One Second

The planning meeting was Funke’s idea.

She had called Damilare on a Wednesday morning and said, with the particular tone she used when something was not actually a suggestion, that it would be good for everyone to sit together before the wedding month arrived. The caterer needed a final headcount. The programme needed eyes from both families. These things were better handled in person than across phone calls that went in circles.

Damilare had told Nneka that evening. Nneka had said of course. She had said it the way she said most things now, from a slight distance, like a woman watching herself agree to things from across a room.

The meeting was on a Friday at seven.

She arrived with Damilare. Tobi was already there, seated at the dining table with a bottle of water and his phone face down beside him, which she noticed and filed without meaning to. Funke was in the kitchen directing a house girl who was arranging small chops on a tray with more supervision than the task required. Mr. Adeyemi sat at the head of the table with the quiet authority of a man who had learned that the best contribution he could make to planning meetings was to stay out of the way of the women running them.

The meeting moved efficiently. Funke had a list. She worked through it with the focus of someone who had organised family events for thirty years and had strong feelings about people who came to meetings without writing things down.

Nneka wrote things down.

Tobi sat across from her and contributed when asked and was otherwise quiet in the way she had come to understand was not absence but attention. Once, when Funke said something about the reception timeline that did not quite add up mathematically, Tobi caught Nneka’s eye across the table. Just for a moment. A shared recognition, the kind that passes between two people who are paying attention in the same way.

She looked down at her notepad.

By nine o’clock the list was complete. Funke declared herself satisfied, which meant she had thought of three more things she would call about tomorrow but was willing to stop for tonight. Mr. Adeyemi produced a bottle of wine he had been waiting to open and Damilare went to help his mother carry things from the kitchen.

The light went out.

Not gradually. All at once, the way NEPA took light, sudden and complete, the generator outside failing to kick in immediately the way generators sometimes failed to kick in, and the room went from warm and bright to absolute darkness in the space of a breath.

Someone laughed. Funke called out from the kitchen. Mr. Adeyemi said something about the generator switch in a voice that suggested he was not moving from his chair to deal with it.

Nneka stood too quickly and misjudged the chair behind her and stepped sideways and then there was a hand.

Tobi’s hand, finding hers in the dark, a brief and certain grip, guiding her one step to the left away from the chair she had been about to walk into.

One second. Less than one second.

He let go.

The generator caught. The lights returned. The room reassembled itself around her, Funke’s voice from the kitchen, Mr. Adeyemi settling back, the small chops tray still on the table, everything exactly as it had been.

Tobi was already moving toward the kitchen to help.

Nneka stood where he had guided her and did not move for a moment. Her hand felt the absence of his the way skin felt the absence of warmth. She looked at her own palm like it had done something without her permission.

Damilare came back into the room carrying a dish and smiled at her across the table.

She smiled back.

For the rest of the evening she did not look at Tobi directly and he did not look at her and neither of them spoke about it because there was nothing to speak about. A hand in the dark. A step to the left. Less than one second.

She sat beside Damilare on the drive home and watched the Lagos night through the window and understood, with the quiet certainty of someone who had been lying to herself for weeks, that she was in serious trouble.

Not because of what had happened.

Because of what one second had done to her.

To be continued…