Chapter 64 Chapter 64

Chapter 64 Chapter 64
Something had shifted with Xavier and Nia could feel it before she could name it.

It was not dramatic. He was still professional. Still present. Still bringing her into the briefings and the legal preparation and the ball planning in the same way he had been doing for weeks. 

He still appeared at her office door when he needed a cross-reference confirmed. He still said good morning and looked up from his screen when she knocked. But something in the quality of these interactions had changed and she had been sitting with the specific discomfort of noticing a thing without being able to point to the thing directly.

She was at her desk one morning when Temi came in with a question about the personal chronology.

"The legal team wants to know if you can fill in a gap," Temi said. "The week of the seventeenth. They have a transaction on the eighteenth but nothing anchoring the seventeenth."

Nia flipped back through her notebook. "That week Anthony was at a conference in the north. He left on the fifteenth and came back the nineteenth." She found the page.

"He called home on the evening of the seventeenth. I noted it because the call was short under three minutes, he always called for longer when he was travelling. I thought at the time he was in the middle of something."

Temi was writing. "That is exactly the kind of detail they are looking for."

"Tell them to send me the full range they are working on. I will go through the notebook and mark everything relevant."

Temi finished writing and looked up. "Can I ask you something?"

"Yes."

"Is everything all right? You seem." She stopped. "Sorry. That is not really my place."

Nia looked at her. "I am fine. Working through some things."

Temi nodded and left.

Nia looked at the notebook. She thought about whether she was fine and decided she was not going to give that question the time it wanted. She had work to do.

She ran into Xavier in the corridor outside the third-floor kitchen two days later. He was heading back to his office with a coffee and she was coming from a meeting on the floor below.

"How is the chronology coming?" he said.

"Almost complete. I will have the final version to the legal team by Friday."

"Good." He paused. "Are you managing the load all right?"

She looked at him. The question was professionally appropriate. The phrasing of it, the specific way he was looking at her when he asked it, was something she was trying to read without appearing to be reading it. "Yes," she said. "Why?"

"Just checking in."

"You do not usually check in about the load."

"I do not usually have someone carrying as much of it as you are."

She held his gaze for a moment. "I am fine," she said.

He nodded. He went back to his office. She watched him go and stood in the corridor for a moment after he had turned the corner.

She was not imagining it.



Xavier had dinner with Gerard Ashby on a Wednesday evening.

They went to the same restaurant they always used, a quiet place in the middle of the city where the tables were far enough apart that you could have an actual conversation.

Gerard was one of those people Xavier had accumulated over the years who were useful not because they wanted anything specific from him but because they were genuinely good at thinking and genuinely interested in the same things he was interested in. 

Dinners with Gerard were usually the kind that felt productive afterward in a way that was difficult to explain.

This one felt different by the end of it.

The food was finished and they were on coffee when Gerard said there was something he wanted to raise. He said it with the specific reluctance of a man who had decided to say something he was not sure he should say. Xavier gave him the space.

Gerard said he had been hearing things. Through various channels, through people they both knew professionally, through the general movement of information in the circles they both operated in. 

He said he did not want to overstate it. He said it was not something he could put a definitive source to. But he had heard enough, from enough directions, that he felt he should say something to Xavier directly rather than leave it unsaid.

What he said was specific. A detail about Nia and a particular professional situation that had occurred some time ago. 

A question about judgment. About where her loyalties actually sat. He said it carefully and with evident discomfort and Xavier listened to every word.

He did not react visibly. He had spent twenty years learning to receive information without his face doing anything useful to the person delivering it.

He asked two brief clarifying questions. He thanked Gerard. They finished their coffee and said goodnight.

In the car going home Xavier sat in the back seat and looked at the city going past and thought.

He thought about what Gerard had said. Gerard was not a gossip. He was not a man who passed information carelessly. 

The specific reluctance with which he had raised it, the evident discomfort of someone doing something they were not certain they should be doing. It was the quality of a man who had heard something real and was uncertain what to do with it.

He thought about the file access.

He thought about the anonymous screenshot.

He thought about Nia coming to him the morning after and telling him the truth before he raised it.

He thought about all of it together and felt something he had not felt clearly before genuine uncertainty. Not about the operation, not about the ball, not about the case. About her. About what the full picture actually looked like when you put all the pieces in the same frame.

He did not like the feeling.

He went inside, went to his desk and worked until midnight without finding a clean answer to the question that was sitting with him.