Chapter 4 — She Was The Only One Who Asked My Name.
Nina Okafor worked on the second floor, in a corner of the finance team's open-plan area slightly separated from the main desks by a half-height divider.
Ray had noticed her in his second week. Partly because of the hours she kept — in before eight, rarely gone before seven. Partly because of what was on her screens. She ran layered financial models. The kind that required genuine technical fluency, not just template familiarity. He had seen those models from the corridor, just enough to understand that whoever built them knew exactly what they were doing.
On Thursday of his second week, he was cleaning the break room adjacent to the finance floor when he heard something hit the floor nearby.
He walked around the corner.
Nina was crouched, gathering papers that had scattered from a dropped folder. Moving quickly, clearly pressed for time, stacking pages without fully reorganizing them.
Ray picked up the pages nearest to him and handed them over.
"Thank you," she said. She looked up briefly. "Sorry — thank you. I'm running late."
"No trouble," he said.
She stood and looked at him for a moment.
"I'm Nina," she said.
"Ray."
"You're new to the building?"
"Few weeks in," he said.
"Well." She gave a short, genuine smile. Not the kind people gave service workers reflexively. The kind that meant she had actually looked at him. "Thank you, Ray. I hope the job's going all right."
"It is," he said. "Good luck with your meeting."
She nodded and headed for the stairs.
Ray stood in the corridor for a moment after she left.
He had been in this building for two weeks. In those two weeks, forty-three people had walked past him. Eight had asked him to move his cart. Three had complained about cleaning schedules.
Nina Okafor was the first person to ask his name.
He began to pay closer attention to her work.
What he observed over the following days confirmed his initial read. Her models were rigorous. Her outputs were conservative and honest. Twice he noticed printed documents on her desk that appeared to be internal risk-flagging reports. Both times, when he passed a few days later, the documents were gone — with no visible downstream action.
He couldn't confirm that Derek had suppressed them. But Derek was the only person with the authority to table that kind of report, and the absence of consequence was notable.
One afternoon, emptying the recycling bin near her desk, Ray noticed a piece of paper crumpled and discarded.
He recognized the format immediately.
It was an internal governance memo. He had designed that header template himself, years ago. Someone had printed it, read it, and thrown it away.
He smoothed it out carefully and read it.
At the bottom was Derek Sloane's signature.
The document was a proposed amendment to the company's articles of association. A restructuring of the voting rights attached to the founder's retained shares. A technical change that, if passed, would reduce his controlling position from majority to advisory.
Ray folded the paper carefully and put it in his pocket.
He had two weeks left.