He was there when the treatments made her sick.

He was there when her hair began to come out in strands, when she wept in silent fury because her own legs were too weak to carry her up her own staircase.

And he was there, hours later, when she fixed a tailored wig, put on a sharp suit, and walked into a boardroom like a force that could not be moved.

He learned the two Ifeomas — the one the illness made, and the one she chose to be in front of the people trying to take her company — and he came to admire the distance she could travel between them in an afternoon.

What neither of them had expected was intimacy, and what neither of them knew how to do was stop it.

They had signed a contract precisely to avoid this — a clean transaction, a service rendered, a shield hired and paid.