Chapter 50 The First Week
The first full week of the Restoration Project as a properly staffed organisation passed the way first weeks always passed, faster than expected and more demanding than planned and full of the specific small discoveries that only happened when people began working together in a shared space for the first time and learned each other's rhythms.
Kofi arrived earliest. Always by seven-thirty, sometimes by seven, with coffee he had made at home in a flask because he had tried the building's coffee on the first day and formed a view about it that he had expressed once and not repeated. He worked with the steady methodical focus of someone who had spent seven years developing disciplined independent work habits and was now applying them in a context that rewarded rather than isolated them.
Clara worked differently. She arrived at nine and left at seven and in the ten hours between she produced an extraordinary volume of precise analytical work that she presented without preamble at the end of each day in the form of a clear document that told you exactly what she had found and exactly what it meant and exactly what needed to happen next. She had completed the initial analysis of the Bankole supplier relationships by Wednesday and presented Zara with a fourteen page document that mapped every connection between the replacement suppliers and the Northgate network and proposed a phased approach to rebuilding the Bankole family's independent supply chain.
Zara read it twice and then called Isaac Bankole.
He listened to the summary she gave him with the focused attention of a man who had been in business long enough to know the difference between reassurance and information and who valued the second kind considerably more than the first.
"You can actually do this," he said. "Rebuild the supplier relationships."
"Clara can," Zara said. "She has already identified three independent suppliers in your region who can replace the Northgate-connected ones. She is building the contact documentation now."
A silence that carried the specific quality of a man allowing himself to believe something he had stopped allowing himself to believe.
"My grandfather asked about the company this morning," Isaac said. "He asks every day. But this morning he asked if there was good news."
"Tell him yes," Zara said. "Tell him there is good news."
She ended the call and looked at the working floor where Clara was at her desk and Kofi was on the phone and Adaeze was due to arrive on Monday and the wall had grown to cover most of one side of the room with cases and connections and the ongoing work of thirteen families and a fourteenth that was already beginning to take shape from the threads Seline had found.
Damien came to the floor each day. Not to manage or oversee or insert himself into the work. He came the way someone came to a place they were interested in and wanted to understand, asking questions when she had time to answer them, sitting in the meeting room with his own work when she did not, present without being intrusive in the way that she was learning was characteristic of him when he cared about something and wanted to be close to it without controlling it.
On Thursday evening after Kofi and Clara had left she found him standing in front of the wall reading through the Fitch map with the focused attention he brought to documents that mattered.
She stood beside him.
"The international coordination team filed the expanded charges this morning," he said. "Hale and Forsythe have both retained separate legal teams. Raymond's lawyers are trying to negotiate a reduction in his exposure by offering cooperation against Fitch." He paused. "Fitch's legal team filed a preliminary challenge to the preservation orders this afternoon."
"Miriam expected that," she said.
"Yes," he said. "She says it will not succeed. The orders are solid."
She looked at the wall. At the thirteen lines and the Northgate map and the Okonkwo and Bankole files and the emerging shape of the fourteenth case.
"Raymond offering cooperation against Fitch," she said. "After everything he did. After eleven years of using Fitch's template against people who trusted him."
"I know," Damien said.
"The families," she said. "They will hear about it. That the man who did this to them is negotiating his own comfort."
"Yes," he said. "They will hear about it."
She looked at Raymond's name on the wall. At the line connecting him to Fitch and to the five original families and to the years of careful performance that had concealed everything.
"He called me Praise," she said. "The whole dinner. Warm and certain. Twenty-six years of that."
Damien looked at her.
"Yes," he said quietly. "He did."
She was quiet for a moment.
"I do not want to spend time being angry about Raymond," she said. "There is too much work to do and anger at him specifically is not useful to the work." She paused. "But I want you to know that I feel it. That I am not past it. That some days it sits in the room with me while I work and I work around it."
"I know," he said.
"I am telling you because you asked for honesty," she said. "Under any circumstances."
He looked at her with the open steady expression she had come to rely on.
"Yes," he said. "I did."
She turned from the wall.
"Friday tomorrow," she said. "First full week complete."
"How does it feel," he said.
She looked at the floor. At the desks and the files and the wall and the light from the windows and everything that had been built in three weeks from a desk and two chairs and instinct and the specific refusal to accept that what had been done to her father and eleven other families was simply the way things were.
"Like the beginning," she said.
He looked at her.
"Yes," he said. "That is exactly what it is."