Chapter 6: The Answer
Alice woke up before he did.
The room was gray and soft with early morning light. Lusaka still quiet outside, the city not yet ready to be itself again. She lay still for a moment, aware of the warmth beside her, the unfamiliar weight of another person in her space, and waited for the panic she expected to arrive.
It didn't come.
She turned her head and looked at him. Mike asleep was a different version of the man she had come to know. The careful composure was gone. His face was open, unguarded, younger somehow. One arm was still across her waist, heavy and warm, and he was breathing slowly with the deep certainty of a man entirely at peace.
She studied him for a long moment.
Then she got up quietly, put on her wrapper, and went to make tea.
She stood at her kitchen counter in the early morning silence, waiting for the kettle, and thought about everything. About the wet pavement on Cairo Road. About the white handkerchief with two initials. About a business card she had told herself she would throw away. About a call from a woman named Natasha Phiri, who knows how she even got her number, she thought to herself. But it didn't matter anymore. And four days of silence and a conversation in plain light that had ended in the dark.
The kettle boiled.
She made two cups.
She heard him before she saw him. Quiet footsteps. Then he appeared in the kitchen doorway, shirt from last night half buttoned, looking at her with sleep soft eyes and that almost smile that had been undoing her from the very beginning.
He looked at the two cups.
Something moved through his expression. Quiet and warm and careful, like a man who understood the significance of small things.
"You made two," he said.
"Don't read into it," she said, handing him one.
He took it. Their fingers touched briefly on the warm ceramic. He leaned against the counter beside her and they stood in the early morning quiet of her kitchen drinking tea and not saying anything. And it was the most comfortable silence Alice had ever shared with another person.
"I'm not angry anymore," she said finally.
He looked at her over his cup.
"I know you're not a bad man," she said. "I know what happened with Natasha was complicated and human and real. And I know you were honest with me when I asked. What I need you to know is that I don't do half things. If I'm in something I'm in it completely, and I need the same back. Not perfection. Just honesty. Always."
Mike was quiet for a moment. He set his cup down on the counter and turned to face her properly.
"Alice Nyambe," he said slowly, like her name was something he was deciding to keep. "I have been a lawyer for eleven years. I have sat across from some of the most difficult people in this country and I have never once said something I didn't mean in a room that mattered." He looked at her steadily. "This room matters."
She held his gaze.
"Then we understand each other," she said.
"We understand each other," he agreed.
He reached over and tucked a small loose braid behind her ear, his thumb brushing her cheek as he pulled his hand back. She let him. Outside the sun was beginning to find its way through the jacaranda tree outside her window, throwing slow gold patterns across her kitchen floor.
It was going to be a beautiful day in Lusaka.
She called Chanda at noon.
She hadn't even finished saying hello before Chanda said, "Something happened."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because you sound like a person who slept well for the first time in weeks. And also like a person who is trying very hard not to sound like that." A pause. "Alice Nyambe. Did Mike Mbewe sleep at your flat?"
Alice said nothing.
Chanda screamed. Not a small scream. A full, committed Chanda scream that made Alice hold the phone away from her ear and laugh in spite of herself.
"Tell me everything," Chanda said. "Start from the beginning. No. Start from the dress. Start from the burgundy dress."
"Chanda—"
"From the dress Alice. Every single detail."
Alice sat on her couch, pulled her knees up, and smiled at the ceiling the way she had the night of their first kiss. Small and private and entirely her own.
Then she started talking.
Three weeks later Mike took her to Sunday lunch at a small garden restaurant in Ibex Hill that he said he had been saving for the right occasion. They sat outside under a wide umbrella with cold drinks and good food and the kind of easy conversation that had become familiar between them. Comfortable without being careless.
At some point during the meal he reached across the table and covered her hand with his. No reason. No announcement. Just his hand over hers, warm and certain, the way he did most things.
She turned her hand over and held his back.
That was all. That was everything.
On the drive home she looked out the window at Lusaka passing by. The jacaranda trees in full purple bloom lining the roads. Vendors at the corners. The city going about its loud and beautiful business, entirely indifferent to the fact that somewhere inside it two people had found their way to each other on a wet pavement on Cairo Road and had somehow, carefully, remarkably, chosen to stay.
She thought about the handkerchief, still in her bedside drawer. She had never thrown it away and she never would.
She thought about the business card. About the cracked phone screen. About Chanda's face when she finally told her everything in person, which had involved actual tears and a very long hug and Chanda saying I knew it, I knew it, I knew it approximately fourteen times.
She thought about Natasha Phiri, and she thought about what it cost a woman to make that call, and she hoped quietly and genuinely that Natasha found whatever she was looking for in whatever came next.
And she thought about Mike. About patience and plain light and two cups of tea in an early morning kitchen and a man who said what he meant in rooms that mattered.
"What are you thinking about?" Mike asked from the driver's seat.
She looked at him. The afternoon light was on his face and he was watching the road with that same quiet attention he gave everything.
"Cairo Road," she said.
He glanced at her. A small smile at the corner of his mouth.
"Terrible day," he said.
"Worst day," she agreed.
They looked at each other for a moment in the way that people do when they mean something other than what they are saying.
Then he looked back at the road and she looked back out the window and Lusaka held them both, warm and indifferent and golden and alive, the way it always was and always would be.
Some things, Alice thought, begin exactly where they should.
On a wet pavement. In the rain. With a stranger who catches you before you fall.
— The End —