Xavier looked at Solomon. "Did you know."
"I knew she was hiding something. I did not know it was Accra. If I had, I would have dragged both of you into a room sooner." Solomon's mouth twisted. "I am angry at you too, Nia. Not because you want the fellowship. Because you made me complicit by silence. I walked past those calendar blocks and told myself it was none of my business. It was always my business. We built this place with three names."
Nia's eyes filled. She did not wipe them. "I know."
Xavier sat back down. He felt emptied out in a way that was almost peaceful, the way a fever breaks. "I need to say something ugly so it doesn't live in my mouth forever."
"Say it," Nia said.
"When I saw him, I went straight to my father. Not to you. To the hotel receipts. To my mother crying in the kitchen while she pretended she was fine for my sake. I fitted your secrecy into his pattern because that pattern is the first language I learned for love going wrong. That says something about me. It does not excuse what you did. But it means my first reaction was not about Accra. It was about a fourteen-year-old boy who never got to cross-examine the man who broke our house. I am sorry for that part. I am not sorry for needing the truth."
Nia reached across the table and stopped short of his hand. "You can be both. I can be both. I wanted the fellowship and I was afraid of your face and I used a sticky note like a costume. I am sorry for the costume. I am not sorry for wanting Accra. I will not apologize for the wanting. Only for the way I carried it."
Solomon stood. "I am going to take a walk around the block. When I come back, I want a provisional plan on the whiteboard: stay, go, or decide-by-date. No more Archives_Q3 folders. No more client-meeting fiction. If we are going to survive this, we survive it in daylight."
He left. The glass door sighed shut.
Xavier and Nia sat alone in the loft that had been their first real adult dream, with the Thai containers from the night before still in the kitchenette trash, smelling faintly of lemongrass and unfinished evening.
VII.
They did not decide that afternoon.
They wrote on the whiteboard anyway. Solomon returned with three coffees and a bag of plantain chips and made them eat. Nia mapped the Red Hook timeline. Xavier mapped cash. Solomon mapped hiring. By four o'clock the board looked like a city seen from a plane: dense, connected, fragile.
At five, Bertrand called.
Nia looked at Xavier. Xavier nodded. She answered on speaker.
Bertrand's voice filled the loft, warm, London-edged, the voice of the smiling man in the blue shirt. "Nia. I was worried when you cut off last night."
"Uncle," she said. "You're on speaker. Xavier is here. Solomon too."
A pause. Then, carefully: "Ah."