EPISODE 9

There are silences that are just silence and there are silences that contain entire rooms of information. The one that stretched between Amara and Dami in his Ikoyi living room was the second kind.

“Shade is my ex-wife,” he said.

Amara kept her face still. “You were married.”

“For four years. We divorced two years ago.”

“Why is she calling you at nine on a Friday night?”

He was quiet for a moment. He had the stillness of someone choosing their words with actual care rather than speed. “We share a daughter. Zara. She is six. When Shade calls outside of the agreed schedule it usually means something with Zara.”

He picked up the phone and stepped toward the hallway. “Give me a moment.”

Amara sat on his sofa and looked at the city through the curtains and did a very fast, very honest accounting of herself. She was not angry. She was something more complicated than angry. She was recalibrating. A daughter. An ex-wife who called on Friday nights. A life with texture and history and people in it that she had not known about because she had not asked and he had not offered.

He came back five minutes later. “Zara has a fever. Not serious, but Shade wanted me to know.”

“Okay.”

He sat down. Looked at her. “I should have told you about Zara earlier.”

“Yes.”

“I was not trying to hide her. I just.” He paused. “I did not know what this was going to become. I did not want to complicate it before it was anything.”

Amara looked at him for a long time. She was twenty-seven and he was thirty-eight and he had a whole life with a before that she was not part of. This was either something she could hold or it was not.

“I am not going to pretend this does not change things,” she said. “But it does not change everything.”

Something in his face settled. He reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, slow and careful.

“Stay,” he said again.

She looked at him. Thought about the drive home to Yaba. Thought about her empty apartment and Tola’s inevitable questions tomorrow and the way his hand felt against her face.

She picked up her phone and texted Tola: Not coming home tonight. I am fine.

Tola replied in under a minute: I need a full debrief in the morning. Every detail.

Amara smiled and put the phone face down and turned back to Dami.

She was staying. But somewhere across Lagos, Shade had just been reminded that this man still existed in her life. And Amara had the quiet, certain feeling that this would not be the last time that mattered.

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THE CEO’S INTERN. A Lagos Adult Romance Series 8