Forty Minutes

He called on a Tuesday evening.

Not a WhatsApp message, not a voice note. An actual call, the kind people made less and less, which meant something or meant nothing depending on the person. With Tobi, Nneka was beginning to understand, things usually meant something.

She was on her couch with her laptop and a half-eaten bowl of ofada rice when the phone lit up. She looked at his name for one full ring longer than was necessary before answering.

“I found something,” he said, without preamble. “A paper, actually. An architect wrote it about the psychology of threshold spaces, the way buildings design the moment between outside and inside. I kept thinking about what you said at the venue.”

She set her laptop aside. “What did I say at the venue?”

“That the first one felt like a conference. That the second one breathed.” A brief pause. “You were describing threshold psychology without knowing the term. The way a space makes you feel before you’ve fully entered it.”

She pulled her knees up on the couch. “And this bothered you enough to call?”

“It interested me enough to call,” he said. “There’s a difference.”

Yes, she thought. There is.

He explained the paper. Not at length, not lecturing, just enough to show her why it had made him think of her, the way the writer argued that people responded to spaces the way they responded to people, instinctively and before their reasoning caught up. She asked questions. He answered them and asked questions back and somewhere in the exchange she stopped tracking the conversation and simply existed inside it.

He asked about her week. She told him about a client presentation that had gone sideways when the founder decided midway through to change the core message she had spent three weeks developing. He said that was exactly what his client on the Ajah project kept doing and they spent a few minutes in shared irritation about people who hired professionals and then dismantled the professional’s work in real time.

“Why do they do it?” she asked.

“Fear,” he said, without hesitating. “They don’t trust that someone else can understand their thing as well as they do. So they keep pulling it back. Keep interrupting the process.”

She was quiet for a moment. “That’s generous. I usually just think they’re difficult.”

“Difficult people are usually afraid people,” he said. “Doesn’t make them less difficult. Just explains the shape of it.”

She thought about her mother. She thought about Damilare answering her question before she finished asking it. She thought about herself, how long she had been interrupting her own process by pulling things back before they became real.

She did not say any of this.

“How is the planning?” he asked. The shift was natural, no weight behind it.

“Moving,” she said. Then, before she could stop herself: “Sometimes I feel like I’m watching it happen to someone slightly to the left of me.”

Silence on his end. Not uncomfortable. The kind of silence that meant he was taking what she said seriously.

“Is that new?” he asked carefully. “Or has it always been like that?”

Too honest, she thought. You went too honest.

“I think I’m just tired,” she said. “The logistics are a lot.”

He did not push it. He accepted the retreat without making her feel the retreat, which was its own kind of consideration.

They talked for a while longer about nothing specific, his mother’s ongoing campaign to repaint the Gbagada house a colour his father was resisting, a documentary he had watched, a restaurant in Yaba he thought she would like based on nothing except a feeling.

When she finally looked at the time it was nine forty-three.

“I’ve kept you,” he said.

“I didn’t notice,” she said, which was true and too honest and she said it before she could edit it.

Another silence. Shorter this time.

“Goodnight, Nneka.”

The way he said her name, level and careful, like he was aware of how much space it could take up if he let it.

“Goodnight,” she said.

She sat with the phone in her hand after the call ended and looked at the ofada rice gone cold on the table and thought about forty minutes that had felt like ten and ten minutes with Damilare that sometimes felt like forty and did not let herself follow that thought to its conclusion.

She put the phone down and finished the rice cold and went to bed and slept better than she had in two weeks.

She noted this in the morning and wished she had not.

To be continued…