Saying It Out Loud

She went to him.

Not that evening. Not impulsively, not in the heat of something she could blame on the moment. She went on a Wednesday afternoon, four days after the family dinner, after she had sat with Funke’s words long enough to understand that sitting with them was no longer enough.

She called first. She said: “I need to talk to you. Not about Damilare. About the other thing.”

A silence on his end. Then: “Okay. Come to the office. Everyone leaves by six.”

She arrived at ten past six. Seventeen floors up, the office was exactly as she had imagined it, large drawing tables and screens and the specific organised quiet of a creative space after hours. Tobi was at his desk. He stood when she came in and did not pretend the visit was ordinary.

She sat in the chair across from his desk. He sat back down. Between them was a drawing he had been working on, pencil lines on white paper, a building taking shape from the inside out.

She looked at it for a moment.

“I need to say something out loud,” she said. “I am not saying it because I expect anything from it. I am saying it because I have spent my entire life not saying true things and I think it is making me ill.”

He was very still.

“I have feelings for you,” she said. “I know what that means. I know what it costs. I know the position it puts you in and I am not asking you to do anything with it. I just needed one person in my life to know a true thing about me without me editing it first.”

The office was quiet around them. Somewhere in the building a lift moved. Outside the window Lagos was doing what Lagos did at six in the evening, asserting itself loudly against the sky.

Tobi looked at her for a long moment.

“I know,” he said quietly.

“I know you know,” she said. “I need you to hear me say it.”

He nodded. Once. Receiving it the way he received everything, without performance, without rushing toward a response.

Then he said: “I have been sitting with something since before I had any right to be sitting with it.” His voice was careful, each word placed deliberately. “Since the venue in Ikoyi. Maybe before. I have been sitting with it and telling myself it was manageable and telling myself my brother was handling his situation and telling myself that what I felt was circumstantial, proximity, wedding preparations throwing people together.” He paused. “None of those things are true.”

She looked at him.

“I see you,” he said simply. “Not the version you perform. The actual person underneath it. I have seen her since the first evening in Gbagada when you laughed at my mother’s story and then caught yourself laughing and I watched you decide it was acceptable to laugh and I thought, this woman edits everything, even her own joy.” He stopped. “I have not been able to stop noticing you since then. I have tried. I want you to know I have genuinely tried.”

The words arrived in her chest and settled there, warm and devastating simultaneously.

“We cannot do anything with this,” she said.

“I know.”

“Your brother. My… Damilare. The families. Everything.”

“I know,” he said again. The repetition was not dismissal. It was confirmation. He had been through every wall of this room already and knew exactly how solid each one was.

She looked at the drawing on his desk, the building emerging from pencil lines, all bones and intention before the finishing began.

“What do we do?” she asked.

“We do what is right,” he said. “Whatever that ends up being.” A brief pause. “But I think you already know what right is. I think you have known for a while and you have been waiting for permission.”

She thought about her mother’s hand on hers. The word sensible. She thought about Kelechi’s silence and the single time he said her name. She thought about a garden in Ikoyi that breathed, and a balcony in Gbagada, and forty minutes that felt like ten, and one second in the dark that had confirmed something her body had known before her mind caught up.

“I am terrified,” she said.

“I know,” he said. “The true things usually are.”

They sat in the office until the light outside shifted from evening into night, not saying much, not needing to say much, two people who had been honest with each other in a world that had not given either of them much practice at honesty, sitting with the specific peace and specific grief of a truth finally spoken.

When she stood to leave he walked her to the lift.

At the lift door she turned to face him.

“Tobi.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you for not making this something it isn’t.”

He looked at her with that expression she had learned to read, the one that meant he was feeling something he was choosing not to act on.

“Thank you for saying it out loud,” he said.

The lift came. She got in. The doors closed between them.

She stood in the descending lift with her back against the wall and her eyes closed and thought about a woman who had spent her whole life editing her joy and wondered what it would feel like to stop.

To be continued…