From A Producer To A Global Superstar

Chapter 470: Alice

Alice sat at her desk with her monitor angled away from the door, her fingers resting on the keyboard without pressing any keys. She had been staring at the same spreadsheet for twenty minutes, a column of numbers that should have commanded her full attention. They did not. Her eyes kept drifting to the glass wall that separated her workspace from the corridor, waiting for the shape she knew would appear.

She did not have to wait long.

Dayo walked past her door at ten minutes past nine, later than his usual arrival but still carrying the same energy she had been watching for weeks. It was not the controlled precision she was used to. His shoulders sat lower. His stride was looser, the gait of a man who was not calculating every step. And his face — she caught only a glimpse as he moved toward his office — held something she had never seen on him before.

A smile that reached his eyes.

Alice turned back to her screen. The numbers blurred. She blinked and they came back into focus, but the meaning stayed lost. She had worked with Dayo since the beginning of JD Records. Since the day he sent her that message, thanking her for the video she had leaked during the competition, the footage that had saved his career and cost her everything. She had joined him because he asked. She had stayed because she believed. And somewhere along the way, during the years when he was building an empire in silence and she was the person who stayed late to make sure he did not collapse, she had convinced herself that proximity would eventually become something more.

She was beginning to understand that it would not.

She stood up. The motion was automatic, her body moving before her mind had finished deciding what it wanted. She walked to the small kitchenette at the end of the corridor and poured herself water she did not want to drink. The space was empty, the morning rush not yet started, and she stood at the counter staring at her reflection in the microwave door. A woman in her early thirties, professionally dressed, hair pulled back with the efficiency of someone who had learned that attractiveness was only useful when it did not interfere with competence. She looked like what she was. A person who had built herself into a function.

The reflection did not tell her what she wanted to know.

She thought about the video. The one she had copied and sent to him from an anonymous account during the Global Competition, knowing that if anyone traced it back to her, her career in broadcast production would end. She had done it anyway. Because she had watched him on that stage, watched the way he commanded attention without demanding it, watched the truth of his talent get buried under someone else’s manipulation. And she had decided, in the middle of the night, that the world needed to see what she saw.

The world saw it. The clip went viral. His name exploded. And three days later, she was called into an office and told her services were no longer required.

She did not regret it. Not then. Not now. The regret was not about the video. It was about what came after.

Alice set the glass down without drinking and walked back to her desk. On the way, she passed Valerie’s office. The door was open, and Valerie looked up from her screen with the same assessing gaze she applied to everything.

"Alice. You alright?"

"Fine." The word came out too quickly, too flat. "Just need to check something with Dayo."

Valerie held her gaze for a moment longer than was comfortable. Valerie knew things. She had the same observational skill that Alice had, but she used hers as a tool rather than a wound. She did not push, but she filed the information away with a small nod.

"Let me know if you need anything," Valerie said.

Alice nodded and kept walking.

The corridor to Dayo’s office felt longer than usual. She had traveled this path a thousand times, delivering reports, confirming schedules, managing the machinery of a label that had grown from nothing into something that now employed dozens of people. The carpet was the same. The lighting was the same. But her chest felt tighter with every step, and by the time she reached his door, she had to stop and breathe.

She thought about the first time he touched her.

Not the first time they worked together. The first time she let herself believe that his attention meant something personal. It was two years into her employment at JD, during the period when Dayo was building JD Secure from nothing, when he worked twenty-hour days and slept in the office and forgot to eat unless someone reminded him. She had reminded him. She had brought him food. She had stayed late to make sure he did not collapse. And one night, at three in the morning, when they were both too tired to maintain the boundaries that exhaustion had already eroded, he had reached for her hand across a conference table covered in code and strategy.

She had let him.

What followed had become a pattern. Not a relationship. Never that. She knew better than to call it that. But a rhythm. A comfort. A physical closeness that filled the spaces where words were too dangerous. She knew his body better than anyone else in his life. She knew the particular way his breathing changed when he was about to fall asleep. She knew the tension in his shoulders that only she could massage away. She knew the hunger that drove him, the exhaustion that followed, the stillness that came after.

And she knew, with the intimacy of a woman who had shared his bed, that something had changed since he returned from Nigeria.

It was not dramatic. Not obvious to someone who did not know him the way she did. But she noticed. The way his attention drifted during conversations that used to hold him completely. The way he checked his phone with a frequency that was new, smiling at the screen in a way that had nothing to do with business. The way he left the office earlier than he used to, disappearing to a house she did not know, with someone she had never met.

They had not slept together in three weeks. The longest gap since their pattern began. When she had tried, two nights ago, standing close enough that he could have reached for her if he wanted to, he had simply looked at her with an expression that was not unkind but was unmistakably distant. He had said he was tired. He had said he needed to go. And he had left.

Alice pressed her palm against the doorframe and felt the cool wood against her skin. She did not know where he went in the evenings. She did not know who made him smile at his phone. She did not know why the vigor that used to spill over into their private moments had suddenly gone quiet. But she knew, with the certainty of a woman who had been paying attention, that someone else was receiving what she had always wanted.

The door in front of her was thick, the wood polished to a finish that gave nothing away. Behind it, Dayo was sitting at his desk, probably scrolling through whatever messages made him look the way he looked now, probably preparing to leave again for a destination he had never mentioned to her. A house. A person. A life that ran parallel to the one they had built together but did not include her in the way she had hoped.

She raised her hand to knock.

Her fingers trembled.

She looked at them, annoyed by the betrayal. She was not a trembling person. She was competent. She was controlled. She was the woman who had managed crises and negotiated deals and kept Dayo’s empire running while he fought wars she could not see. But her hand shook against the door, and she could not stop it.

She thought about leaving.

The idea came with a sharp clarity. She could turn around. She could go back to her desk. She could compose an email explaining that she had been offered an opportunity elsewhere, something vague and professional that would allow them both to maintain the fiction that nothing had ever happened between them. She could take the exit package that her years of service had earned her and start somewhere clean, somewhere her history did not follow her.

But the fiction had already cracked.

She had seen him this morning. She had seen the glow. She had counted the days since he had touched her. And she knew, with a certainty that sat in her chest like a stone, that whatever was happening in the evenings, in the house she did not know, with the person she had never met, was pulling him away from her with a force that she could not match by staying silent.

The tremor in her hand steadied.

Alice knocked.

The sound was sharp, decisive, the knock of someone who had made a choice even if she did not yet know what the choice was. She heard movement behind the door, the soft shift of a chair, the footsteps approaching.

"Come in," Dayo said.

His voice was different too. The same timbre, the same depth, but carrying a warmth that had not been there before. A warmth that was not for her.

Alice turned the handle.

And stepped inside.