Working Late

She did not plan to be in Onikan that afternoon.

The client meeting had moved at the last minute, a location change texted through at noon, and Nneka had rerouted without thinking much about it, following her Maps application through the Friday traffic with her presentation deck open on her laptop in the back seat and her mind on the feedback she expected from the creative director who had been resistant to the rebrand from the beginning.

The meeting ran long. It was after five when she came out of the building, loosening the structured energy she wore to client presentations the way you loosened a collar, letting herself become ordinary again in the evening air.

She was waiting for her driver to circle back when she saw the car.

Damilare’s car. The grey Camry with the small dent on the rear bumper he kept saying he would fix. Parked outside a restaurant she did not know the name of, a low-lit place with frosted glass windows and a discreet entrance, the kind of place designed to be unremarkable from the outside.

She stood on the pavement and looked at it.

Her driver called to say he was two minutes away.

She did not move.

The restaurant door opened. Damilare came out first, his jacket over one arm, his phone in his hand, and behind him a woman Nneka had never seen before. Tall. Natural hair. The particular ease of someone who was comfortable in her own presence. They were not touching. They were standing close in the way people stood close when touching had recently been a possibility.

Damilare said something. The woman laughed, tilting her head slightly, and Damilare smiled the smile Nneka knew, the real one, the one that reached his eyes.

Then he looked up.

He saw her.

The smile did not disappear immediately. It took a moment, which was worse than if it had disappeared immediately. It took a moment and then it was gone and his face arranged itself into something careful and she watched the arrangement happen from across the street in real time.

The woman noticed the change in him and turned to follow his gaze and saw Nneka on the pavement and her expression did not change at all, which told Nneka everything the expression was trying not to tell her.

Her driver pulled up.

She got in.

“Nneka.” Damilare’s voice behind her, crossing the street, his hand on the car door before she could close it. “It is not what…”

“My driver is here,” she said. Her voice was level. She was distantly amazed by how level it was. “I’ll see you at home.”

She closed the door.

She did not look back as the car pulled into traffic.

In the back seat she placed both hands flat on her thighs and looked straight ahead and breathed the way her body required her to breathe and did not cry, not because she was strong but because something inside her had gone very quiet and still, the specific stillness that arrived not when you were surprised but when something you already knew finally showed itself.

I knew, she thought. I have known for weeks.

She thought about the furniture showroom. The phone angled away. She thought about Reena Salawu and the Abuja project and the answer that was too complete and too immediate. She thought about nine forty-five on a Wednesday evening. Are we still on for…

She thought about the woman’s laugh. The tilt of her head. The way Damilare’s real smile had appeared for someone else in a restaurant Nneka had never been taken to.

She made dinner.

She did not know why she made dinner. Her hands needed something to do and the kitchen was there and so she made egusi soup with the stockfish she had been saving and set the table and sat down and waited.

Damilare came in at half past eight.

He stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at the table and looked at her and she could see him assembling something, choosing between versions of what to say.

“Sit down,” she said quietly. “Eat. We can talk after.”

He sat. He ate. She ate beside him and neither of them spoke and the soup was good, she noted distantly, the best egusi she had made in months, and she thought about how the body continued its competencies even when everything else was falling.

After dinner he tried to explain.

She listened. She let him speak until he ran out of words, which took longer than she expected because he was thorough, Damilare, he was always thorough, and even his explanation was complete and organised and accounted for everything except the part that mattered.

When he finished she looked at him across the table.

“Did you love her?” she asked.

He was quiet for a long time.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “I thought it was finished. I kept thinking it would finish.”

She nodded.

She got up and washed the dishes and went to bed and lay in the dark and felt, beneath the grief and the anger and the specific humiliation of having been right about something she desperately wanted to be wrong about, something else entirely.

Something that felt, and she hated herself for this, almost like relief.

To be continued…