Insight of a Kenyan Girl

The jazz hummed low, sunlight spilling across the table, when Patty’s phone buzzed again. The sound was small, but it shifted the air, like a crack running through glass.

He didn’t rush. He never did. He stood with deliberate calm, lifted the phone, and swiped. His voice, when it came, was smooth, almost casual yet the words cut like steel.

“Three percent. Today.”

I stilled, my mug halfway to my lips.

Patty moved to the window, framed in gold light, his shoulders straight, his presence taking up more space than the room should have allowed. He spoke as if the morning belonged entirely to him. “No delays. By the time New York opens, it’s done. Or he won’t have a company left to argue over.”

His tone never rose. It didn’t need to. It carried that kind of authority the kind that rearranged futures without a single threat spoken aloud.

Silence stretched from the other end. Then his mouth tilted, not in amusement, but in something darker. “If he hesitates, remind him of Jakarta. Men like him don’t fear numbers. They fear what you remember.”

Another pause. A soft click. He ended the call.

For a moment, the kitchen was not a kitchen at all. The sunlight still poured in, the coffee still steamed, but the air vibrated with something else power, money, danger all coiled tight around the edges of his quiet.

Patty set the phone down, precise, almost reverent, as though even ending business carried ritual. He turned back toward me. He didn’t check if I’d heard. He knew I had.

“That didn’t sound like ordering breakfast,” I said, forcing my voice light, though my throat had gone dry.

His eyes flicked to mine, steady, unreadable. He leaned on the table, casual in posture but not in presence. Then softer, as though he’d decided to let me in on something few ever saw, he said, “Not everything I touch turns to ruin, Minnie. Some things, I build.”

The weight of it lingered in the air between us, like a confession or a promise.

I held his gaze, my heartbeat louder than the music. The words should have reassured me. Instead, they made me wonder what ruin looked like in his world and whether I could survive standing in its shadow.

He reached for his mug and drank, unbothered, returning to silence as though nothing had shifted. The contrast unnerved me. The man who had just moved unseen pieces on a global chessboard now sat across from me, sipping coffee like it was the only thing that mattered.

The warmth between us crept back in with dangerous ease. His hand brushed the table, near mine but not touching, a nearness that carried its own gravity. He gestured at my untouched plate. “You should eat too.”

I forced a bite past my lips, though taste hardly registered. My mind replayed his words, his tone, the shadow of Jakarta.

He studied me as I chewed, not with judgment, but with a quiet intensity that made me feel like I was being weighed measured against something I couldn’t name.

“Do you ever regret it?” I asked before I could stop myself.

Patty’s brow lifted, just slightly. “What?”

“Having that much… control. Carrying it.”

His pause was deliberate. He set his mug down slowly, fingers lingering against porcelain. “Regret is for men who think they had a choice. I don’t regret. I decide.”

The words landed heavy, and yet beneath them I caught a flicker. Not softness exactly, but something human, something fragile, like a scar beneath armor.

The silence pressed close. My kitchen suddenly felt too small for the both of us for the vastness of his world and the ordinariness of mine. And yet, his presence anchored me, unsettling and magnetic all at once.

When his hand finally reached across the table and covered mine, the warmth of his skin was startling. Firm. Real. A tether in the swirl of everything unspoken.

The dangerous man on the phone and the quiet one in my kitchen blurred together until I couldn’t separate them. All I knew was that I was still here, balanced in that fragile place between safety and risk between ruin and whatever it was he claimed he built.

And for the first time, I wondered if I wanted to step off that balance at all.