She waited eighteen minutes.
She knew because she watched the clock on her phone with the specific focus of someone who needs something to look at besides the elevator. She had almost talked herself into leaving twice when the doors slid open and a woman stepped out.
She was striking in the way that certain women are, not loud about it, the kind of beautiful that has been refined down to a specific and deliberate version of itself. Tall, dark coat, the kind of posture that suggested she had never been unsure of a room in her life. She was saying something into her phone and she didn't see Diane immediately.
When she did, she stopped walking.
The phone call ended. She looked at Diane with an expression that lasted only a second before it settled into something composed and almost curious.
"You must be Diane Osei," she said.
Diane stood. "I don't think we've met."
"We haven't." The woman extended a hand. Her grip was brief and firm. "Lara Ekezie. Adrian's almost ex-fiancée." She let the almost sit there for a moment. "He didn't mention me."
It wasn't a question.
"No," Diane said.
Lara looked at her for a moment with an expression that might have been pity or might have been something more clinical. She glanced back toward the elevator, then back at Diane, and she leaned in slightly as though they were sharing a confidence.
"Whatever he told you last night," she said, "ask him why he was engaged to me three months ago. And whether he actually ended it before he went to Lagos in September." She held Diane's gaze for exactly as long as it took for the words to land. Then she straightened, tucked her phone in her coat pocket, and walked toward the exit. "Good luck with whatever this is."
The lobby doors closed behind her.
Diane stood very still.
The elevator opened again and Adrian was there, and he read her face in the first second and whatever he had been about to say didn't come out.
"She told you," he said.
"Were you engaged."
He moved toward her and she stepped back without thinking, just one step, and he stopped.
"Yes," he said.
"When did it end."
"October."
She did the arithmetic. She had learned long ago that the arithmetic always told you more than the explanation.
"The conference was September," she said.
He didn't answer that. He didn't need to.
She was aware of the receptionist at her desk pretending to work and the two men near the security desk who had gone very still. She kept her voice low and level because she had spent a long time learning how to stay even when everything inside her wanted to do something else entirely.
"You were engaged when you sat down next to me," she said. "You were engaged when you let me think that night was just a night between two strangers. You knew exactly who I was. You'd already researched me. And you were with someone else."
"Lara and I were already over. It just wasn't formalised."
"That's what all of them say." She picked up her bag from the chair. "Every single one of them says that."
"Diane."
"I'm going."
"I still need your answer." He said it quietly but there was an edge under it, not threatening, something closer to desperation that he was working to contain. "Raymond's window closes in less than sixty hours. Whatever you think of me right now, the situation doesn't change."
She stopped walking. Her back was to him.
"I didn't plan to feel anything that night," he said. "I need you to know that. I planned the conversation. I didn't plan the rest."
"That doesn't make it better."
"No. It doesn't."
She turned to look at him. He was standing very still in the middle of the lobby with his hands at his sides and he wasn't performing anything, that was the thing she couldn't dismiss. There was no calculation in his face at this exact moment. There was just a man who had done something he couldn't undo, waiting.
"I'll call you tonight," she said. "Don't contact me before then."
She walked out.
The afternoon was cool and overcast and the street noise hit her like something physical. She stood on the pavement outside the building and exhaled slowly, once, through her nose.
She needed to think. She needed Simi and a bottle of wine and three hours of not deciding anything. She needed to not be pregnant at twenty-eight with her life rearranged around a man she had known for one night and a legal document from 1974.
She flagged down a cab.
Before she could give the driver her address, someone knocked on the window.
She turned.
An older man stood at the curb. He was tall, sixty or near it, a suit that cost more than most people made in a month. He had her mother's eyes. She didn't know how she knew that but she did, immediately and with certainty, the same slightly downturned set, the same quality of contained feeling.
"My name is Raymond Marchetti," he said through the glass. "And I think you deserve a version of this story that nobody else is going to give you."