He came down the stairs quickly and walked through the ground floor. He pushed through the front door and came out into the morning air. The guard was standing near the gate and Dami was standing a short distance away. Remy looked at Dami, a young man with thin shoulders, quiet eyes, worn clothes, and an envelope in his hand. Remy walked toward him directly and stopped in front of him.
He asked in a low and tight voice whether this was the person who had brought the document. The guard nodded. Remy looked at Dami for a long moment. Then he said simply, “Come with me.” He took Dami back up to his office on the fifth floor. He told his staff to hold all his calls. He closed the office door and pointed Dami toward a chair.
He sat across from him and leaned forward with both elbows on the desk. He asked Dami calmly to explain from the very beginning exactly how the document had come into his possession. Dami looked at the man sitting across from him, the large desk, the clean suit, the heavy silence. He placed the envelope on the desk and began to speak.
He told the whole thing from the beginning. The estate road, the bush, the bag, the weight, the cart, going home, reading the documents. Remy listened without interrupting once. His face did not change much, but his eyes were intense and fully fixed on Dami. When Dami finished speaking, there was a silence that lasted several seconds.
Then Remy asked the question that mattered most. He asked where the bag was now. Dami said it was at his house under the bed. He had not touched the money. He had not spent a single note. Everything was exactly as he had found it. Remy sat back slowly in his chair. He pressed his lips together and looked at the ceiling for a brief moment.
Then he looked back at Dami and asked whether he was willing to take him there now. Dami said yes. They left the building together. Remy’s driver brought the car around and they both got in the back. Remy said nothing during the drive. Dami gave directions quietly, and the car moved through the busy roads and eventually into the narrower streets of the neighborhood where Dami lived.
People on the road turned to look at the clean, expensive car moving slowly through the area. Children stopped playing to stare. Women selling by the roadside looked up. The car stopped in front of Dami’s house. Remy stepped out. He looked at the building for a moment. Small, worn, with cracked paint on the walls and a tiny yard.
He stepped inside behind Dami without a word. Dami went straight to the bedroom. He pulled the bag out from under the bed and carried it into the sitting room. He placed it on the floor in front of Remy and stepped back. Remy crouched down and unzipped the bag. He went through it quickly, checking the money and then the documents carefully.
He counted the bundles with his eyes. He checked the papers one by one. After several minutes, he stood back up. He looked at Dami standing quietly by the doorway. He took a long, slow breath. Then he said nothing for a moment. He just looked at Dami with an expression that was very hard to describe. Something between disbelief and something much deeper.
They carried the bag to the car together. Remy’s driver placed it in the boot. They drove in silence for a while. Then Remy spoke. He asked Dami whether anyone else knew about the bag. Dami said no. He had told no one. Not his parents, not a friend, no one. Remy nodded slowly. Then he asked why. Why had Dami not kept the money? He asked it directly and without softness.
He wanted the real answer. Dami looked out the window for a second and then turned back to Remy and said simply that the money was not his. And that was the full answer. Remy looked at him for a long moment and said nothing more. They stopped at a large bank. Remy took the bag from the boot and walked inside. He was there for nearly forty minutes.
Dami waited in the car. He watched people walk in and out of the bank entrance. He watched a security guard standing still in the sun. He sat with his hands in his lap and thought about nothing specific, just the quiet. When Remy came back to the car, his face looked lighter. The tight, wound-up expression he had worn since leaving the office was slightly gone.
He got in the car and told the driver to take them back to the office. He did not say anything else for the first few minutes of the ride. Back at the office, Remy poured two glasses of water and placed one in front of Dami. He sat down across from him again like before. Then he asked Dami to tell him about himself.
Not about the bag, about his life. Dami was quiet for a moment. Then he began to speak. He spoke about his parents, about school, about the graduation, about the hundred job applications, about the rejections, about the small failed businesses, about the scrap cart. He did not say any of it in a dramatic way. He said it plainly and slowly, like a person reading from a list.
The room was very quiet the whole time. Remy did not interrupt. When Dami finished, Remy sat back. He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said that he had met many people in business, smart people, educated people, people with connections and strong families behind them. He said he had not met many people who could find a bag full of money, sit with it for days, and return every note of it.
He said that kind of person was rare, the kind of rare that most businesses needed deeply but never found. Then he stopped talking. He picked up his phone and called someone. He spoke for a few minutes in a low voice. Then he put the phone down and looked at Dami and said he had a proposal to discuss. But before Remy could get to the full proposal, his office phone rang. He picked it up.
His face changed as soon as he heard the voice on the other end. He sat up straight. He held the phone tightly. The voice on the other end was from the firm that had paid for the contract. They had heard rumors. Someone from inside had leaked information that Remy had not yet confirmed receipt of the funds through the proper channels.
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