Grace gave a bitter almost-laugh. “Of course you will. Men like you always come back once they smell a story.”
He left with that in his ears.
The next afternoon, he returned.
And the day after that.
And the day after that.
At first Grace said very little. Sometimes she did not come to the door at all. Sometimes Hope met him at the market and he walked beside her while she sold yams, careful not to interfere when customers approached. He learned the rhythm of her life in pieces. School in the morning. Market in the afternoon. Home before dark. She loved reading aloud but stumbled on long English words and hated fractions with a personal intensity. She liked orange soda, though she rarely got it. She disliked pity on sight.
One afternoon she spread her exercise book across an upturned crate near the yam stall and scowled at a page of arithmetic.
“I hate math,” she announced.
“You shouldn’t say hate so quickly,” Micah said.
She stabbed at the page with a pencil. “Then you do it.”
He looked down. It was simple division. He sat on the low step beside her, ignoring the stare of passersby, and worked through the first one slowly. Hope watched his face, not the page.
“You’re rich,” she said after a while.
“Yes.”
“So you don’t have to know this.”
He almost smiled. “Rich people still have to divide.”
She considered that, then snorted.
Around them the market shifted toward evening. Smoke rose from corn roasting over open coals. Radios crackled from different stalls, each one playing a different song. Somewhere a woman shouted at a boy to stop climbing on sacks of rice. The sky softened. Dust settled. For the first time in years, Micah sat still without checking his phone every thirty seconds.
Peace unsettled him more than stress ever had.
His assistant did not hide her disapproval.
“This is the third investor briefing you’ve missed,” she said one evening outside his office, holding a tablet to her chest like a shield. “The board is asking questions.”
“Let them.”
“The media photographed your vehicle in the village twice.”
“So?”
“So your fiancée’s publicist called me. That’s what.”
Micah took off his jacket and draped it over the back of his chair. “Then tell them I’m handling something personal.”
She stared at him. “You never say personal.”
“I just did.”
He meant to sound firm. Instead he sounded tired.
Tiana noticed too.
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