From A Producer To A Global Superstar

Chapter 471: Alice...the conversation

The office was quiet when Alice stepped inside.

Dayo sat behind his desk with his phone in his hand, the screen still glowing from whatever he had been looking at when she knocked. He set it down face-down as she entered, a gesture that felt deliberate, and looked up at her with an expression that was already shifting from ease to caution.

"You needed something?" he asked.

Alice did not sit in the chair across from his desk. She stood, her hands clasped in front of her, her posture straight in the way it became when she was preparing for a difficult conversation. She had organized this office. She had chosen the furniture, the lighting, the layout that was supposed to make people feel comfortable enough to be honest. Now she stood in the middle of it feeling like she was on the wrong side of her own design.

"Where do you go in the evenings?" she asked.

The question landed directly, without the softening of small talk that usually preceded serious conversations in this building. Dayo’s expression flickered, a brief tightening around his eyes that she would not have caught if she had not spent years studying his face.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean," Alice said, her voice steady but quiet, "that you leave this office earlier than you used to. You check your phone constantly. You smile at messages that have nothing to do with work. And for three weeks, you have not touched me."

She watched him absorb the words. Watched the careful way he leaned back in his chair, the way his hands folded together on the desk, the way his breathing slowed into the rhythm he used when he was preparing to manage a situation rather than simply respond to it.

"Alice," he said.

"Do not say my name like that," she interrupted, and the sharpness in her voice surprised them both. "Like you are letting me down gently. I am not a child, Dayo. I am the person who has been in this building since before it had furniture. I am the person who handled the fallout when you disappeared for four years and the world thought you were finished. I am the person who has been in your bed. And I deserve to know why I suddenly feel like a stranger in a space I helped build."

Dayo was quiet for a long moment. The office seemed to hold its breath with him, the silence pressing against the glass walls.

"You are not a stranger," he said finally. "And you are not imagining things."

"Then what is happening?"

He looked at her, really looked at her, and she saw something in his eyes that she had never seen before when they discussed anything personal. Not avoidance. Not the careful distance he usually maintained. Just clarity. The clarity of a man who had finally made a decision and was no longer afraid of its consequences.

"There is someone," he said.

The words were simple. Three syllables. But they struck her chest with a force that made her grip the back of the chair in front of her to stay standing.

"Someone," she repeated.

"Yes."

Alice nodded slowly, processing the admission. She had expected it. She had known it for weeks, felt it in the spaces where his attention used to be. But hearing it spoken aloud was different. It made the suspicion real, and reality hurt in a way that imagination had not prepared her for.

"How long?" she asked.

"Since before the trip to Nigeria."

Alice closed her eyes for a moment. The timeline landed with a particular cruelty. Before Nigeria. Before he had returned with this new lightness, this glow that she had been watching with growing dread. She had been sleeping with him while he was already moving toward someone else, and she had not known. She had not suspected because she had trusted him, because she had convinced herself that whatever they had, however undefined, was exclusive in its own way.

"And you did not tell me," she said. It was not a question.

"I did not know how to tell you," Dayo said. His voice was rough, stripped of the polish he usually applied to difficult conversations. "I told myself that what we had was separate from what I felt for her. That I could manage both. That I was not hurting you because I was not making you promises I could not keep. But I was wrong. The silence was the harm. The not telling you was the harm. The letting you continue while I knew where my heart was going, that was the harm."

Alice opened her eyes. She looked at him across the desk, at the man who had built an empire from nothing, who had survived attacks that would have destroyed most people, who had always seemed so controlled and untouchable. And she saw that he was uncomfortable. That this conversation was costing him something. That he was not managing her, not strategizing, just finally being present with a truth he had been avoiding.

"Who is she?" Alice asked.

"Someone from my past," Dayo said. "Someone I never stopped loving. I thought she was gone. I thought I had lost her because of my own failures. And when I found her again, I realized that the years we were apart did not change what I felt. They only made me more certain."

Alice felt her throat tighten. She thought about the years she had spent beside him, the nights she had stayed late, the weekends she had given up, the body she had offered without conditions because she believed that eventually he would see her as more than convenient. And she realized, with a clarity that was almost violent, that she had been competing with a ghost. With a memory. With a woman who had left him and still owned him completely.

"The kiss," Alice said quietly. "Outside this building. Years ago. When I told you how I felt. You stood there and said nothing. You let me keep hoping. Was that because of her?"

Dayo nodded slowly. "I was already in love with her then. I was already lost. And I did not have the courage to tell you the truth because I was afraid of losing your professional loyalty. I was afraid of being alone in this building while I was fighting wars I could not explain. So I took what you offered, your comfort and your presence, and I did not give you the honesty you deserved in return. That was my failure. Not yours."

Alice released the chair and walked to the window. She stood with her back to him, looking out at the city below, at the people moving through their lives without knowing that in this office, a woman was learning that everything she had built her hope on was made of air.

"Do you know what the worst part is?" she said, her voice barely above a whisper.

"Tell me."

"The worst part is that you are being kind right now." She turned to face him, and her eyes were bright with tears she was refusing to let fall. "You are finally telling me the truth. You are finally looking at me like I am a person instead of a function. And it is only happening because you are in love with someone else. I spent years waiting for you to see me. And the moment you do, it is to tell me that I was never what you wanted."

Dayo stood up from his desk. He walked around it, moving toward her with the careful pace of someone who knew he was approaching something fragile.

"I see you now," he said. "I have always seen your value. Your mind, your loyalty, your work. You are integral to JD Records. This label would not function without you. That is not a line. That is not a comfort prize. That is the truth of what you have built here."

"I do not want to be integral," Alice said, and the tears finally escaped, moving down her cheeks in silent tracks. "I wanted to be chosen. I wanted you to look at me the way you are looking at your phone when you check it. I wanted to be the reason you left work early. I wanted to be the person you were rushing toward. Not the one you were rushing away from."

Dayo stopped a few feet away from her. He did not reach for her. He did not offer a touch that would have been inappropriate and inadequate. He just stood there, letting her see him, letting her say what she needed to say without interruption.

"You were never rushing away from," he said quietly. "You were holding me together when I had nothing else. But I should have told you what that meant. I should have told you that I needed you as a colleague, as a friend, as someone who understood this work in ways no one else did. I should never have let you into my bed without letting you into the truth of where my heart was. That was my cowardice. And I am sorry for it."

Alice wiped her face with the back of her hand, a quick, angry motion. "Sorry does not give me back the years."

"I know."

"It does not make me feel less like a fool."

"I know."

"And it does not change the fact that I have to walk out of this office and sit at a desk fifteen feet from your door, knowing that you are smiling at messages from a woman who is not me, while I answer your emails and manage your calendar and pretend that my heart is not breaking in a building that I helped build."

Dayo was silent. There was nothing he could say to that, and she watched him recognize the impossibility of offering anything that would fix it.

"What do you want me to do?" he asked finally.

"I want you to have offered me honesty three years ago," she said. "But since you cannot do that, I want you to do one thing now. Do not try to make this better with gestures. Do not offer me projects or responsibilities or anything that feels like compensation. If I stay at this label, it will be because I decide my work matters more than my pride. Not because you made it financially sensible. I am not for sale. Not even by kindness."

Dayo nodded. "Understood."

Alice walked past him toward the door. Her hand was on the handle when she stopped, not turning around, her voice dropping to something that was almost broken.

"Does she know about me?"

"She knows there was someone," Dayo said. "She does not know it was you. And if you want it to stay that way, it will."

Alice laughed, a short, bitter sound. "Thank you for protecting me. After everything, thank you for at least keeping that private."

She opened the door and walked out, closing it softly behind her. The corridor was empty. The office was quiet. And she stood there for a moment, her hand still on the handle, her body refusing to move in any direction because she did not know where to go.

She thought about her desk, about the emails waiting, about the meetings she had scheduled and the artists she was managing and the empire that continued running regardless of what had just shattered inside her. She thought about the professional identity she had built, the competence that was supposed to be her armor, the efficiency that had made her indispensable.

Indispensable. Not chosen. That was the word that would haunt her.

Alice pushed off the door and walked toward the stairwell. She did not go to her desk. She could not face the screen, the work, the normal rhythm of a day that had just been split in half by honesty. She pushed through the heavy door and walked down the concrete steps, her heels making sharp echoes that matched the rhythm of her heartbeat.

On the landing between floors, she stopped. She pressed her back against the cold wall and slid down until she was sitting on the floor, her knees drawn up, her face buried in her hands. And there, in the privacy of a stairwell that smelled of industrial cleaner and old paint, she finally let herself cry.

Not loudly. Not dramatically. Just the slow, painful release of years of hope that had been held together by silence and proximity and the desperate belief that if she was patient enough, good enough, present enough, he would eventually look at her and see what she had been offering all along.

The tears came until they stopped. Her breathing steadied. She sat on the concrete floor and looked at the wall across from her, at the blank surface that offered no answers.

She did not know what she would do next. She did not know if she could stay at JD Records, working beside him, watching him move toward a life she was not part of. She did not know if she had the strength to leave everything she had built, to start over somewhere else, to prove that she was more than the role she had carved out for herself in his shadow.

All she knew was that the conversation was over. The truth was out. And she was sitting on a concrete floor in a stairwell, alone, with the pieces of a heart that she had given away without conditions, finally understanding that conditions would not have changed the outcome.

He had never been hers. He had always been someone else’s. And she had been the last person to know.

Alice wiped her face with her palms, took a breath, and stood up. She smoothed her clothes, checked her reflection in the small mirror she kept in her bag, and fixed her face into the controlled, professional expression that had always been her shield.

Then she walked back up the stairs, toward the office, toward the desk, toward the work that was still waiting. Not because she had decided to stay. But because she had not yet decided to leave, and until she made that choice, the only thing she knew how to do was keep moving.

She passed Dayo’s door without looking at it. She sat at her desk and opened her laptop. And she began to work, her fingers moving across the keys with the same efficiency they always had, while inside, something essential and hopeful that had lived in her for years finally went still.