The Name He Didn’t Say

The office was quiet by six.

Tobi preferred it this way. The open plan floor with its twelve desks and competing conversations and the senior partner’s habit of thinking out loud across the room became, after everyone left, something he could actually work inside. The drawings on his screen made sense in the quiet. Problems that felt tangled at noon untangled themselves by evening.

He was finishing the elevation drawings for a mixed-use project in Ajah when his colleague Biodun appeared at the door with his jacket already on.

“You’re still here,” Biodun said, not as a question.

“Deadline is Friday.”

“The deadline is always Friday.” Biodun came in anyway, pulled a chair from the nearest desk, and sat in it backwards, which was a habit Tobi had given up asking him to stop. “How’s the wedding preparation going? Your brother’s, I mean.”

“Three months away,” Tobi said, without looking up. “Moving.”

“You like her? The fiancée?”

Tobi saved the file. Opened it again. Saved it a second time, which was unnecessary.

“She seems good for him,” he said.

Biodun was quiet for a moment in the way that meant he was deciding whether to say something. He usually said it. “That’s a very specific answer to a different question.”

“It’s the relevant answer.”

“I asked if you liked her.”

“She seems like a good person,” Tobi said. “Damilare is fortunate.”

Biodun looked at him for a long moment, then stood and pushed the chair back. “Alright. Lock up properly, the security man has been forgetting the side entrance.”

After he left Tobi sat with his drawings and did not work on them.

She seems like a good person.

He thought about the garden venue in Ikoyi. The way she had touched the bougainvillea without thinking, the way you touch things that are genuinely beautiful rather than things you are supposed to admire. The way she had said this one before she had any reason to, like something in her already knew.

He thought about what she had said about her job. Companies spend millions telling people who they are instead of just being it. She had said it lightly, like an observation, but there was something underneath it, something she was not quite saying about herself.

He was good at hearing what people were not quite saying.

That is the problem, he thought.

He pushed back from his desk and went to the window. Seventeen floors up, Lagos spread itself out in the early evening, lights beginning to appear across the island, the water in the distance catching the last of the sun.

He thought about Damilare.

He thought about what he knew about Damilare, the specific thing he had been carrying for six months like a stone in a pocket, heavy enough to notice but not yet heavy enough to put down. He had told himself it was not his business. He had told himself his brother was handling it. He had told himself that whatever was happening would resolve before the wedding and nobody needed to be hurt.

He had been very thorough about what he told himself.

But he had spent two hours with Nneka in a garden in Ikoyi and watched her be more genuinely herself than he suspected she was allowed to be most of the time, and the stone in his pocket felt heavier tonight than it had yesterday.

She deserves to know.

It is not your place.

She is walking into something incomplete.

It is not your place.

He returned to his desk. Opened a new file. Stared at it.

His phone lit up. Damilare.

Still at the office? Mum wants to know if you’re coming for dinner Sunday.

Tobi looked at the message for a long time. His brother’s name on the screen, easy and familiar, the older brother who had always taken up more space in every room and never done it deliberately, who had given Tobi his first architecture book at fourteen and shown up without being asked when Tobi’s first project fell through.

He loved his brother. That was the problem too.

Yes, he typed back. Tell her I’ll bring the wine.

He put the phone down and went back to his elevation drawings and worked until ten o’clock without stopping and did not say her name out loud once.

He noticed that he had been careful not to.

To be continued…