The meeting had stretched across four hours, consuming the afternoon and bleeding into evening, until the light through the conference room windows shifted from gold to amber to the deep violet of a Lagos night. Dayo sat at the head of the table, his posture relaxed but his attention absolute, listening as Alice walked through the final integration timeline for Luna's return. Around him, the core team had settled into the kind of focused exhaustion that came from wrestling with details that mattered—Wayne arguing for a staggered announcement strategy, Valerie pressing for international coordination, Ulrich quietly noting operational dependencies that no one else had considered.
They had reached consensus on the essential point: silence.
