New Member, Old Ghost

By Wednesday, Solomon had already made himself useful. He offered to help set up chairs before Bible study. He remembered names after hearing them once. He laughed at Deacon Ifeanyi’s tired jokes with a warmth that made the older man clap him on the back and declare him “one of us” within a week.

Oluwasegun liked him immediately.

“That young man has good spirit,” he told Bimbola over dinner, spooning egusi onto his plate. “Very respectful. Very sharp too, he asked me some deep questions about the book of Job after service.”

Bimbola pushed rice around her plate without eating. “Where did you say he moved from again?”

“Benin, I think. Or somewhere down that side.” Oluwasegun shrugged, uninterested in the detail. “Why, you know him?”

“No,” she said too quickly. “Just curious.”

She hadn’t stopped thinking about Solomon since Sunday. She replayed his words over and over, Benin isn’t easy to leave behind, searching for an innocent explanation and finding none. She’d spent nine years constructing a life so far removed from her past that even she sometimes struggled to remember the girl she used to be.

That girl had a name too. Not Bimbola exactly, though that had always been her name, just not this version of it. Before the fasting, before the fitted church wrappers and the careful vocabulary of a pastor’s wife, there had been a Bimbola who danced three nights a week at a beer parlour off Sapele Road to keep herself and her sick mother fed after her father died. A Bimbola who owed her survival to men she’d rather forget, one of whom went by the name Osas, and whose shadow still occasionally crossed her mind at three in the morning when sleep refused to come.

She’d left all of that behind when she moved to Lagos at twenty-three, met Oluwasegun at a crusade, and let his gentle, earnest faith convince her that reinvention was not only possible but holy. She became a new creature, the old had passed away, all things had become new. She believed it. She’d built an entire life on believing it.

Now a stranger from that old life was sitting in her husband’s church, calling her by a name only Benin remembered.

Thursday evening, she found an excuse to linger after choir rehearsal, watching Solomon help stack hymn books. When the last of the choir members left, she approached him directly.

“Can we talk?”

Solomon looked up, unsurprised, as if he’d been waiting for her. “Of course, Sister Bimbola.”

“Drop the act,” she said quietly, glancing toward the door. “Who are you, and what do you want?”

He smiled, and this time it reached his eyes, cold and satisfied. “I told you already. I’m a new member of this church.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“You should relax,” he said, picking up the last hymn book. “I’m not here to cause trouble. I just find it interesting, that’s all. The last time I saw you, you were dancing at Aunty Rose’s place on Sapele Road. Now look at you. Pastor’s wife.” He shook his head slowly, almost admiringly. “God works in mysterious ways, they say.”

Bimbola’s hands went cold. “Keep your voice down.”

“I am speaking normally,” Solomon said, voice perfectly level. “You’re the one who looks like she’s seen a ghost.”

He set the hymn book down and picked up his jacket, moving toward the door with unhurried steps. At the threshold, he paused and looked back at her.

“Don’t worry, Sister Bimbola. Your secret is safe with me.” A pause, deliberate and cruel. “For now.”

He left her standing alone in the empty hall, the overhead fan humming above her, her carefully built world beginning, quietly and irreversibly, to crack.

To be continued…

Do you think Solomon is bluffing, or does he really know everything?