glowing faintly on the counter.

to the gallery tonight instead. There's someone I'd like you to meet. She thought of the shell companies, the wire transfers, the offer letter written in the same elegant hand that had signed her director's name to eight months of quiet theft.

"She wants to meet me," Adaeze said slowly, an idea taking shape even as she spoke it aloud.

"She thinks I'm still exactly what she hired. Naive. Useful. Easy to manage." She looked up at him.

"So let her keep thinking that. Let me walk into that gallery tonight and give her exactly what she's asking for, except this time you and I already know what she's hiding."

"Absolutely not."

"You don't get a vote on this one." She said it gently, but she meant it entirely, and watching him understand that, watching him wrestle with the particular helplessness of loving someone he couldn't fully protect, did something to her chest she didn't have time to examine.

Before he could argue further, she'd already picked up her phone, already found Balogun's name in her call log, already pressed it to her ear before he could stop her, his hand coming up too late, closing instead around empty air where her wrist had been a second before.

The line connected. Two rings, then Balogun's voice, warm and unhurried as ever, entirely unaware of the folder now sitting open on Kamsi's drafting table.

"Adaeze. I was hoping you'd call back."

"I got your message," Adaeze said, and felt Kamsi go very still beside her, watching her the way he'd watched the alley below the gantry, coiled and ready and trusting her, finally, to walk the line herself. "I'd love to meet whoever you want me to meet. Where should I come?"

A pause on the line, brief, considering. When Balogun spoke again, something in her voice had changed, some warmth stripped away and replaced with a precision Adaeze hadn't heard from her before.

"Not the gallery," she said. "Change of location. The old rail depot in Yaba, the abandoned one behind the market. Six o'clock. Come alone, dear." A pause, deliberate, landing like a blade. "And tell your neighbor he's welcome too. I've been wanting to meet him for months."