Too Smooth

The wedding planner’s name was Chisom and she had the organised intensity of someone who had saved seventeen weddings from collapse and intended to save this one too before it had any chance to need saving.

She spread her portfolio across Nneka’s dining table on a Wednesday evening, colour-coded tabs and laminated vendor cards and a timeline that accounted for every hour of the wedding day down to the minute. Damilare sat beside Nneka with his reading glasses on, which he only wore at home, which she had always found quietly endearing.

They went through the checklist together. Catering deposit, confirmed. Decorator, confirmed. Photography, two options still open. The cake consultation was scheduled for the following Saturday.

“The invitation printing,” Chisom said, tapping her pen on a line item. “I need a decision by end of next week. The printer I use books early and he is worth the wait but he will not hold the slot indefinitely.”

“We’ll confirm by Thursday,” Damilare said.

Chisom made a note. Nneka watched her make the note and thought about how the wedding was becoming something that existed outside her, a machine with its own momentum, moving toward a date whether or not she was ready.

You are ready, she told herself. You have been ready for this for years.

After Chisom left they ate the jollof rice Nneka had made earlier, reheated now and slightly drier than it had been, and Damilare said it was still good and she knew he meant it because he ate two full plates.

She washed up while he answered emails at the dining table, his glasses still on, his attention fully somewhere else. She watched the water run over her hands and thought about nothing specific and everything general and was almost at peace with the evening when his phone, resting face-up on the table, lit up.

She was not trying to see it.

She saw it.

Reena: Are we still on for—

The rest disappeared as the screen timed out.

Damilare did not reach for it immediately. He finished the sentence he was typing on his laptop, then picked up the phone, read it, typed something brief, and set it down again.

He did not change position. He did not clear his throat. He did not look up.

Nneka turned off the tap and dried her hands on the kitchen towel, slowly, one finger at a time.

“Who’s Reena?” she asked.

Her voice came out light. Curious rather than afraid. She was good at that.

Damilare looked up from his laptop. No hesitation. No flicker. “Reena Salawu. She consults for us on the Abuja project. Why?”

“I saw the name on your phone.”

“She’s been going back and forth about a site visit timeline.” He returned to his laptop. “I keep telling her to just confirm the dates but she changes her mind every week.”

Nneka folded the kitchen towel and hung it on the oven handle.

The answer was complete. It had a surname, a project, a context, a mild complaint about the woman’s indecisiveness. It was exactly the kind of answer a person gave when they had nothing to hide.

It was also exactly the kind of answer a person prepared.

She could not have explained the difference to anyone. She just felt it, the way you feel the temperature of a room change by one degree, too small to prove, too real to dismiss.

“Okay,” she said.

She went to the sitting room and found something to watch and did not think about Reena Salawu and the Abuja project for the rest of the evening.

She thought about it the moment she woke up the next morning.

She lay in the early light and ran the answer back through her mind. The surname. The project. The complaint about indecisiveness. She tested each part of it the way you press a bruise to confirm it is still there.

He answered before you finished asking.

That is not evidence of anything.

He answered before you finished asking.

She got up and made tea and stood at the kitchen window watching the street come alive below and thought about a woman called Reena who may or may not consult on the Abuja project and who had texted her fiancé at nine forty-five on a Wednesday evening to ask if they were still on for something.

Still on for something.

She did not tell Somto.

She did not tell anyone.

She carried it to work and carried it home again and set it down beside the growing collection of things she was not yet ready to examine properly.

To be continued…