Between Two Skies

The email arrived on a Tuesday morning in the middle of the worst week of Adaeze's professional life.

She had been at her desk since six-thirty, which was forty minutes before anyone else arrived and ninety minutes before she was contractually required to be there, working on the pitch deck for the Fontaine account — a French luxury conglomerate that was considering Nigeria as its West African headquarters, which would be, if secured, the largest account in the history of Meridian Communications Lagos and the thing that would either make her career or confirm what her managing director had been suggesting, in the careful language of someone who had decided something and was building a paper trail to support it, for the past four months.

That she was not quite right for this.

The phrase not quite right had appeared in her last performance review. She had read it three times. She had not asked what it meant because she had understood exactly what it meant — it meant she was too precise, too direct, too unwilling to soften her analysis to make the room comfortable, too much of what she was and not enough of what they expected. It meant she did not laugh at the right moments and did not defer at the right moments and wore perfume that was, as her colleague Tolu had once said with the particular cruelty of someone who believed they were paying a compliment, a lot.

The perfume was YSL Libre EDP. She had worn it every working day for two years. She intended to continue.

The email was from a woman named Isabelle Fontaine.

Dear Ms. Okonkwo. I am the Head of Brand Strategy for Fontaine Group. I have reviewed the preliminary submissions from several Lagos agencies and yours is the only one that says anything true about this market. I would like to meet. I will be in Lagos on Thursday. Are you available for breakfast?

Adaeze read it twice. Then she forwarded it to nobody, told nobody, and went back to the pitch deck.

She would tell her MD after the breakfast. There was no point telling him before — if it went nowhere, she had said nothing. If it went somewhere, she would have the meeting to show him.

She spritzed the Libre again — she always did this when something significant happened, a private marking of moments — and went back to work.

The lavender and the orange blossom opened on her wrist. The vanilla base settled beneath. She breathed it in once, the way you breathe in something that belongs to you, and returned to the deck.

Outside, Lagos continued doing everything Lagos does. The account was not yet won. The meeting had not yet happened. The offer — if it was an offer — was sitting in her sent folder, untouched, the way all important things sit before the moment they change everything.

She had two days until Thursday. She intended to be ready.