Adjacent

Chapter one: Taking that step

CHAPTER ONE

Andrea

I was going to quit my job.

Maybe tomorrow. Or the day after.I’d been filing it away for weeks, like something I’d eventually act on once the fog in my head cleared.

Today was not the day, apparently, because here I was at 6:18 a.m., standing in the kitchen, holding a coffee mug I had just retrieved from the piano.

The piano.

Last week it was the gym, sitting beside a dumbbell as if it had finished its reps and was cooling down. Two days ago, the bookshelf. Yesterday, the staircase railing. I have a working theory that the mugs migrate on their own, developing little legs overnight and wandering through the house in search of meaning.

It’s either that, or my boss is a man who moves through life so completely absorbed in his own thoughts that the concept of returning an object to its origin point simply does not register.

Four years in, and I still have not decided which explanation is more unsettling.

Akintaju Oladele. CEO of Elvaris Holdings, parent company to Elvaris Pay, Elvaris Media, and Elvaris Rentals, each one headed by his siblings, which means his family did not just build a business, they built an empire and distributed it among themselves like a well organised inheritance.

He oversees more than any reasonable person should willingly carry, and he does it with the kind of composure that makes you wonder if he was assembled rather than born.

And yet. The mugs.

I rinsed it and set it on the counter.

Breakfast next. Toast, eggs, avocado. Simple and deliberate, the same way everything in this house runs.

I’ve learned over time that consistency is its own kind of language here. You do not improvise. You do not introduce a new element without reason. You anticipate, you prepare, you execute, and if you‘be done your job correctly, nothing feels like effort.

Chisom came through the kitchen with her usual quiet efficiency, offered me a good morning in that light, unbothered voice of hers, and continued on her way.

She has worked in this house longer than I have and carries the kind of institutional calm that only comes from having seen everything at least twice. I admire it greatly. I aspire to it daily. I achieve it roughly forty percent of the time.

The gate creaked. Alex. He was early, which was not a surprise because Alex was always early, constitutionally incapable of arriving at the correct time when he could arrive at an inconveniently impressive one instead.

He would be out there now, leaning against the car with that expression of his that suggested he had already solved several problems before breakfast and was simply waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

I set the table. Everything in its place, the way he preferred it, the way I had learned to prefer it simply by proximity.

Four years of managing someone else’s world has a way of rewiring your own preferences without asking permission. I notice it sometimes, this quiet annexation, the way I now instinctively time things, pre-empt things, arrange things in a particular order because disorder feels like a small failure.

And then…

The shift.

At this point, it’s the only word that fits. Something in the air changes, adjusts, settles differently, like a room that has been waiting and has finally remembered why.

I’ve never been able to explain it adequately, and I have tried, mostly in the privacy of my own thoughts at odd hours when I have no business thinking about it at all. It is the particular quality of a space when a certain kind of presence enters it.

Four years, and it still happens.

I find it exhausting.

He came in from the hallway, unhurried in the way that only people with absolute authority over their own time ever are.

Six-foot-three, the kind of build that makes a room feel slightly smaller without being in any way threatening, broad through the shoulders, carrying himself with that specific stillness I have never seen him relinquish. Sharp jaw, dark eyes that move with quiet efficiency across a room, taking inventory before most people have finished blinking. His hair was damp, curling just enough at the edges to look almost accidental. Almost.

White shirt. Sleeves already rolled to the forearm in that particular way of his, which I have catalogued, against my better judgment, as one of the more unnecessary things about him. He looks like someone assembled by a committee of people who had decided, collectively, that subtlety was overrated.

I want to be clear: I am aware of how this sounds. I have been aware for some time. I simply choose, every morning, to set it aside and get on with things.

“Good morning, sir,” I said.

“Morning.”

One word. As always. Akintaju Oladele operates on a strict economy of language, distributing words only where they are strictly required, and not a syllable more.

In another life, in another context, I might find this maddening. Here, I have simply learned to read the spaces between what he says.

“First meeting is at nine. Investor call with Kade & Co.”

He nodded, reaching for his coffee.

“Legal at eleven. Jane sent the documents through last night, they are in your study.”

Another nod. His eyes passed across mine in that way he has, quick and thorough and utterly unreadable, like a scan rather than a glance.

“I moved the two p.m. to Thursday. The media team needs your sign-off and they cannot move forward without it.”

“They can proceed without me,” he said.

I considered, briefly, the many things I could say to that. I thought about the forty-minute call I had sat through last Tuesday with the media team, all of them talking carefully around the fact that they were stuck, that they had been stuck, that the last three times they had tried to proceed without him it had resulted in a full reversal of work and two rescheduled deadlines.

I thought about how I had absorbed all of that on his behalf so that it wouldn’t become a problem he had to solve.

“They need final approval,” I said.

He looked at me. That brief, calculating look he gives when he’s deciding whether to press or concede.

“Thursday is fine.”

I made a note. He returned to his food.

And that should have been the end of the exchange, neat and complete the way our mornings usually are, a clean handoff of information that requires nothing further from either of us.

I would move to the next item, he would finish breakfast, and the day would begin its careful unfolding.

But I was still standing there.

I cannot always explain why I do this. There is no professional reason for it. My tablet had everything I needed. The schedule was prepared. The briefing was complete. There was nothing left to communicate that required my continued presence in this kitchen, with this man, at this hour.

And yet.

I shifted my weight slightly and looked at a point somewhere past his left shoulder, as if I had spotted something of mild interest in the middle distance.

There was nothing there. I was doing what I always do, which is pretend to be occupied while actually doing nothing, a skill I have developed to an almost artistic level in this job.

I’m stalling. Of course I’m stalling. How do I intend to bring it up when I haven’t processed it myself?

He ate with the same precision he applies to everything. Each movement considered, as if even breakfast is something he has scheduled and intends to execute correctly. I’ve watched this man work through a five-course dinner while simultaneously fielding a crisis call, voice calm, fork steady, and you’d assume chaos were simply a different kind of weather he had decided not to be affected by.

It is deeply annoying.

It is also, if I am being honest with myself, which I try to avoid before 8 a.m., somewhat compelling.

There are things I know about Akintaju Oladele that I doubt many people do. I know that he takes his coffee black, no sugar, but will quietly finish a cup that has been made wrong rather than mention it.

I know that he reads before he sleeps, that he leaves his books face down because he cannot be bothered with bookmarks, that he has a particular impatience with unnecessary meetings that he conceals behind perfect composure.

I know that he respects competence above almost everything, and that the closest thing he has to warmth is a very brief nod when something has been done exactly right.

I have received that nod. More than once. It is ridiculous how much weight I have assigned to it. A nod. My standards have dwindled.

This is the particular madness of proximity.

You learn a person by their edges and their habits and the small involuntary things they do not even know they reveal, and you begin to believe you understand them.

Then they look at you in that particular way, through you rather than at you, and you remember that understanding someone’s habits is an entirely different thing from knowing them. That access and intimacy are not the same. That you can spend four years in someone’s orbit and still be standing outside it.

I looked away.

At the counter. At the window, where the early Lagos light was coming through in clean flat sheets, illuminating the kitchen in a way that was almost accusatory. At my tablet, which I pretended to consult.

“You should leave in thirty minutes if you want to get ahead of traffic on the island,” I said, because talking felt more productive than standing here taking inventory of my own feelings at 6:30 in the morning.

“I know.”

Of course he does. The little shit.

I nodded like that was a complete and satisfying response and returned my attention to my tablet.

He finished eating. Set the fork down with that small, precise sound it always makes, barely audible, somehow final. Then he stood, reached for his jacket from the back of the chair, and pulled it on in one smooth motion. And for a moment, just a moment, his eyes came up and met mine.

He has a way of looking at a person that is very still and very direct, like he’s consulting some internal record and comparing it to what he finds in front of him. It lasts barely a second. It feels considerably longer.

Say something sensible, some part of me suggested.

“Your driver is ready,” I said.

Four years. A whole functioning brain. That.

“I’ll be back late,” he said.

“Okay,” I replied, as if that were the only thing worth noting about that sentence.

He gave a small nod. Turned. Walked out the way he always does, like leaving a room is simply another thing he does with perfect efficiency.

I stood in the kitchen for a moment longer than made any practical sense, looking at the door he had just walked through. The morning carried on without comment. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere outside, a car door closed.

I exhaled. Should I go after him? Goodness, what would he even say?

I picked up the mug I had already rinsed and rinsed it a second time, hands under the water, the motion doing what it always does, which is give my body something to do while my mind finishes whatever it started.

Here is what I know about staying somewhere too long: you stop noticing the reasons you should leave and start building small justifications for remaining. You tell yourself it is the salary, the routine, the familiarity, the fact that everything here works and you are the reason it works and there is a particular satisfaction in that, even if nobody says so. You tell yourself these things and they are all true, partially, and yet they are also not the full answer, and on mornings like this one, standing in a quiet kitchen with the day barely begun, you can feel the gap between the partial truth and the whole one.

So I dried my hands, straightened up, and power walked after him.

When I got outside, Alex was almost going out the gate, so I flagged him to stop. I moved quickly to the passenger seat and gestured for him to roll down the glass.

“I have something to say sir” I said, almost out of breath.

“Can’t it wait till I’m back?”

“It won’t take much time.”

Phew. Here goes nothing.

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Author’s note: What did she say to him? Hope it’s not what I’m thinking? 😭

Welcome to Andrea and Oladele’s cruise ship!!

Tell me what you think about the first chapter!