Chapter 5: The Choice
Alice waited four days before she called Mike again.
Four days of going to work and coming home and eating dinner and staring at her phone and not touching it. Four days of Natasha Phiri's voice sitting in the back of her mind like a stone she couldn't move. Four days of reading his messages, small and unhurried things, nothing demanding.
On the fourth day she called him.
"I need to see you," she said, when he picked up.
A pause. He heard something in her voice because Mike Mbewe always heard things. "Tell me when," he said.
"Tonight. My place."
Another pause. "Send me the address."
She sent it.
He arrived at seven with nothing in his hands. No wine, no flowers, no props. Just himself, in a dark shirt and trousers, and those steady eyes that looked at her the moment she opened the door and knew immediately that something was wrong.
She let him in without touching him. That felt important.
Her flat was small and warm and neat, the way she kept everything. She had lit no candles, made no effort. She wanted this conversation in plain light.
"Sit," she said.
He sat on her couch. She sat across from him on the chair. The distance between them felt deliberate and he noticed it.
"Who is Natasha Phiri?" she asked.
Something moved across his face. Not guilt exactly. More like recognition. Like a man who had been waiting for a question to arrive and was now deciding how to meet it.
"Where did you hear that name?" he asked quietly.
"She called me," Alice said. "Four days ago. I don't even know how she got my number. She told me you were together for two years. That you ended things four months ago." She kept her voice even. "She told me you have a way of making a woman feel like she is the only thing in the room when she isn't. And then she hung up before she could tell me what that meant."
Mike was quiet for a long moment. He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and looked at the floor. Then he looked at her.
"Natasha and I were together. Yes," he said. "Two years. She wanted to get married. I wasn't ready. We went back and forth about it for six months before it ended." He said it plainly, without decoration. "I should have ended it sooner than I did. That's the honest truth. I kept thinking I would get there and I didn't, and I let it go too long. That was unfair to her and I know it."
"Was there anyone else while you were with her?"
"No," he said. Firmly, without hesitation.
"Then what did she mean," Alice said carefully, "about other things in the room he never told you about?"
Mike exhaled slowly. "I think she meant my work. The hours. The cases I couldn't talk about. The version of me that existed only in that office that she never fully got access to." He paused. "She wanted all of me and I gave her most of it. She decided most wasn't enough."
The flat was very quiet. Outside a car passed on the road. Somewhere a dog barked once and stopped.
Alice looked at him for a long time. She was good at reading people. It was part of what made her good at business. She had learned to tell the difference between a man performing honesty and a man being honest. Performance had a shine to it. This had none.
"Why didn't you tell me about her?" she asked.
"We have known each other three weeks, Alice," he said quietly. "I didn't think it was—"
"If you are pursuing me," she said, "I need to know who else has been in this space. That is not unreasonable."
"No," he said. "It isn't. You're right. I should have told you. I'm sorry."
The apology landed simply. No elaboration, no defense. Just the words, left there for her to do with what she wanted.
Alice sat with it for a moment. Then she stood and walked to her window and looked out at Kabulonga in the evening dark, the jacaranda trees moving slightly in the breeze, the distant lights of the city beyond the quiet street.
She heard him stand. Heard him cross the room. Felt him stop behind her, close but not touching, the warmth of him reaching her before his hands did.
"Alice," he said. His voice low and quiet.
She turned around.
He was right there. Closer than she had planned for when she had arranged the chairs and the plain light and the careful distance. His eyes were on her face, reading her the way he always did, and what she saw in them was not charm or strategy. It was something quieter and more dangerous than either of those things.
It was patience. The kind that comes from a man who has decided something and is willing to wait for it.
"I'm still angry," she said.
"I know," he said.
"This doesn't just go away because you explained it."
"I know that too."
She looked at him. He looked back. Neither of them moved and the air between them was thick with everything that had been said and everything that hadn't.
"I don't do this," she said. Her voice was quieter now. "I don't let people this close this fast. I don't—"
"I know," he said, for the third time. And then gently, "Neither do I."
She didn't know who moved first. She didn't think it mattered.
His hands found her face the way they had outside Marlin, that same unbearable gentleness, and she reached up and held his wrists and kissed him. Not softly this time. With everything that four days of silence had built up behind it. He kissed her back with a thoroughness that made her forget for a moment that she had ever been careful about anything.
They moved without discussing it, the way people do when words have run out and the body takes over the conversation. His hands were warm and certain at her waist, her back, in her hair. She pulled him closer by the front of his shirt and felt him exhale against her mouth like a man setting something down he had been carrying too long.
They found their way to her bedroom in the dark, unhurried, stopping twice because stopping felt as good as moving. He laid her down with the same quiet attention he gave everything, deliberate and present, like she was something worth taking time over. She pulled him down to her and thought, in the last coherent moment before thought became unnecessary, that this was what Natasha had meant.
Not other women. Not secrets.
This. The way he made the room disappear until there was nothing in it but the two of them.
What followed was warm and honest and entirely theirs. The kind of intimacy that doesn't announce itself but settles into the bones and stays.
Afterwards the room was quiet. The city hummed outside. Alice lay in the dark looking at the ceiling, his arm heavy and warm across her waist, his breathing slow and even beside her.
She turned her head and looked at him. He was already looking at her.
"Still angry?" he asked softly.
She considered it.
"Ask me in the morning," she said.
The corner of his mouth moved.
She turned back to the ceiling and let the quiet settle around them like something earned.
Outside Lusaka continued its nighttime business, indifferent and alive, entirely unbothered by the fact that inside a small flat in Kabulonga, Alice Nyambe had just made her choice.
She just hadn't said it out loud yet.