The Billionaire's Lagos Bargain

Chapter One: The Lift The demolition notice was printed on very nice paper. That was what offended Temi most. Not the words, though the words were bad enough. Notice of Acquisition and Clearance, Herbert Macaulay Way Corridor, Yaba Rise Development. It was the paper: thick, creamy, faintly textured, with the Grant Meridian Holdings logo pressed into the top like a royal seal. Someone had paid good money to tell her she had thirty days to leave the only home her mother had ever built. She folded it into a hard square and pushed it into her handbag next to the box of chin-chin. "Madam, you cannot park there." "I'm not parking," Temi told the security guard, climbing out of the yellow Uber Keke that had dropped her right in front of the tower's marble steps. "I'm visiting." The guard looked at her: flour still dusting the sleeve of her green ankara blouse, braids pulled up in a hurried knot, a white cake box held like a peace offering. Then he looked up at the building behind him, as if to ask whether she had noticed it. She had. It was impossible not to. Grant Meridian Tower rose out of Ikoyi like a blade of glass, thirty-two floors of mirrored blue that caught the late-afternoon sun

and threw it back at the lagoon. Across the water, Lagos sprawled and honked and sold and shouted, and none of it seemed to touch this place. Even the air felt different here, cooler somehow, as if money came with its own weather. "Do you have appointment?" the guard asked. "I have this." Temi lifted the lid of the box. The smell came out first: butter, nutmeg, a whisper of coconut. Golden chin-chin, still faintly warm, and a cluster of puff-puff dusted in sugar. "Sweet Temi's, Yaba. Best in the mainland. Try one." He hesitated. Every Lagos security man hesitated in the same way: duty on one shoulder, hunger on the other. "Just one," she said gently. "You've been standing in this sun since morning." He took two. She let him. Inside, the lobby was all white stone and silence. A water feature ran down one wall in a sheet so smooth it looked like glass. The receptionist had the kind of eyebrows that cost more than Temi's monthly rent, and she raised both of them slowly. "I'm here to see the CEO," Temi said. "Do you have an—" "Appointment. No. But he has my building." She set the notice on the marble counter and smoothed it flat. "And I think that makes us close enough to talk." * * *

It took forty minutes, two phone calls, and one very firm please, sit down, ma before Temi admitted the receptionist was not going to let her upstairs. She sat on a leather sofa that sighed when she touched it and stared at the lift doors. Her phone buzzed. Chioma. CHIOMA: Have they arrested you yet TEMI: No. They are ignoring me professionally. CHIOMA: Babe. It's a billionaire company. You can't just walk in with puff-puff TEMI: Watch me. CHIOMA: I am watching. That's the problem  Tobi says he locked the shop, by the way. And he wants to know if the CEO is the guy from London. Temi frowned and opened her browser. She had read the name a hundred times on the notice but never bothered to look at the man. Kayode Adebayo-Grant. The first result was a Financial Times article: The Fixer Comes Home: London's Turnaround King Inherits Troubled Nigerian Empire. There was a photograph of a man in a dark suit walking out of a building in the rain, face half-turned from the camera, jaw set like he was already disappointed in whoever had taken the picture. She didn't click on it. She didn't need to know what he looked like. She only needed him to look at her. At the end of the lobby, a set of lift doors slid open. A cleaner stepped out pushing a trolley, and behind her Temi glimpsed a staff badge reader, a panel of buttons and, most importantly, no receptionist.

Temi stood up, smoothed her blouse, picked up her cake box, and walked to the lift like she belonged in it. Nobody stopped her. That was the secret of Lagos: if you walked with enough purpose, people assumed somebody important had sent you. The doors were closing when a hand caught them. A man stepped in. Tall, with the kind of stillness that made the lift feel smaller. He wore a charcoal suit with no tie and the top button of his white shirt open, as though he had been strangling himself all day and had finally lost patience. Dark skin, close-cropped hair, a faint shadow along his jaw. He carried a leather folder under one arm and a phone in his other hand, and he did not look at her at all. He pressed thirty-two. Temi glanced at the panel. Thirty-two was the top floor. Of course it was. She had been about to press it herself. The doors closed. Soft music played. Something with violins. The man scrolled through his phone, frowning at it like it had personally insulted him. Up close he smelled of cedar and rain, though it hadn't rained in Ikoyi all week. Temi held her cake box a little tighter. Floor eight. Floor nine. "Excuse me," she said. "Do you work for him?" His eyes lifted from the screen. They were very dark and very direct. "For whom?" "The CEO. Mr. Adebayo-Grant." She said it the way her mother used to say NEPA when the light went off.

A pause. "In a manner of speaking." "Then maybe you can tell me what kind of man he is." She lifted her chin. "Because I'm going up there to see him." "Do you have an appointment?" "Why does everybody in this building keep asking me that?" Something moved at the corner of his mouth. It wasn't a smile, but it was a cousin of one. "It's a reasonable question in an office building." "Well, he didn't make an appointment before deciding to bulldoze my bakery." She pulled the folded notice from her bag and held it up between two fingers. "Thirty days. On very nice paper." He looked at the notice, then at her, more carefully this time. "Yaba Rise." "You know it." "I've read the file." "Then you know there's a building on Herbert Macaulay Way with a blue door and a hand-painted sign that says Sweet Temi's." Her voice wobbled, and she hated it, so she pushed harder. "My mother painted that sign. She started with a table on the roadside selling puff-puff to students. Twenty-two years. She raised two children from that table. And now some man who has been in Nigeria for, what, three weeks, decides that our street is underutilised." "The street is underutilised," he said mildly. "The drainage is failing, half the buildings on that corridor are structurally unsound, and the—"

"Oh, so you're on his side." "I'm on the side of the engineering report." "The engineering report has never eaten my puff- puff." The lift jolted. Not a gentle jolt. It was a hard, mechanical shudder that went up through the floor and into Temi's knees. The violins stuttered and died. The lights flickered, dimmed, and came back in a weak orange emergency glow. The numbers above the door froze on 19. For a long second neither of them spoke. "No," Temi said. "No, no, no." The man pressed the alarm button. A distant bell rang somewhere far below them. He pressed it again, then lifted the emergency handset and spoke into it in a calm, clipped British voice. "This is lift three. We're stopped between nineteen and twenty. Two occupants." He listened. "Yes. Thank you." He hung up. "Generator switchover. They say ten minutes." "In Lagos," Temi said faintly, "ten minutes is a philosophy, not a time." This time he did smile. It was brief, almost reluctant, and it changed his whole face, like a light switched on in a house everyone assumed was empty. Then it was gone, and he loosened his collar another inch and leaned against the mirrored wall. Temi set her cake box on the floor and pressed her palms flat against the brass rail. The lift was already

getting warm. It was very quiet without the violins. She could hear her own breathing, and his. "You're not claustrophobic?" he asked. "I grew up in a two-room flat with my mother, my brother and four hundred cake tins. I'm fine." She was not fine. Her heart was going like a talking drum. "Are you?" "No." He glanced at the ceiling. "I'm merely late for a board meeting." "Good. Let him wait." "Who?" "Your boss. The great Mr. Adebayo-Grant." She sank down to sit on the floor, folding her legs beneath her, because standing felt like waiting and sitting felt like defiance. "Let him sit at the head of his big table and wonder where everybody is. Let him find out how it feels when someone else decides your time is worth nothing." He considered her for a moment. Then, to her surprise, he slid down the wall and sat opposite her, long legs bent, expensive trousers on the lift floor. It was such an unexpected thing for a man in that suit to do that she forgot to be angry for a whole second. "Tell me about the bakery," he said. "Why? So you can write a memo?" "So I can understand what I'm being shouted at about." "I'm not shouting." "You were shouting a little."

She opened her mouth, then closed it. Fine. She had been shouting a little. "It's small," she said finally. "Six tables. Two ovens. One of them only works if you kick it on the left side. We open at six because the students from Yaba Tech come before lectures, and the traders from the market come at seven, and the bankers from the new office on Commercial Avenue come at eight and pretend they're not buying four doughnuts each." She smiled despite herself. "My brother Tobi does the till after school. He's sixteen. He wants to study computer science at UNILAG. He's going to, too, as long as I still have a business to pay the fees with." The…