Chapter 56 Right answer

Chapter 56 Right answer
Xavier called Nia into his office on a Tuesday afternoon.

She had been at her desk going through a cross-reference check when the internal message came through. She saved her work, straightened her notes, and went up.

He had the folder open on his desk when she arrived. Gia's latest update. She could see the pages from where she was standing and she did not look at them directly because she did not want to seem like she was reading them upside down from across the room, which she absolutely was.

"Sit down," he said.

She sat.

He did not rush into it. He let a moment pass, not for dramatic effect, she understood by now that this was not how he operated. He was the kind of man who thought before he spoke and the pause was the thinking, not the performance.

"Gia has been cross-referencing the search with the Rahman family investigation records," he said. "The pattern matches. The woman you are looking for has a connection to the Rahman family. 

The timelines align, the geographic history aligns. The nature of the record removal is consistent with the kind of deliberate erasure that was carried out across the Rahman family documents during the same period. The same approach. The same level of care."

Nia was very still.

"I do not want to say more than that yet," he continued. "Gia needs another day to confirm it properly and I do not want to give you something I cannot fully stand behind." He paused. "But I wanted you to know where we are."

She looked at him across the desk.

She had been deciding this for days. Not consciously, not in the way you make a list and weigh the items against each other. But somewhere underneath the working and the waiting and the careful management of what she said to whom and when, she had been arriving somewhere. Sitting here now, looking at him, she understood that she had arrived.

"She is my mother," Nia said.

The room was very quiet.

Xavier did not look surprised. He did not reach for words to fill the space.

He did not do any of the things people do when they are trying to manage a moment that has caught them off guard. He just looked at her steadily.

"I know," he said.

She stared at him. "You know."

"I suspected it from the first week." He held her gaze. "The way you asked for the search. What you were and were not willing to say about it. 

The fact that there were no photographs. And then when the Rahman connection appeared, everything aligned." A pause. "I was waiting for you to be ready to tell me."

She sat with that.

She thought about all the times she had sat across from him in this office over the past weeks and carefully not said it. 

All the half-answers. The managed explanations, the reasons she had given herself for keeping it close. He had known the whole time. He had given her the space to arrive in her own time and he had not made her feel the cost of taking it.

"I am sorry," she said. "For not saying it sooner."

"You do not need to apologise."

"I do." She looked at the folder on his desk. "You have been helping me find my mother for weeks without knowing that is what you were doing. You deserved to know that from the beginning."

"You told me when you were ready," he said. "That is enough."

She looked at him for a moment. Something in her chest settled. The way things do when you have been holding them at an angle for too long and finally let them sit straight.

"What happens now?" she said.

"Gia confirms the connection. We keep the search moving." He picked up his pen. "And you stop carrying this alone."

She was almost at the door when her phone buzzed in her pocket.

She looked at the screen.

Anthony.

She turned back to Xavier. He had seen her face change. He was already watching.

"Answer it," he said. "Put it on speaker."

She walked back to his desk. She set the phone down and accepted the call.

"Anthony," she said.

"I hear Cole's team has been busy." His voice was easy still but something beneath it had tightened — the quality of a man who has understood that a window he thought was still open has quietly closed while he was looking elsewhere.

"I have a photograph, Nia. The most recent one available of the woman you are looking for. A real one, you can have it. All I need in return is one document from Cole's files. That is a very reasonable exchange for what I am offering."

The room was completely quiet.

Nia looked at Xavier. He was watching her. Just watching with his hands flat on the desk, giving her the full space to make her own choice.

"No," she said.

A pause on the other end. "Think carefully about what you are turning down."

"I have." Her voice did not waver at all. "The answer is no."

She ended the call.

She looked at Xavier.

He looked back at her.

"Right answer," he said. Quietly. Simply. Just two words and nothing attached to them.

She picked up her phone. She went back to her desk. She sat down and found her place in the cross-reference check and kept working. She worked steadily for the rest of the afternoon and did not let herself stop.

At some point Temi knocked on her open door and asked if she needed the updated legal timeline before she left. 

Nia said yes. Temi brought it in and set it on the corner of the desk and glanced at everything spread across the surface and said, "You are still here?"

"Clearly," Nia said.

"It is almost seven."

"I know what time it is."

Temi looked at her for a moment the way people looked at her sometimes.

Nia looked at the updated timeline. She picked up her pen. She kept going.

But underneath all of it, running quietly beneath the work the way it always did now, she thought about the photograph Anthony had described. 

She was going to find a way.

She always found a way.