Actually

The restaurant in Surulere was quieter than usual for a Thursday.

Somto had arrived first, which meant she had already ordered the pepper soup and had been sitting with her thoughts long enough to have arranged them into something resembling a plan. Nneka recognised this version of her friend the moment she sat down. The slightly too composed posture. The way she waited until the pleasantries were fully finished before saying what she had actually come to say.

“I’m going to ask you something,” Somto said. “And I need you to not give me the brand strategy answer.”

Nneka put down her menu. “What is the brand strategy answer?”

“The one where everything is positioned correctly and nothing is actually said.” Somto looked at her directly. “Are you happy? Actually happy? Not excited about the venue or managing the caterer or holding everything together. Are you, Nneka Okafor, happy?”

The question landed the same way it had landed the last time, like something dropped from a height.

The difference was that this time Nneka did not have a composed answer already assembled and waiting.

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Looked at the table.

“I don’t know,” she said.

Somto did not react. She did not lean forward or reach across or make a sound. She simply received it, the way a person receives something they have been waiting a long time to hear.

“Okay,” she said quietly. “Tell me.”

And Nneka, who had been editing for weeks, who had become so skilled at the architecture of what she left out that she could do it without effort, opened her mouth and let something true come out.

She told Somto about the phone at the furniture showroom, the screen angled away, the name she had seen the second time on the counter with the message that did not finish. She told her about the answer Damilare gave, surname and project and mild complaint, complete and smooth and instant. She told her about the feeling she could not prove, the one degree temperature change in a room.

She did not tell her about Tobi.

She told herself it was because the two things were separate. That what she felt about Damilare’s secret was one conversation and what she felt about Tobi’s phone calls and balconies and forty minutes that felt like ten was another conversation entirely, and mixing them would make her look like a woman looking for an exit rather than a woman with a legitimate concern.

She believed this for approximately four minutes.

Somto listened to everything about Reena without interrupting. When Nneka finished, she was quiet for a moment, her pepper soup untouched and cooling.

“What does your body tell you?” Somto asked.

“What?”

“Not your head. Not the version that constructs three reasonable explanations. Your body. When you think about Reena and that message, what does your body tell you?”

Nneka thought about waking up the morning after she saw the name on the phone and running the answer back through her mind before she was fully awake. She thought about the way she had noted the time of the message. Nine forty-five. A consultant on a site visit timeline.

“It tells me something is wrong,” she said.

Somto nodded slowly. “Then something is probably wrong.”

“I have no proof.”

“You don’t need proof to trust yourself, Nneka. You need proof to have a conversation with him. Those are different things.”

Nneka looked at her friend across the table, this woman who had known her for eleven years and had never once told her what to do, only ever cleared the fog enough for Nneka to see what she already knew.

“What do I do?” she asked.

“You decide what you need to know,” Somto said. “And then you find a way to know it. Not for me. Not for the wedding. For you.”

They ate after that, the conversation moving to lighter things the way conversations did after something heavy had been set down. Somto talked about a man from her office who had been trying to ask her out for three weeks using increasingly transparent pretexts. Nneka laughed genuinely, the first genuine laugh she had produced in days.

In the car park afterward Somto held her by both arms and looked at her.

“One more thing,” she said. “Is there anything else? Anything you haven’t told me?”

The Tuesday evening phone call moved through Nneka’s mind. Forty minutes. Threshold psychology. Goodnight, Nneka. The cold ofada rice. The sleep that came easier than it had in two weeks.

“No,” she said. “That’s everything.”

Somto looked at her for one moment longer than comfortable.

“Okay,” she said. Then she got in her car.

Nneka sat in her own car and did not start the engine for a full minute.

That is not everything, she thought. And she knows it.

To be continued…