The second meeting was easy to arrange. The third required no arrangement at all.
David called her.
"Coffee," he said when she answered.
"Is that a question?"
"I am practising executive efficiency."
"You should practise punctuation."
He laughed. "Coffee?"
Joyce looked at the notes open on her desk. She had already gathered enough information from their second meeting to justify contacting the Adebayo Foundation formally. She did not need this one.
"Forty minutes," she said.
They met in a quiet cafe in Victoria Island. David arrived without an assistant, driver or visible hurry. He ordered black coffee. Joyce ordered hers too late in the afternoon and knew Grace would complain if she found out.
"Tell me why the foundation's education programme is underperforming," David said.
Joyce blinked. "You brought me here to work?"
"I was told consultants enjoy being useful."
"Whoever told you that dislikes consultants."
She opened the report on her tablet anyway. For thirty minutes they talked about scholarship retention, weak monitoring and the habit wealthy organisations had of measuring generosity instead of outcomes.
David did not become defensive.
"My father liked photographs," he said eventually. "If something could be photographed, he considered it impact."
Joyce looked up. "You say that like you disagreed with him often."
"Not often enough."
There it was: the first piece of him that was not publicly useful.
"Complicated relationship?"
David stirred coffee he had not sweetened.
"He was a complicated man."
"That's a very diplomatic answer."
"I was raised for boardrooms."
"That sounds exhausting."
He looked at her.
The question had landed somewhere she had not intended.
"It was normal," he said.
Joyce knew enough about people to hear what normal often concealed.
She changed the subject.
By the end of the hour she had learned that David hated papaya, loved old highlife music and still carried his father's fountain pen even though he could not explain why. He learned that Joyce collected old photographs from street markets.
"Of strangers?"
"Mostly."
"Why?"
She hesitated.
Because photographs survived people who were erased from stories. Because one blurred image of Amara outside a clinic had been more useful than three official records.
"I like evidence that ordinary lives happened," she said.
David studied her. "That is a strange answer."
"You asked a strange question."
He smiled.
When they left, rain had started, brief and warm.
David opened an umbrella.
"I'll drop you."
"I have a car."
"Then I will walk you to it."
They moved together through the rain. David asked about one of the street photographs Joyce had mentioned. She described a picture of two women laughing beside a yellow bus in the 1980s, neither identified.
"Maybe that's why I keep them," she said. "Somebody should remember people existed even when the names disappear."
David looked at her for a long moment. "You say things like that and then pretend you're not intense."
"I have never pretended that."
He laughed.
At her car, Joyce turned.
"You don't need to keep calling me before the foundation hires me."
"I know."
"Then why are you?"
For once, David had no polished answer.
"I like talking to you."
The simplicity of it made her uncomfortable.
"You are married."
His face changed.
"I know."
"Good."
Joyce opened her car door.
David stepped back.
No flirtation. No excuse.
That should have reassured her.
Instead, driving home, she realised she had wanted him to say something else. At Grace's flat that evening, she spread foundation documents across the dining table.
Grace watched her.
"You got access?"
"Almost."
"And David?"
Joyce did not look up. "What about him?"
"You said his name before the foundation's."
Joyce stacked the papers too neatly.
"You are imagining things."
Grace sighed.
Joyce kept working.
The investigation was moving forward.
That was what mattered.
The following week the foundation sent Joyce a formal request for a proposal. She should have celebrated. Instead she sat with the email open and thought about David saying I like talking to you. The access she needed was becoming inseparable from a person who trusted her for reasons he did not understand.
She accepted the assignment anyway.
When Grace saw the confirmation, she said nothing. Her silence had become less like disapproval and more like mourning for a mistake that had not yet happened.
She filed the unease under irrelevant and kept working.