Chapter 4: The Complication
Finally, Friday came the way good things do. Quietly, without announcement.
Alice spent more time than she would ever admit getting ready that day. She stood in front of her wardrobe for twenty whole minutes, which was nineteen minutes longer than she normally spent on anything. She tried three dresses, three pairs of shoes, and went apart applying all sorts of makeup. It was a deep burgundy wrap dress that Chanda had bought her for her birthday two years ago, and that she had never worn because she had always felt it was too much for wherever she was going.
Tonight it was not too much.
She met Mike at Marlin, a quiet restaurant in Kabulonga that sat back from the road behind a row of bougainvillea, the kind of place that felt like a secret even though everyone knew about it. He was already there when she arrived, standing outside rather than waiting at the table. And when he saw her, something moved across his face that he didn't quite manage to keep neutral.
He stared.
"Don't," she said, smiling slightly, walking past him toward the entrance.
He laughed. Low and genuine. She had not heard him laugh before, and she filed it away somewhere careful.
They sat at a corner table with candles and wine and blinking lights, and the kind of menu that required actual reading. Mike ordered without fuss. Alice ordered what she wanted without checking the prices, which she always did on principle.
The conversation came easily. Too easily, Alice thought, for two people who barely knew each other. They talked about Lusaka, about how the city had changed in the last ten years, about the buildings going up on Great East Road and whether they were beautiful or just ambitious. Mike told her about a case he couldn't name but described in broad strokes, a land dispute that had gone on for six years and that had broken something in him, the way long injustice does to people who care about justice.
She watched him talk about it. The way his jaw tightened slightly. The way he chose his words carefully even in frustration, like a man who had learned that careless words cost you more than you ever expect.
"You actually care," she said, when he finished.
He looked at her. "About what?"
"The law. The people in it. You're not just doing a job."
He was quiet for a moment. "Is that surprising?"
"Most people are just doing a job," she said honestly.
"So are most people," he said. "I just can't seem to manage it."
She smiled at her wine glass. He watched her smile.
The food came and went. The wine was replaced. The restaurant slowly emptied around them until they were one of two tables left and neither of them had noticed. It was the waiter, hovering politely, that broke the spell.
Outside in the warm night air the bougainvillea rustled in a light breeze and Lusaka glittered quietly beyond the trees. They stood in the small car park not quite ready to separate. Everything still warm between them.
"I want to see you again," Mike said. Simply, directly, the way he said everything.
"You've seen me three times in two weeks," Alice said.
"I know," he said. "I want to see you again."
Something bloomed quietly in her chest. She had never felt this before. She looked up at him in the dark, the restaurant light catching the angles of his face, and thought that this was the moment. The moment before something changed. She had been here before in her life, at the edge of something that felt large, and she had always been careful. Always chosen the safe side.
She reached up and straightened his collar. A small gesture, almost without thinking. Her fingers brushed the warm skin of his neck and she felt him go very still.
She looked up. He was watching her with dark steady eyes and something in them that made her breath come slightly shorter.
He leaned down slowly, giving her time. All the time she needed to step back.
She didn't step back.
His lips met hers softly at first, a question, and then she answered it and it became something else entirely. Warm and certain and unhurried, his hand coming up to the side of her face with a gentleness that undid something in her she hadn't known was tied. She kissed him back with the quiet intensity of a woman who had been thinking about this without admitting it for two weeks.
When they separated the night felt louder somehow. Crickets. A car somewhere on the road. Her own heartbeat.
"Goodnight Alice," he said quietly, his hand dropping slowly from her face.
"Goodnight Mike," she managed.
She drove home with the windows down and the warm night air in her hair and did not trust herself to think too clearly until she was safely inside her flat with the door closed behind her.
She sat on her couch.
Put her hand to her lips.
Smiled at the ceiling.
But not everything was warm.
Three days later Alice's phone rang with a number she didn't recognize. She almost didn't answer. She was in the middle of a site visit in Woodlands, supervising the installation of a feature wall for a new client, and her mind was entirely on the spacing of the panels.
She answered on instinct.
The voice was female. Smooth, careful.
"Alice Nyambe?"
"Yes. Who is this?"
A pause. "My name is Natasha. Natasha Phiri." Another pause, measured. "I think we need to talk about Mike Mbewe."
Alice went very still. Around her the installation team continued working, someone called out a measurement, a drill whirred somewhere above her head. She stepped outside into the afternoon sun.
"What about him?" she said carefully.
"We were together," Natasha said. "For two years. We ended things four months ago." She said it without drama, which somehow made it worse. "I'm not calling to cause problems. I'm calling because I think you deserve to know who you're getting involved with before you get in too deep."
Alice tightened her hand on her phone.
"And what exactly do I need to know?" she asked, her voice very even.
Natasha was quiet for a moment. Then, "He's not a bad man. I want to be clear about that. But Mike has a way of making you feel like you are the only thing in the room. And then one day you realize the room has other things in it that he never told you about."
The line went quiet.
"What things?" Alice asked.
But Natasha had already hung up.
Alice stood in the afternoon sun outside the Woodlands site for a long moment, the sounds of the installation drifting out through the open door behind her. She looked at her phone. At Mike's name in her recent calls. At the memory of his hand on her face three nights ago.
She put her phone in her pocket and went back inside.
She had panels to hang.
But that evening, sitting alone in her flat, she did not call him. And when his message came through at 9pm, a simple "Thinking about you," she read it, set her phone face down on the counter, and stared at the wall for a very long time.