I heard the question before I fully came back to the room.

The deck Khalid had asked me to prepare was still open in front of me. A half-finished slide. A cursor blinking with the patient indifference of something that has nowhere else to be, waiting for a version of me that still had energy to give it. I let the phone rest against my ear and did not answer immediately. For a moment I only sat there, feeling my name arrive from a stranger’s mouth — arrive and then settle in the air of the room like something borrowed, something that used to belong only to people who actually knew me and had quietly, over the past week, become the property of whoever wanted to say it.

Then I sighed. The sound carried more of the week in it than I meant to let out.

This had been my routine for seven days now. Wake. Work. Carry the quiet. Pretend the quiet was ordinary, that my chest wasn’t already tight from the moment my eyes opened, the tightness arriving before consciousness had fully assembled itself, before I’d remembered why.

One week since Bimbo’s video went live.

One week since my face began appearing on blogs I had never opened, shared by people I would never meet, my expression frozen mid-sentence in screenshots I had not given permission for. One week since my Instagram page went from fifteen thousand to over a hundred thousand followers, the numbers climbing so fast they stopped feeling like anything positive and started feeling like exposure — like a door someone kept propping open no matter how many times I tried to ease it shut. One week since I became a subject of discussion on Twitter and TikTok, passed around between strangers with opinions, until even I sometimes flinched when I heard myself spoken of in the third person, as if the Kikelomo they were debating and the one sitting in this room had quietly, without my noticing, become two different people.

I had told myself I would not look.

Then night would come. The house would settle into its own silence. My body would be tired enough for sleep and still my thumb would move — some compulsion stronger than my own resolve, reaching for the apps the way a person touches a bruise they already know is tender, pressing anyway, just to confirm the ache is still there. Just to see. Just to know which version of the story was winning tonight.

What I found would almost make me laugh.

Almost.

The laugh never quite arrived. It lodged somewhere behind my teeth, caught there, because some of the comments were so confidently wrong they had traveled all the way back into accidental comedy, and some of them had pressed on the exact tender places I thought I had already survived, finding the old bruise with unsettling accuracy, reminding me that a wound you have lived with long enough can sometimes feel like it no longer exists, right up until someone finds it.

A woman who went by @titikoya had made a TikTok about how gullible I was to let Bimbo take advantage of me. She said it brightly, with the ease of someone standing far from the wreckage, filming in what looked like a well-lit bedroom, entirely unbothered.

“This is why I tell people to shine their eyes. Just look at how she had to suffer because she was just plain stupid.”

Stupid.

I sat with that word and I could feel it trying to become mine again, trying to slip back into a place in my chest it had once lived comfortably for years. As if the years had not already asked me that question in private, at 3am, in the shower, in every unguarded moment when nobody else was watching. As if love, when it first arrived, came wearing a warning label I had simply refused to read, as if seventeen-year-old me should have known better than to trust the boy everyone else trusted too.

Another comment said: “Men are always the prize. I knew that Jaiye guy. He was quite popular then. Always knew there was something off about him.”

I stared at those words until they blurred, letters losing their shape. How convenient it was to become a prophet after the fire. How easy to say you saw it coming once the ashes were already public and safe to comment on.

Then a man who went by @kenechukwu110 posted: Let’s not turn this thing to gender war o. A woman was wronged by her best friend and her best friend has publicy come to redeem her image. Finito.

There was one blog post I kept returning to, even when I told myself I would stop, my thumb pulling the page back up almost against my own will. She had written:

I knew Kikelomo when we were in school but she didn’t know me because she was quite a popular young girl, then. You could tell from the way she comported herself that she was a sincere woman. Things started going down the hill for her when she fell in love with that Jaiye guy. I just wish there was something that could be done for all the years wasted.

I wanted to argue with her words, wanted to type out a reply and delete it three times before finally closing the app. I wanted to say that God does not waste years, that even the ugly ones are not empty, that I believed that, that I’d built a whole faith on believing that. But before theology could rise, grief did, faster and closer to the surface than I expected. My body remembered those years first, before my mind could catch up with reasons. The shrinking. The explanations rehearsed in mirrors. The way a name could enter a room ahead of you and sit down before you did, so that people had already decided who you were before you’d said a single word to them.

People I did not know were coming out to make videos. To testify for me. To speak about what they had perceived from the whole situation, each one adding their own layer to a story that had somehow stopped being mine to tell. Classmates. Former members of TWC. Faces from a life I had already tried to bury neatly under newer days, resurfacing one by one like something the ground refused to keep down.

“Mama Kike was so kind!”

“To be fair, if you knew PJay then, you’d probably had fallen for him too. I don’t blame her.”

“You guys are changing this narrative o. It was PJay who pursued Kike. Even when he knew Bimbo was a danger to her.”

“I’d always found it difficult to believe Kike was the one who scammed all those men.”

“Look at the Bimbo babe now suffering from kidney disease. It’s usually when they’re at the point of death they remember how terrible they’d been.”

“She deserves everything o! The bad, the worse, the ugly. Bimbo, ahhhh.”

Some of it warmed me, unexpectedly, catching me off guard each time. I did not expect that. Kindness from strangers had a way of undoing me more quickly than insult ever could, arriving somewhere softer and less defended. But some of it frightened me too. The hunger in it, sharp and eager. The way people reached for punishment as if cruelty could finish what justice had not, as if enough collective anger could somehow retroactively protect the girl I’d been. I carried both feelings and could not make them sit separately, could not sort my chest into neat rooms the way the comments themselves seemed to want the story sorted.

Then Daniel’s video surfaced.

Daniel, the boy Bimbo started moving with after I pulled myself out of her life. He sat in front of a camera and confessed how he knew about those scams Bimbo was running with my name. But he could not speak up because she held something over him, something she could use, his voice dropping at that part like even now the fear hadn’t fully left him. I watched his mouth shake around the truth and felt no triumph, no satisfaction at another piece of evidence sliding into place. Only a slow, sinking recognition. So I had not imagined the pattern. So this was how she moved through people, systematically, one leveraged secret at a time. The knowledge did not free me. It only made the past feel more real, more solid, less like something I might have exaggerated in my own memory over nine years of turning it over.

After that, the videos kept coming. Secondary school mates. People from her life after uni. One morning, then another, then another, each one arriving before I’d finished sitting with the last. At some point I lost count and stopped following. Every new day uncovered something else, and after a while I began to perceive that many of the stories were being stretched to feed the appetite around them, embellished just enough to travel further. The internet wanted a monster with no remainder, no complicating softness, and I could feel that hunger even when I closed the phone, even lying in the dark afterward.

There were nights I told myself I would finally watch Bimbo’s original video through. That I owed myself the whole thing. That I could bear it now, that enough time had passed, that I was stronger than the last attempt.

I never could.

Each time I pressed play, I only reached the beginning.

My name is Bimbo Akintunde, some of you know me as Bimbo Oguntunyi and this is how I ruined the life of my Uni best friend: Kikelomo Adeyemi.

My name in her mouth like that made something in me fold, quietly, completely, every single time, no matter how many times I told myself this attempt would be different. I would lock the phone and sit in the silence it left behind, breathing as if I had climbed a flight of stairs too fast, my heart working harder than the stillness of the room should have required.

Social media stayed loud for days. People turned her confession into challenges, jokes, soundtracks, my worst nine years compressed into fifteen-second clips set to trending audio. Her comment section had been muted, so no one could speak under the post itself, but the rest of the internet had not gone quiet. I read terrible things written about her and felt my stomach twist in a direction I did not want it to twist, an unwelcome ache on her behalf that I hadn’t asked for and couldn’t seem to refuse.

I know she hurt me.

But she is not beyond redemption.

I hated how true it felt, how stubbornly it sat there refusing to be argued away. It would have been easier to want her destroyed, easier to let the crowd finish what had started, to simply lean into the collective anger and let it carry me somewhere satisfying. Instead I sat with that unwilling mercy and felt it as grief more than virtue, a heaviness rather than a triumph. She had been my friend even though I’d never truly been hers. That fact had not been erased just because the friendship had been used against me, weaponized into something that had nearly cost me everything.

Then the takes changed shape.

Feminist Twitter found an angle and bit down. I must have been a man-pleaser not to notice that something was wrong with Jaiye. Church boys manipulated women and left them to carry the shame. I read those threads with my jaw locked, feeling myself harden into a lesson, into an example cited in arguments that had nothing to do with the actual texture of what I’d lived through. Soon the conversation was no longer about Bimbo, or Jaiye, or me, specifically, as people. It became about church. About fellowships. About pulpits and purity and every old wound waiting for a place to land, my story simply the latest surface for it all to be relitigated on.

That was when I knew I could not stay there anymore.

I deleted the accounts one after the other. Password. Confirmation. The small ritual of disappearing from rooms that had never asked if I wanted to be discussed in them, each deletion its own small relief. When I was done, the silence in my phone felt almost physical, like a house after too many voices have finally gone, the echo of them still hanging faintly in the air even after the last one leaves.

Then I turned toward God, because there was nowhere else left worth turning.

These people do not know You, I told the Lord one morning during devotion, my forehead bowed over my hands, the words arriving low and unhurried. If they did, they would understand that all of this was toward Your ultimate purpose. If they knew how hard You tried to save me from this, they would swallow their words in shame. If they had a single idea of how You still turned the mistake I made into a beautiful story, they would wonder at Your person.

I did not rush the prayer, letting each sentence finish itself before reaching for the next.

I know the enemy tries to hijack every situation to raise a railing accusation against You and Your body. I know they want to use this as an opportunity to say, See? That is why the church is not safe. But if only they knew that the safest people I have met are Your children. Men. Women. Pruned by You. If only they knew how safe You are.

I spent the next few days speaking to Him at every spare seam of the day. In the kitchen, hands moving through dishes while my mouth moved through prayer. In traffic, forehead nearly resting against the wheel at red lights. In the thin minutes before sleep, when my defenses were too tired to hold anything back. Sometimes I had language, whole sentences arriving fully formed. Sometimes I only sat and let Him see the ache I could not arrange into anything prettier than it was, offering it up exactly as raw as I’d found it.

On Thursday night, four days after the video was released, I was in devotion when the question came from that deep place where God’s voice does not shout and still leaves no room to pretend I have not heard.

Kikelomo, will you obey me?

My lips parted before the rest of me had caught up.

“Yes, Lord,” I muttered, the words small with reverence, automatic in the way only practiced surrender could make them. “I’ll do Your bidding.”

Let go of your fight.

My eyes widened on their own, my whole body going still. “What?”

I said: let go of your fight.

The room did not change. The lamp was still on. The page was still open. But something in my chest lurched, as if the floor had shifted one quiet inch beneath me — imperceptible to anyone watching, entirely real to whoever was standing on it.

This was not what I had come expecting.

I had come ready for comfort. For confirmation. For a scripture to steady my hands around the fight already in motion, a word of assurance that I was on the right road and should keep walking. I had not come ready to be asked to open my hands.

I knew I was in no position to negotiate the instruction. I had said yes before I knew what the yes would cost. That was always how it worked, that was the nature of the surrender I had been choosing for years. But this. This particular yes. After everything it had taken to get here. After the years, and the papers, and Mr. Banks, and the hospital, and the moment I had stood in front of Bimbo and held the line.

I sat very still, as if stillness might make the words rearrange themselves into something more convenient. Might let me discover I had misheard.

“Lord.” I heard my voice begin to break around the edges of itself. “I’ve spent years trying to restore what I lost in the course of this. I’m on the verge of a breakthrough, and You’re asking me to stop fighting?”

The tears came immediately. The kind that heat the face and make the throat too narrow to breathe through properly, arriving without warning between the thought and the feeling. A constriction settled in my heart — tight, familiar, an old visitor I recognized at once. The ancient panic of a woman who has finally crawled close to the edge of vindication, only to be asked to step back from it.

Why let me pursue everything to this point? Why let me gather hope and papers and witnesses and the thin bright possibility of a courtroom that would say — finally, officially, on the record — that I was not what they called me? Only to reach the apex and be told to put it down?

What then? Do I keep living in the shadow of what she did? Do I watch people build their jokes and their sermons on the ruins of my name and call that obedience? Call that the good and perfect will of a God who was supposed to love me enough to intervene?

“Why do You want me to let go, Lord?” The tears were dropping onto my hands now, warm against my knuckles, and I did not try to stop them. “I’ve been the one suffering. I’ve been the one taking the brunt. I came to You before going on this path. You confirmed it. You said to go. And now — now that I’m almost there — You’re asking me to let go?”

I stayed in it. The whole ugly shape of the grief, the whole trembling confusion of it, every question I had not known I was still holding until this moment cracked them all open at once. I did not try to make it beautiful or presentable. I let it sit between us exactly as raw as I had found it, offering it up that way, because I had nothing left to dress it in.

Do you trust me, Kikelomo?

The second question arrived softer than the first. Quieter. And somehow that quietness undid me faster than the command had.

“You know I do.” The sobs came hard enough that the words broke apart in the middle. “I do. I do.”

Then allow me to fight for you.

I folded forward.

My whole body gave way to the weight of it — forward, hands finding the floor, forehead not far behind, the posture of a person who has run out of ways to hold themselves upright and finally, finally, stops trying. I wept on God’s shoulder like a child being told she cannot keep the thing she has been clutching with both hands, fingers cramped from the holding.

I told Him it was difficult. I told Him I wanted the court. I wanted to watch Bimbo be required to say the words in front of a judge, under oath, with a record attached to it. I wanted the clean ending, the public clearing, the moment when the story would stop being something that could still bite. I told Him I was afraid that letting go would look like agreeing I had never been wronged. Like handing the internet’s cruelest comments a small quiet victory they had not earned.

And still, beneath all of it, something older remained. Steadier than the grief. Steadier than the fear. Outlasting both of them, as it had always outlasted them.

Obeying Him was my ultimate desire. Not the clearing. Not the court. Not the vindication I had spent years constructing in my imagination. Him. Doing what He asked. Becoming what He intended.

It did not make the grief smaller. It only kept me from rising and walking out of the room with my own plan still clenched in my fist.

Just before I stood up to face the rest of the day, a scripture dropped quietly into my heart.

And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.

I knew it was the Holy Ghost laying something under the spoken word, something firm enough to stand on. I did not suddenly feel light. I did not feel the peace that was supposed to pass all understanding arrive with a rush and fill every empty space. I only felt something solid enough to hold onto — a rope thrown into water I was still very much treading. And since I did not know what else to do, I decided I would hold on to the efficacy of that word, whether or not the feeling ever fully caught up to the choosing.

When Nosa and I met in the evening, I did not ease into it. I sat across from him with the day still sitting heavily on my skin, no energy left for a gentle preamble.

“I’m going to drop the case,” I said. “Bimbo’s case, babe.”

He stared at me. Confusion came first, unguarded, almost boyish in its honesty, his brow furrowing before he’d even processed the full sentence.

“I don’t understand. You’re going to let it go?”

I looked away. The light in the room felt too honest, too exposing. I needed a second to gather myself, and even that second was not enough. When I looked back at him, the tears I thought I had already spent found me again, arriving without permission.

“The Lord asked me to.” My voice broke around the rest. “He said… He said to stop trying to clear my name.”

Nosa did not speak immediately. He let the silence hold for a long moment, watching me, letting me see him actually take it in rather than rushing to a reaction. When he finally spoke, his voice came low. Careful. The voice of a man who has walked something all the way through himself before bringing it to someone else.

“Sometimes we think the instructions of God are grievous because we cannot see the full picture.” He paused, letting the phrase settle before continuing. “We have a limited view. Everything we hold — the case, the court, the moment in front of a judge — we hold it from one side of the story. He sees the end from the beginning. And when He speaks from that place, what He asks can feel too hard, because we’re measuring it against what we can see, and what He’s asking us to trust is everything we can’t.”

His eyes stayed on mine. Not looking away. Not letting me look away either.

“But we have evidence, Kikelomo. We have so much evidence of His wisdom in handling your life specifically. The things that were supposed to destroy you that didn’t. The places He showed up when you had stopped expecting Him. If we can hold all of that…” his voice dipped, “then I think we can trust Him with this. Even when it costs us something we had already started to count on.”

He breathed in slowly, and I heard in it that this was costing him too. That he was not handing me a tidy answer from somewhere comfortable outside the ache. That the man sitting across from me had wanted that court case too, and was choosing to set it down alongside with me.

“I know you want the court case that says once and for all who you are. I want it too — I want it because of the future in front of us. But if He is asking us to let go…” he reached across and found my hand, “then let’s leave it with Him. Let’s not step in front of what He’s already decided to handle Himself.”

I cried. Quietly, this time. Something in me finally given permission to exhale — not because the decision had become easy, but because I had needed someone to stand inside the hard thing with me. Not to explain it into something smaller. Not to make God sound more convenient. Just to be there, inside the same difficulty, choosing the same obedience, not ahead of me.

By Friday, Pastor Efua came.

She sat across from me with the calm of someone who has spent enough years in the Spirit that she has learned to carry what she receives without dropping it.

“I have a strong impression, Kikelomo. The Lord asked me to tell you that this is no longer your battle to fight.”

Pastor Dimeji nodded, corroborating her without ornament, no elaboration added, as though the simplicity of it was itself part of the confirmation.

“Kikelomo, the Lord loses the battle to win the war.”

After they left, I sat with those words longer than I sat with most comfort, turning them slowly, feeling for their edges. They did not erase the ache. They did not give me a map for what came next. They only confirmed what I had already heard in the dark, when there had been no pastors and no audience and no one to make obedience look noble or easy, just me, alone, on the floor of my own room, arguing with God and eventually running out of arguments.

That night, after the house had settled and the last of the day’s noise had thinned into stillness, I knew exactly what I was going to do.

Not because I felt ready.

Because I had been met. Because I had been told. Because I had wept my way to the edge of my own understanding, and found, on the other side of it, something steadier waiting for me than the fight I’d been so desperate to keep.

And there, with my hands finally beginning to loosen, one finger at a time, I chose to obey.

^{Kikelomo Adeyemi.}

^@thekikeade

^{Sept 5th 2025. 6:00am,}

^{Life, in its entirety, is a school of learning. And we are, at every single stage of it, students. Being a student means being designed for study. So every experience becomes a lesson. Every encounter, a subject. Every relationship, whether it stayed or left, a course we were enrolled in whether we chose it or not.}

^{The stories that have gone out about me these past weeks were a season of tedious, rigorous classwork. A room I sat in for far longer than I would have chosen, if choosing had been mine to do. But I have graduated from it now because I have finally come into an understanding of the entire curriculum. I know now what the lesson was for. I did not always know that while I was still sitting in it.}

^{Bimbo and Pastor Jay were also students, tending toward a purpose the way we all are, selfishly or unselfishly, most of us not even fully aware of which. And because life placed us in the same classroom, at the same hour, our purposes jammed against each other. And what happened, happened. I am not writing this to explain it away. I am writing it because I have finally stopped needing it explained.}

^{I have forgiven them. Both of them. I have no reason left not to. I am at peace with God, and that peace did not arrive cheaply — I want to be honest about that, for anyone reading this who is still somewhere in their own classroom, still waiting for the lesson to make sense.}

^{I love the Body of Christ. I love the brethren of Jesus, imperfect as we all are inside it. Because for what essence should a man live, holding every hurt done to him across an entire lifetime, turning each one over and over until his hands have forgotten how to hold anything else? What a sad, sad life that would amount to. And I have lived sadly enough already. I do not intend to keep living that way.}

^{If our heavenly Father can, on a daily basis, bear the weight of our infirmities — can look upon every one of our failures without disdain for our person — how much more should a mere man like me, who has received what I can only call mercy, extend the same?}

^{I have seen the posts. I have read some of what you had to say about me, about Abimbola, about Pastor Jay. Some of it stung more than I expected it to, if I’m honest — words have a way of finding the exact bruise you thought had already healed. But it’s alright to think you would have done differently in my position. If we all acted the same, if every human being moved and thought and behaved identically, we would not have a population of men at all. We would have successfully created a tumor: something that only multiplies itself, with no capacity to become anything else.}

^{The church of God did not hurt me. Jesus boys did not hurt me. Even Bimbo, as strange as this may sound coming from the person who bled the most in this story, did not hurt me — not at the root of it. The one who was truly after my hurt is the adversary, Satan. And the people you’ve spent this past week blaming were merely tools taken advantage of, the same way any of us can be taken advantage of in a moment of carelessness. To call Pastor Jay evil for what happened would mean casting the same judgment on Peter for withdrawing from the Gentiles the moment he saw the Jews arrive. In both cases, you have men trying to protect their own reputation at someone else’s expense. The only real difference between the two stories is the output — and the output, admittedly, cost me years.}

^{And for Bimbo; I still love her. I need you to understand that this is not a performative sentence, something written to sound gracious for an audience. It is, in fact, true, and it does something to me every time I say it out loud. My heart breaks to see the woman I once ate with, suffered with, laughed until we couldn’t breathe with, cried with, now bound to a hospital bed by a sickness that is slowly, quietly destroying her from the inside. I love and pray for her according to the instruction of our Lord Jesus: love those who hate you, do good to those who persecute you. My ideologies may seem strange to you, maybe even foolish. But I live by the teachings of Jesus, teachings that have recalibrated my mind far beyond the pain I once carried, and are still recalibrating it, even now, even while I write this.}

^{I hold nothing against Bimbo, Pastor Jay, or TWC anymore. Not a single thing. And I wish them all the very best in every endeavor left to them. The church of God remains an institution of learning I am proud, unashamedly proud, to still be a part of. Most of all, my Lord and personal Savior Jesus remains a man I am in complete awe of — the only one, honestly, whose opinion of this whole story I’ve ever really needed. And I hope, beyond all the noise still circling this post, that everyone reading it sees Him. That they come to know Him the way I have. That they live in the blessedness of His life, the same blessedness I am standing in as I write these final words, still a little tired, still a little healed, both at once.}

^{I have nothing more to say on this matter.}

^{Kikelomo Adeyemi.}

^{A woman helped by God.}

“Hellooo, am I on to Kikelomo Adeyemi?”

The voice came again, warmer this time, stretched a little, as if the person on the other end had already decided I was there and was only waiting for me to admit it. It carried an ease I couldn’t quite place, unhurried in a way most of the calls I’d been fielding these past weeks had not been.

I stared at the blinking cursor on Khalid’s deck and felt my stomach tighten, some old defensive instinct rising fast. News blogs had been circling for days, patient and relentless in equal measure. People who wanted a sentence they could turn into a headline.

“Yes,” I said at last, carefully, bracing myself for whatever came next. “This is her.”

“This is the Oba. Nosakhare’s father.”

For a second, the words did not land as words. They landed as heat, a flush moving up through my chest before my mind had even finished processing what my ears had heard.

My eyes widened on their own. I almost came off the chair, one hand flying out to grip the desk for balance I didn’t actually need. Nosa’s father. Calling me. Directly. The thought arrived in pieces, too large to hold at once, each fragment demanding its own moment of disbelief. Was this not against some kind of tradition? Did kings just… call? Like this? In the middle of an ordinary afternoon, while I was still mid-slide and mid-breath and mid-trying, desperately, to remain a normal person in a normal office chair?

My chest gave one hard thump, then another, loud enough I half expected Khalid to hear it through the cubicle wall. I felt the phone go slightly slippery in my hand, my palm suddenly damp. For a foolish, panicked second I wondered if it was a scam. If someone had found my name, found Nosa’s name, stitched the two together, and decided to make a joke out of both at my expense.

“Hello, are you there?”

I sat up so quickly my spine protested, a small twinge shooting up my back that I barely registered.

I did not know what to do with my body. Was I supposed to kneel, even over the phone, some absurd instinct suggested? Stand? Bow my head to a voice traveling through a network tower somewhere? How had he even gotten my number? Was this some elaborate prank Nosa would later laugh about while I died a small, private death in this office chair, replaying every word I’d said?

“I’m here, sir,” I said, and heard the nervousness sit plainly in my throat, thick and obvious. I tried to swallow it. It did not go anywhere. “Good afternoon, Oba. It’s quite a pleasure to hear from you.”

“I’ve been meaning to call you since Nosa spoke to me some weeks ago. Forgive me for not calling earlier.”

Forgive.

The word snagged, catching somewhere unexpected.

A whole king of Benin Kingdom, asking me — me — to forgive him.

I sat very still, as if movement might wake me from whatever this was, might dissolve the whole improbable moment. Someone needed to wake me. This could not be happening in the same room where I had been sighing over a deck two minutes ago, wrestling with a half-finished slide that suddenly felt like it belonged to a different life entirely.

“I hold no offence, sir,” I said, the sentences tumbling out too quickly, one on top of the other, no room between them to breathe properly. “In fact, I’m quite pleased to hear from you.”

I had no idea if I was doing this well. This was new ground, uncharted in every direction. There was no rehearsal for speaking to a king while your heart was trying, quite literally, to climb out of your chest and make a run for the door.

I heard the smile in his voice before I heard the next words. Something easy. Alive. I found myself thinking, almost helplessly, that he must be a lovely man, that Nosa’s warmth clearly hadn’t come from nowhere. The kind of warmth that did not need to announce itself, that simply arrived and made you feel, without quite knowing why, that you were already welcome.

“Thank you for that. I hope you haven’t been too overwhelmed with everything going on? I hear social media can be quite brutal.”

A small laugh escaped me before I could arrange it into anything more dignified, surprised out of me by the ordinariness of the concern.

“So far, I’ve been holding up quite well.” I paused, because the truer sentence was still sitting behind that one, and something about his easiness made me want to actually say it. “I just can’t wait for the whole drama to be over, sir. Honestly.”

“It will be.”

He said it so calmly. So naturally. As though we had known each other for years and he was only reminding me of something I had misplaced somewhere along the way. Then I remembered he was a king. Relating with people was not guesswork for him. It was a skill worn smooth by decades of use, a tool he handled without ever seeming to reach for it deliberately.

“My son, Nosa. He speaks highly of you.” A brief quiet, as if he were choosing the next line with care, weighing it before releasing it into the air between us. “And that young man is quite an intelligent man. If he says you’re all you are, then I believe him.”

Heat climbed into my cheeks at once, spreading fast enough that I was grateful, absurdly, that this was a phone call and not a video one.

I looked down at my own lap like a girl who had been caught being seen, though there was no one in the room but me and a stubbornly unfinished PowerPoint slide.

“Thank you, sir.”

“I just wanted to reassure you,” he continued, “and to let you know that we all can’t wait to receive you here.”

My smile came so suddenly it almost hurt, stretching wider than my face seemed prepared for. He spoke like an older Nigerian version of Nosa. The same unhurried certainty. The same way of making a sentence feel like a place you could sit down and rest in for a while. I had to hold myself back from making any sound that would betray how young the joy in me still was, how close it was sitting to the surface.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Nosa said you want to restore your name. That’s good.” He let that settle for a beat, then went on, almost conversational, like he was suggesting where to have lunch rather than reshaping my entire future in a single sentence. “The easier recourse will be to marry my son. Once you’re bearing his name, no one will bat an eye at you twice. All they need to hear is Eghosa and all the doors that need to open, will open. Or what do you propose, dear one?”

The office around me thinned, sound and light both narrowing down to just his voice.

Marry my son.

He had said it the way other men discussed football. No disapproval. No careful distance from the drama attached to my name, no hesitation dressed up as diplomacy. Just that. As if I were not a complication to be managed. As if I were a future he had already, quietly, begun to make room for at his own table.

I blushed so hard I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from doing something unroyal and ridiculous, some undignified squeal threatening at the back of my throat.

“Agreed, sir,” I said, when I trusted my voice again, steadying it before I let it out. “That sounds like a better option.”

His laugh came then, pleased, warm and full through the speaker.

“I like you. You have a great sense of humor.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He hummed, a low considering sound, and then:

“My wife, Nosa’s stepmom, is here. She would love to speak with you too.”

I blinked at the empty space in front of me, my brain scrambling to keep pace.

Okay.

What exactly was going on?

What had Nosa said to these people? How much of me had he carried into rooms I had never entered, into conversations I hadn’t been present for, building me a reputation I was only now discovering existed?

“Hi, Kikelomo.”

Her voice was different from his. Sophisticated. Measured, each word placed with precision. The cadence of it did something to the air, drawing it tighter, more attentive. There was no other word for it. It sounded like royalty had learned how to greet you without ever raising its voice, without needing to.

“Hello, ma,” I muttered. “It’s nice to hear from you.”

“Of course.” A small pause, deliberate. “Nosa speaks about you quite a lot with his father. I’m sure he barely mentions me.”

Blunt.

I gave her that immediately, some part of me almost relieved by the directness after so much careful softness. There was no softness used as disguise here. And it was true. Nosa barely mentioned his stepmom. Once I had asked, carefully, testing the water, and he had said he held no animosity toward her. They just did not have that kind of relationship. The sentence had been simple. It had also been a door he did not open farther, and I hadn’t pushed.

I felt the danger of the moment and still chose not to lie, some instinct telling me this woman would know a lie the moment it left my mouth.

“He speaks about you, ma,” I said. “But not quite as much as the king.”

There was a beat, silence stretching just long enough to make my stomach drop slightly.

Then she laughed.

“You’re honest.”

Even her laughter sounded expensive. Sure of itself, the laugh of a woman who had long since stopped needing anyone’s approval to enjoy something.

“I think we’ll make good friends.”

Something in me loosened at that, surprising and cautious at once, a small, tentative relief settling somewhere in my chest.

“Yes, ma. It’s a delight to speak with you both. And thank you for your encouragement.”

“Hm.” I could hear the smile in her voice too, faint but present. “We can’t wait to have you in Edo soon. Please take care of yourself. And if you can, avoid social media. That’s how I’m able to keep a precise mind.”

A laugh slipped out of me, helpless and grateful, genuine relief threading through it.

“Alright, ma. All points duly noted.”

“Do take care of yourself, Kikelomo. You’re a strong woman, and it was a pleasure speaking with you.”

The words landed warmer than I expected, settling somewhere deep. Strong. I held them for a second longer than the conversation required, turning them over privately before letting the moment continue.

I thanked her again, meaning it fully. The king came back on the line just long enough to say goodbye, warm and unhurried to the very last word, and then the call ended.

I lowered the phone slowly, staring at the dark screen as though it might explain itself.

The office returned in pieces, sound and color seeping back in. The glow of the laptop. The unfinished slide, cursor still patiently blinking. The ordinary afternoon I had been sitting in before a kingdom entered it, uninvited and entirely welcome.

I sat in the silence for approximately thirty seconds, not trusting myself to move yet.

What had just happened?

Had I just spoken with the Oba of Benin? Just like that? From this chair? In this body, this exact ordinary Tuesday body? With this name that the internet was still chewing over, still passing around like something that belonged to everyone but me?

And he had hinted at marriage.

Not with disapproval or that careful royal distance I had feared without even knowing, until this exact moment, that I had been fearing it. He had spoken as if the drama around me was weather, and weather passed, eventually, the way it always does, and I was still someone they were waiting to receive on the other side of it, umbrella already prepared.

I stood, legs slightly unsteady beneath me.

Scanned the office.

Listened for footsteps, for a shadow at the edge of the cubicles, for anyone who might turn the corner and find me looking like a woman who had just been rewritten from the inside, every internal furniture rearranged in the space of a single phone call.

When I was sure the coast was clear, I finally did the thing I had been holding back from the moment the Oba said my name as if it belonged in his mouth without shame.

I covered my mouth.

And I squealed.

Author’s Note: Thank you everyone for reading up until this point. Bimbo’s chapter is finally over. Or would I say… almost? Anyone who wants to guess how God will fight for Kike? 😊

Catch Up On Previous Episode Here.

Kikelomo stood a short distance from the hospital entrance with Mr. Bankole.

From where Nosa sat, he could not hear them. He did not need to. He watched the small things instead: the way she kept one arm folded across her middle, a posture he had come to recognize from every difficult conversation she had ever had to stand her way through. The way her gaze kept leaving the lawyer’s face to travel the lot, the hospital doors, the row of cars baking in the sun, as though some part of her was still braced for an exit route that had not fully closed. She was listening. She was also still on guard, her whole body holding the tension of the last hour, unwilling yet to release it.

Mr. Banks spoke with the unhurried patience of a man practiced at delivering difficult news in impractical places, his voice too far away to carry but his cadence readable even from this distance. Every so often he gestured with the folder. Kikelomo nodded, but the nod came a beat late, as if her mind had to travel back from somewhere else before it could engage with the present.

Nosa let himself stay there a little longer. She was still processing, and whatever she was processing deserved to happen without him hovering at the edge of it.

Only a short while ago, in the cooler dimness of the hospital corridor, he had pulled her into him. He remembered the exact weight of her against his chest — the faint hospital smell still caught in her hair, the way her shoulders had not immediately softened, had taken a full ten seconds longer than usual to finally give way. He had held her because she had just stood in that ward and refused to be moved, and he had needed her to feel, in a physical and unmistakable way, that he had seen it. He had heard the stories about Bimbo — Adanna’s careful retellings, Kike’s own halting confessions — but seeing the performance in the flesh had been different. Sharper. Uglier at close range.

Bimbo’s voice had arrived already sweetened, every tremor calibrated for maximum effect, the practiced quality underneath the genuine suffering operating simultaneously, both things somehow true at once. He had recognized the coating immediately. He had also known better than to step in, to let his own concern fill a room that needed to belong to Kikelomo. He had trusted her to find her way through it. He had watched her do exactly that.

Still, the memory of that room sat in him now like heat the AC could not quite reach. Lodged somewhere the vents didn’t blow.

His phone vibrated in the cup holder, hard enough to rattle against the plastic. He glanced down, saw Tife’s name, and let it ring once more before answering. When he picked up he kept his eyes on Kikelomo, unwilling to lose sight of her even mid-conversation.

“Hi, bro.”

Oreoluwa’s voice arrived first — not words, just the bright, tumbling sound babies make when the world has their complete and delighted attention, a small burst of pure uncomplicated joy that carried clean through the speaker and filled the car for exactly one second. Something in Nosa’s chest loosened at the sound of it, a tightness he had not fully registered until it released.

“You home?” he asked.

“Yeah.” Tife sounded slightly out of breath in the familiar way, the juggling-the-baby-while-talking cadence Nosa could picture without needing to see it. “Ore and I are having boys’ time. Adanna is out.”

Nosa’s mouth curved despite itself. “You chose today. The one afternoon I’m not there to have boys’ time. I find that suspicious.”

“Jealousy really doesn’t look good on you.” A rustle, then the soft thud of something plastic hitting the floor, followed by a brief cheer from the baby. “You’re coming back to this same house. He will still be here.”

“He likes me more.”

“He likes whoever is offering sweet things.” A pause, warmth threading through the amusement. “But he didn’t cry when I picked him up today, so I’m counting it as a win.”

Nosa was smiling now, genuinely, the expression sitting strangely against the tightness still lodged in his shoulders — a small relief carved out of an otherwise heavy afternoon, the particular comfort of a friendship that could make room for this even now. Outside, Mr. Bankole shifted the folder from one hand to the other. Kikelomo tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and looked toward the car for the first time, as though she had felt him watching. Some thread between them, invisible and reliable.

Tife’s tone changed. The teasing thinned and something more careful moved in underneath.

“So. How did it go?”

Nosa did not answer immediately. He watched Kikelomo turn back to the lawyer, then let out a breath that fogged the lower edge of the windshield.

“She agreed.”

“She agreed?”

“Yeah.” A pause. “Although she tried to manipulate Kike again.” He shook his head slowly. “Thank God Kike saw it before it worked. And it would have worked, Tife. On someone less prepared — it would have worked completely.”

The quiet on the other end had a quality to it. Oreoluwa’s small chatter continued in the background, entirely unbothered by the weight of the adult conversation around him, a small ongoing proof that the world contained things untouched by all of this.

“I kept hoping,” Tife said, and then stopped. The sentence stayed unfinished. “I don’t know what I expected. That sickness might do what nothing else could. That some version of her might have softened.”

“She hasn’t.” Nosa rubbed his thumb along the stitching of the steering wheel, a small repetitive motion he was not fully conscious of. “If anything — she’s sharper. The layers are more refined. The body is failing but the instincts are intact, maybe more intact than they should be. If she weren’t lying in that bed, I genuinely don’t know what she’d still be capable of.”

The floor creaked on Tife’s end. The baby’s sounds shifted as he was moved, a small contented sigh audible even through the phone.

“We’ve raised almost everything for her transplant,” Tife said, the practical part of his mind surfacing. “We are almost there. We need her strong enough for the law to actually meet her standing up.”

“Tell me what’s still needed.” Something settled in Nosa’s voice as he said it. “I want the surgery done quickly. With the best hands available. I don’t want cost to be the reason for any delay.”

Outside, a nurse pushed an empty wheelchair across the lot and disappeared through the side entrance.

“She wants to die, Tife.” The words arrived heavier than he expected them to, sitting in the cooled air of the car with a weight that did not dissipate. “Because death looks like the easier exit for her.”

Tife was quiet. Several seconds of silence that said he was sitting with it properly, not rushing toward reassurance.

“What kind of heart is that?”

“I don’t know.” Nosa’s eyes found Kikelomo again, steady, watchful. Her free hand was closed into a loose fist at her side, the tension still in her even from this distance. “I don’t know how a person arrives at that point. But I can see how much it’s affecting Kikelomo. And my spirit is telling me to pray. Not just for Bimbo’s body. For the direction she’s moving in. That woman has lost her fear, Tife. Completely. And that is a more dangerous condition than the kidney.”

“Is it that bad in your spirit?”

“It is.” A short exhale. “I’m going to pray. Tonight. Her body first, then whatever is happening underneath it. She’s frail — she looks considerably older than she should — but the gimmicks are intact and she knows exactly how to use them. A failing body and an unrepentant spirit is a combination I don’t know how to be comfortable with.”

Oreoluwa made a sudden loud, delighted sound on the other end — something had apparently just become very interesting — and Tife murmured something off-phone, his voice muffled, before returning with some of the earlier lightness back.

“Sorry. He has discovered the remote again. This is a recurring battle.”

Nosa found himself smiling despite everything, the warmth of it genuine even against the weight of the afternoon.

“What’s the plan from here?” Tife asked.

“I spoke with the matron before we left.” Nosa watched Mr. Bankole close the folder with a quiet, decisive snap visible even from this distance. “We move her to a private ward today. Mr. Banks want her monitored.”

“Good.”

“Tomorrow, He is also sending someone to record the confession videos. He won’t leave her to do it alone — after what happened in that room, I wouldn’t trust her alone with a camera and a story she can still edit.”

“And then it goes out?”

“Eventually.” A pause. “Tife, I’m concerned about Kikelomo. She’s already been through enough. This is going to put attention on her whether she wants it or not.”

“It will,” Tife agreed. “But it’s the right kind of attention, bro. The kind that corrects a record. She might get pulled in several directions — media invitations, interviews, things she’ll have to decide about one by one. But we control the spine of it. BBC can come in months later, after the noise, when it can be told properly. ”

“Yeah.” A breath. “You’re right.”

A silence settled, longer this time, the comfortable kind. The baby had gone quieter, as if he too had picked up on the change in register.

“Are you thinking about your father?” Tife asked. Gently, but directly.

Nosa tipped his head back against the headrest. The ceiling of the car was a dull, unremarkable grey, and he stayed there for a moment, eyes unfocused on it, before looking back out at the lot.

“He likes her.” The words came out quieter than the rest, carrying something more interior. “He doesn’t say it directly but I know. He asks about her in every call, even the short ones. I think he’s doing what my mother would have done if she were still here.” His throat tightened briefly around the thought. “I just don’t want him hearing about this and drawing the wrong conclusions. I don’t want him thinking there’s too much noise around her. That she’s someone whose life brings this kind of thing with it.”

“Your concern is valid.” Tife’s voice carried the weight of someone who had thought this through already, possibly on Nosa’s behalf before Nosa had thought to ask. “Pray about it on the way home. Then call him and give him the necessary shape of it. Not every detail. Just enough that he hears it from you first.” A beat. “You don’t want him piecing it together from someone else.”

Nosa closed his eyes briefly. Letting it settle. “Alright.”

“You’ll be fine, bro.”

“Thank you.”

“Is she with you yet?”

Nosa opened his eyes. Kikelomo and Mr. Bankole had turned and were walking toward the car now, unhurried, their conversation apparently winding to its close. Their shadows stretched longer than they had a few minutes ago, the sun finally beginning to relent, the afternoon light losing its sharpest edge and softening toward something more bearable.

“She’s coming now.”

“I’ll call her later,” Tife said, decisive. “I want her to hear it from me that she did well today.”

Something settled in Nosa’s chest — simple and clean and grateful. “She’d appreciate that. I would too.”

“See you both soon.”

The line went quiet.

Nosa lowered the phone but did not immediately set it down, turning it over once in his hand. He sat in the hum of the AC and watched the two figures grow clearer through the windshield — Kikelomo first, then the lawyer beside her — while the afternoon, at last, began its lean toward evening. The worst of the heat and the worst of the day both, finally, starting to pass.

Joshua was still talking when the key turned in the lock.

Kuye’s first thought was not her name. It was the small, stupid relief of a sound he had been listening for without admitting he was listening — a relief that arrived a full half-second before his brain caught up to it and reclassified it as something considerably more complicated. Then the door opened, and relief became something less convenient entirely.

“Yes, Joshua. She just came in now.”

He kept his voice down. Not a whisper — low enough that it belonged to the phone and not the room, a careful modulation he had not consciously decided on. His eyes, independently and without his permission, went to her immediately.

Timehin came in the way a person came in when they hoped the house would not look back. Shoulder first, the door eased shut with more care than the door needed, each motion quiet and deliberate, as if loudness itself might summon something she wasn’t ready for. She stayed facing the wood for a moment, one hand still on the handle, and Kuye watched the line of her back and noticed, without meaning to notice, that her shoulders were sitting lower than they usually did — lower than the bright, upright posture she wore like a default setting, the one that made her seem like she was always about to stride toward something.

A week, and he had forgotten the exact shape of her when she was tired.

That fact alone unsettled him more than he was prepared to examine.

“Alright, Kuye. Thank you. Tell her to call me — she hasn’t been picking up.”

Joshua sounded concerned, on the other end. But it was simple concern, the kind with a clean shape: call the girl, hear her voice, hang up. Nothing tangled underneath it. Nothing that had spent the last week doing what Kuye’s version of concern had been doing — complicating every quiet moment, occupying space it had not been invited into.

He ended the call before the silence after it could ask him anything.

She had not looked at him.

A week of this. Seven days of living in the same house and treating the rooms like enemy territory she was obligated to move through but not occupy. Late in. Early out. The dining table unused — her chair conspicuously empty at every meal, its absence more present than most presences. He had noticed, which was the first problem. The second problem was how much he had noticed.

He used to tell himself he was only registering the quiet. Houses went quiet. People got busy. He was a man who found explanations, had built an entire professional life on the capacity for finding reasonable ones. But reason did not account for the evenings he had stood in the passage and heard her laugh with Kike through a closed bedroom door. That laugh had done something unhelpful to him — something that had no clean file to put it in, that made the door look thinner than it was, that had, on one occasion, caused his hand to rise without his permission, knuckles ready, before he caught himself standing in the corridor like a man interrupted in the act of something he hadn’t finished deciding to do.

Knock and ask what was funny? And then stand in her room and confess that he had been starving for the sound of her, that the quiet she left behind when she moved through the house without stopping had become a kind of noise he couldn’t turn down?

He had walked back to his room. Sat on the edge of his bed. Stared at his hands. Thought: this is not who you are.

He was a man who put feelings in order. Named them. Filed them where they belonged and closed the drawer. Did not let them wander the house at night looking for someone.

Three days ago he had turned a corner and nearly walked into her. She had looked up. Seen him. And her whole body had done something — a flinch too small to prove, too fast to argue with, but real, he had seen it — before she went past him as if he were smoke. As if staying in the same air might cost her something she couldn’t currently spare.

He had stood in that corridor afterward and tried to locate the word for what it felt like to be treated as repellent. Had not found one. Had spent the rest of the evening in the specific discomfort of a man who prided himself on having words for things.

She made a sound in his direction now — two syllables that might have been good evening if he chose to be generous with the interpretation — and started toward the hallway.

“Timehin.”

Her name left him before caution could intervene.

She stopped. The bag strap slid half an inch down her shoulder. She turned only as far as politeness technically required, not a degree further.

Her face gave him nothing. Not anger, not surprise — a careful, practiced nothing. A wall painted the color of a wall.

“Yeah?”

He looked away first — to the floor, to the wall — then forced himself back to her eyes, making himself hold them even though it cost him something he couldn’t quite name.

“Your phone. Joshua said he hasn’t been able to reach you all afternoon.”

He didn’t add the rest. That he had called her too, twice, letting it ring each time without leaving a message because what would he have said? That the unanswered calls had sat in his chest like a stone that got heavier each time they went to voicemail? That when Joshua mentioned he hadn’t reached her since the outreach, something in him had gone cold and specific — the precise, targeted clarity he reserved for actual emergencies — and he had been within two taps of pulling up a tracking app before stopping himself, standing in the kitchen with his phone in his hand, feeling the absurdity of a man monitoring someone who had made it sufficiently clear that she wanted nothing to do with him?

“It was stolen.” Flat. Matter-of-fact. The tone of someone filing an insurance report. “On the bus I boarded on my way back. I wasn’t unaware of it ringing. I’m not a child, Kuye.”

He was moving before the thought finished forming — the chair scraped, and he stopped several feet short of her, calibrating the distance carefully. Close enough to see the redness at the rims of her eyes. Far enough that she wouldn’t need to step back from him.

“I didn’t know that. I’m sorry.”

“Now that you know—” a brief, thin pause— “can I go?”

She looked at him properly then, for the first time since she came through the door, and the look was not bored. Boredom was a costume. Under it was something else entirely — a fatigue so complete and pervasive that it had sanded her face down to almost nothing, stripped away everything performative and left only what was actually there. She looked like a person who had given everything they had to the day and had come home to find the home still required something of her.

“I’m sorry about your phone, Timehin. If you don’t mind — I have a spare, and you can—”

“I don’t want your spare phone.” Sharp. Immediate. Cutting him off before he could finish the thought. “You already think poorly of me. I don’t want you adding this to the list of things you’ve done for a person you couldn’t think less of.”

The sentence went through him cleanly, landing somewhere he hadn’t thought to guard.

Think poorly of you.

He wanted a date. A specific instance. Something he could put on the table and refute point by point, methodically, the way he refuted things that were wrong. He wanted, with a childishness he was aware of and could not fully suppress, to be innocent of the charge. And some part of him — the honest part, the part he was less comfortable consulting — suspected he wasn’t entirely.

She turned.

“Timehin.”

His own voice surprised him. There was something in it he had not authorized. Something closer to the sound a person makes when they realize a door is closing and they are not yet ready to be on the other side of it. Thin, exposed, slightly desperate in a register he did not recognize as his own.

She stopped. Her shoulders rose and fell — a full, deliberate breath, taken and released — before she turned back with the air of someone granting a second chance they did not have the energy for but were granting anyway.

He looked at her. And for a span of seconds he could not measure, language left him completely.

This was the part he most despised about himself right now: the blankness. He could speak in crisis. He could arrange chaos into order under actual pressure, could find the right words at the wrong hour in rooms where the wrong words would cost something. Stand with her this close and his mind emptied like something knocked over, everything carefully organized spilling out, useless.

What remained was body — the warmth under his collar, the knock of his pulse in his throat, the specific awareness of her face as something he was not allowed to think about in the way he was currently thinking about it. He was thinking about it anyway. Helplessly, the way you think about something that keeps arriving regardless of the door you’ve tried to close against it.

Ignoring her had been the only system that felt like a system. Distance was containable, manageable, something you could maintain by discipline. The alternative required him to examine the thing he had been stepping around: that her absence had not brought him peace. It had made him restless. Attentive in directions he had no prior experience being attentive in. A particular kind of stupid that he had never been before and did not have a file for.

“I’m sorry.”

He let the breath go before the words.

“I haven’t been kind to you. And the way I’ve treated you — I don’t have a good explanation for it. But I want you to know that it has nothing to do with thinking little of you.” He held her gaze. “It has never had anything to do with that.”

The rest rose and stopped behind his teeth. I think about you more than I have a use for. I think about the empty chair. I think about your laugh through a door I did not knock on. I think about the way you looked at me in that corridor and I have not found a place to put that look.

He swallowed it.

For a moment — one unguarded, undefended moment — something in her eyes softened. Some part of the wall came down just far enough. Then it came back up, practiced and quick, a door closing with familiar efficiency.

“It’s alright,” she said, directing the words somewhere beside his left ear, carefully not at him. “Can I go in now?”

“Your phone. What are you going to do about it?”

The tears arrived fast — faster than she had time to stop them, faster than the composure she had been maintaining all day could account for. They filled her eyes before she could turn away, and she blinked, once, twice, hard, jaw tight, the discipline of it visible and costing her.

Then the flatness she had been wearing all evening dissolved entirely, and what was underneath it was raw, scraped thin, the kind of tired that has a specific source and knows exactly what it lost.

“I don’t know what to do.” The flatness was gone. What replaced it was thinner, scraped. “That’s the only place I have the videos of my last moment with my mum. And now it’s gone.”

Mum.

The word landed and rearranged everything.

She was not only the woman who had spent a week moving through this house like she owed it nothing. She was a daughter. She was someone who had already lost something enormous and had been managing that loss quietly, with the same practiced competence with which she seemed to manage everything, and today had lost a piece of what she had been using to hold it.

He watched her try not to break in front of him — the lift of her throat as she swallowed, the line her mouth pressed into, the sheer effortful discipline of a woman refusing to fall apart in a hallway in front of someone she had decided, for reasons he had given her, not to trust with that — and something cracked open in his chest that no amount of careful filing had managed to protect.

He wanted to close the space. He wanted to take the bag off her shoulder and put his hands where the strap had been pressing. He wanted to say come here and mean it with no conditions attached. His palms actually ached with the weight of standing still, of keeping his feet where they were, of choosing the sensible thing over the true thing.

He did not move.

He reached instead for the one thing that had never failed him — logic, clear and directed, the language of action when feeling threatened to become too large for the room.

“Do you have the original box? The phone’s carton — did you buy it new?”

She wiped at her eyes with the back of her wrist, the gesture rough and unsentimental. “It’s at my stepdad’s place.”

The word — stepdad — arrived again in the space between them quietly, a detail he had not known, a door into a chapter of her he had never once thought to ask about. He sat with it for a second: her mother, gone. A stepfather somewhere he knew nothing about. He understood, suddenly, with a clarity that felt slightly overdue, why she spent so much of herself here — with Kike, with Iya Kuti, in the warmth of a house that opened its arms without keeping receipts. The understanding arrived without sentimentality.

Just settled.

“Can we go now?”

Her frown came back — a small, exhausted confusion. “Now? Gbagada is not close. And what do you even plan to—”

“Find it before they flash it.” He heard the urgency enter his voice and did not try to manage it this time, letting her hear exactly how much he meant this. “Right now, whoever has it is hoping we keep calling so the battery dies on its own. We’re going to stop giving them that.” He paused. “Samsung, yeah?”

She blinked. “Yes.”

“Good. There are options. But we need the IMEI number, and we need to move quickly.”

A silence. Something shifting behind her eyes — the wall not coming down exactly, but a crack in it. Just a crack. Just enough to let something through.

“Okay,” she said. Quietly.

“Will your stepdad be home?”

“No. But I have a key.”

“Then let’s go.” He moved toward the door, pausing only when he realized she had not yet moved, and turned back to find her still standing where she was, watching him with an expression he couldn’t fully read — not suspicion exactly, not hope exactly, something between them that did not have a clean name.

He held her gaze. Let whatever was left of the performance fall away from his face entirely, nothing careful remaining in it.

“We’re going to find it, Timehin.” He said it plainly. “They won’t get away with it. I’m going to make sure of that.”

She did not step forward. She did not thank him. She stood there with the bag and the red eyes and all the complicated history of the last week still occupying the air between them like a third presence that had not been invited and had not yet decided to leave.

He did not close the space.

And for the first time in seven days — neither did she turn away.

The gate of 4B Parkview Estate opened with a slow, metallic scrape, as if the iron itself had grown tired with the day, worn down by the same long hours that had worn everyone else down too. Nosa eased the car through — careful of every jolt, every sudden sound, his hands unusually gentle on the wheel for a man who normally drove with the confidence of someone who’d never once dented anything. Headlights washed across the lawn Iya Kuti tended with that almost holy devotion of hers. Wet grass gleamed, dew already gathering in the cooling air. Night flowers hung open in the dark, pale and patient. Somewhere beyond the compound a car horned, then fell away, and the silence that followed felt thick and kind, settling over the estate like something offered rather than simply arrived.

Beside him, Kikelomo slept.

She had slipped under somewhere around Berger. One moment she had been sitting upright, trying to stay present, blinking hard against the pull of the day; the next, her head had tipped toward the window, then found the seat, and her whole body had surrendered as if it had been waiting all day for permission, for someone else to finally hold the weight of things for a while. He had done everything he could to keep her there, undisturbed. No work calls. No music. No sharp braking, easing off the pedal at every junction like the road itself might wake her if he wasn’t careful. When the phone lit up on the dash, he only looked at it long enough to silence it, then returned his eyes to the road as though even the glow might reach across the car and disturb her.

Lawyer Bankole had stayed behind in Ibadan. The rest would come when it came. Before they left, he had told them, voice kept low so it would not add another weight to their already burdened shoulders:

“We want to control the narrative as much as we can. I’m handling this myself because I’m the family lawyer… and because you’re joining the family soon. We wouldn’t want you perceived wrongly, Kikelomo.”

Afterwards, Nosa drove out of the hospital. And prayed. For most of the road back to Lagos the prayers had moved quietly through him, unhurried, wordless in places where words simply weren’t necessary — about the conversation waiting tonight with his father, about the king who had grown to love this woman without ever having met her, about the fragile hope that nothing spoken later would change that love. He’d prayed the way you pray when you’re not entirely sure what to ask for, just that God already knows.

Now the car sat inside the compound. He let the engine run a moment longer than it needed to, as if ending the sound might end the peace currently pooled in the small dark space between them.

“Babe.” He touched her arm, gentle, barely more than a press.

She stirred. A small, unintelligible sound left her mouth, warm and shapeless, the sound of someone still deep enough in sleep that words hadn’t fully assembled themselves yet. Then she turned her face deeper into the seat and slipped under again, unbothered, trusting even in unconsciousness that wherever she was, it was safe.

His hand hovered.

He almost woke her a second time. The words were already forming, gathering themselves at the back of his throat. Then she shifted once more — just a tiny adjustment of her shoulder, a sigh so soft it was almost not a sound at all — and kept sleeping, settling further rather than surfacing.

So, he stopped.

And he watched her.

The car was dark except for the thin gold of streetlights bleeding through the windshield, laying a faint bar of light across her cheek, her lashes, the corner of her mouth, painting her in something soft and unhurried. He killed the engine. The sudden quiet made her breathing louder, more present in the small space. Slow. Even. Soft waves that rose and fell as if the night itself had decided to match her, to breathe along.

He had seen so many of her faces.

The bright one, when laughter took her whole body and left nothing held back. The tight one, when worry sat behind her eyes and tried, unsuccessfully, not to show. The fierce one, when she was defending something she loved with everything in her. The tired one. The angry one. The one that appeared when she was trying not to cry and failing, her mouth pressed small as if she could hold the ache there by sheer force of will. He could have drawn a hundred portraits from memory alone, could have described each one to a stranger in perfect detail.

This face was new.

Peace had settled over her like a veil, complete and undefended. Her long lashes lay still against her cheeks, casting the faintest shadows in the thin light. Her mouth was slightly parted, breath moving soft and even past it. A strand of hair had fallen across her temple and stayed there, unbothered, and he found himself wanting, absurdly, to leave it exactly where it was rather than tuck it away. She looked unguarded. Unguarded in a way that made his chest ache with a small, sweet fear that she would wake and this particular quiet would break, this one moment of a woman entirely at rest, nothing braced, nothing performing.

Every few minutes she stirred.

Each time, his whole chest tightened, some instinct rising to check whether the peace would hold. He found himself holding his own breath until hers evened again, matching her rhythm without meaning to. He did not know when watching her had become a kind of desire, distinct from anything he’d have called desire before. He only knew he could not look away, that some part of him had simply decided this was the only place in the world worth his attention right now.

His hand moved before he told it to.

Fingertips, barely there, found the curve of her cheek. Warm skin. Soft. He followed the line as though he were learning it for the first time, though he already knew it by heart, could have traced it blind. The pad of his thumb rested just beneath the shadow of her lashes and did not press. Did not claim. Only stayed, patient, content simply to be near.

This woman.

This woman he wanted to marry.

Her presence did something to the air around him, always had, from the very first time. It made rooms kinder. It made his own thoughts slower, gentler, less inclined to hurry toward the next task. Sitting here, with her breath filling the small space between them, he wanted to stand between her and every unkind thing this world had ever tried to hand her, wanted it with a fierceness that surprised him even now. He wanted to keep this peace on her face for as long as God would allow, to somehow bottle this exact expression and produce it again on every hard day still ahead of them.

Why would anyone hurt a woman this sincere?

The question rose in him almost like pain, sharp and unresolved. Why was the world ever rough with someone he had come to revere like this — this pure, unperforming heart, this courage, this girl who could fall asleep in his car after the hardest afternoon of her recent life and look, for a moment, as if nothing in the world had ever touched her wrongly at all?

Kikelomo stirred.

Not all at once. First a small crease between her brows, some dream passing through. Then the faintest turn toward his hand, as if her body recognized the warmth before her mind did, leaning into it on instinct alone. Her lashes fluttered, slow, resisting. She found him in the dark, and a smile arrived on her mouth before her eyes were fully open. Sleepy. Sweet. Entirely unguarded still.

“Are we home?”

His hand was still on her cheek. He did not move it. He did not want to, would have been content to leave it there for the rest of the evening if she’d let him. The streetlight caught the edge of her face and made it look almost holy, gilded at the edges.

“I figured I should let you sleep a few more minutes,” he murmured. The words came out softer than he intended, roughened by everything he’d just spent the last several minutes feeling. “You looked so peaceful. I didn’t have the heart to take it from you.”

She blinked, slow, the last of the dream still clinging to her voice like something she hadn’t fully set down yet.

“I was dreaming about Jesus.”

A tiny pause. Her eyes searched his, unfocused and trusting, still soft with sleep.

“He was speaking to me about Bimbo.”

“What did He say?” He kept his voice low, matching hers, unwilling to break whatever fragile, dream-warm thing was still sitting in the car with them.

“He said He still has the plan to save her.” Her smile deepened, small and sure, something settled moving across her whole face. “I felt so comforted. I’d been troubled about her since we left the hospital, even though I didn’t say it out loud.” She shifted a little toward his hand, not quite leaning, just accepting the warmth, as if his palm were part of the dream she was leaving and she wasn’t quite ready to let go of it entirely. “And then He said He’s going to teach us how to love each other rightly.”

“Hm.”

The sound was almost a laugh, almost a prayer, something wordless that carried both at once. Nosa looked at her and felt the old wonder rise again — this dreamy woman, this Jesus woman, sitting in his car with sleep still in her eyes, speaking of the Lord as if He had just stepped out of the passenger seat and left the air warmer behind Him, still lingering somewhere between them.

What a lucky man he was.

“Can’t wait to learn from our Lord,” he said, and meant it completely, no irony anywhere in the words.

She studied him for a moment, groggy and earnest at once, something searching in her sleepy gaze. A strand of hair had fallen again. He tucked it back without thinking this time, the gesture so small it barely counted as movement, and her eyes followed his hand as if the tenderness itself were something she wanted to remember, to keep carefully alongside everything else about tonight.

“Do you think we might have days when we don’t like each other?” she asked. The question came out quiet, almost shy, a vulnerability threading under the sleepy warmth of her voice. “Because I like you. Besides being in love… I really just like you. As a person.”

His eyes stayed on hers.

“I don’t think so,” he said at last, careful, considering the question the weight it deserved. “We might disagree. We might get overwhelmed. Life will be loud some days, babe.” His thumb moved once across her cheek, a barely-there stroke. “But we won’t stop liking each other, Kikelomo. I don’t think that’s a thing that’s in either of us to do, honestly.”

She sat up slowly, as if the movement itself were something she did not want to rush, reluctant to fully leave the small warm world of the parked car. The seat leather whispered under her. She kept her face near his hand a second longer than she needed to, some part of her clearly not ready to give up the contact.

“Me too.” A small breath, steadying. “Look at Adanna and Tife. Pastor Efua and Pastor Dimeji. Even your parents in the Lord.” Her voice was still soft with sleep, but the certainty in it was fully awake now. “We have great examples before us.”

“Yes, we do, babe.”

“So we’re going to be okay.” She said it like a promise she was making to both of them at once, a small vow spoken into the dark of the car. “This phase will pass, and we’ll be so fine.”

Something in him gave way — quietly, completely, no fanfare to it at all. Was it possible to fall for the same woman again while she was still sitting right there beside him? While her hair was a little messy from the journey and her words were still warm from a dream about Jesus? Watching her speak, hearing the quality of her heart, the sincerity that never performed itself, not even now, not even half-asleep… he had no other language for it. He had simply fallen in love with her again, right there in a parked car, for what felt like the hundredth time this week alone.

“And about your dad…”

He blinked, startled not by the subject but by how gently she had found it.

“How do you know about my dad?”

She shrugged, the motion small, almost shy, her cheek still resting faintly against his palm. “I don’t know so much. I just know you’ve been a little tense.” Her eyes dropped to his mouth, then returned to his eyes, soft. “And you prayed all the way from Ibadan. I could hear you, even with my eyes closed.”

A shy smile touched his lips, caught out. “I guess I’m poor at hiding these things from you.”

“There’s no need to hide from me, babe.” Her voice carried quiet conviction now, fully awake underneath the sleepiness. “The Bible says the heart of a king is in the hands of the Lord. So the Lord knows how to teach your father to accept me. Even with all of this — the case, the story, everything that’s about to come out.”

He nodded, something loosening in his chest at the reminder. He listened as if every word were a hand on his back, steadying him. In the quiet after she finished, he could hear his own breathing again, slower than it had been a moment ago.

“I’m not worried.” Her voice softened further, dropping into something almost drowsy again. “I love your father. I can’t wait to meet him properly. And your stepmom too. I love them both already, even from a distance.” A little light entered her sleepy eyes, playful and sure at once. “I’m sure when they see me, they’ll fall in love with me too.”

“I mean, who doesn’t?” The smile reached his voice now, warm and unguarded. “Even Oreoluwa is irrevocably in love with you.”

A playful pout appeared, her whole face lighting with it. “As I am with him. That baby has my whole heart, honestly, I’d fight for him.”

Then her face grew quieter, some deeper feeling settling in behind the playfulness. “Thank you for today, Nosakhare. Eternity will reward all that you’ve done for me.”

He took her hands. Both of them. Held them the way a person holds something they have already decided to keep forever, no room left for doubt in the grip. His thumbs moved once across her knuckles, then again, slower, unhurried.

“I’m merely a vessel, babe. God can raise any other person to do a hundred times better than I have done.” He looked down at their joined hands, small in his, then back at her face. “I am grateful I get to do this. By tomorrow, when things get chaotic again — and they will, babe, we both know that — I’ll be here. As always.” A small breath, steady and certain. “Standing by your side. That’s not going to change, whatever comes.”

The car was still. The estate was still. Between them there was only warmth — the leftover heat of the day, the closeness of two people who had survived something and arrived home anyway, together, intact. He could smell the faint scent of her perfume, worn thin by the hours but still there, still hers. He could feel the pulse in her wrist beneath his thumb, quick and alive.

“I love you, Nosakhare.”

He leaned in just enough that his forehead almost touched hers. Not quite. A nearness that felt like a promise more than an action, a held breath neither of them wanted to end.

“I love you too, Adeyemi.”

He stayed there a moment longer, breathing the same small dark with her, unwilling to be the first to move, the whole night waiting patiently outside the windows for either of them to decide it was time to finally go in.

Author’s Note: We are back guysss!

Catch Up on Previous Episode Here.

The soft beep of Nosa’s text lights up my phone screen and for a moment the words just sit there, glowing, while my brain catches up to what they actually mean.

My eyes widen.

Four hours ago we had been on a call, me rambling — properly rambling, with hand gestures and everything, as though he could see them — about the particular Suya I used to buy at Oshodi when I still lived there. I had gone on at length about the quality difference between the Island versions and the mainland ones, about how everything you eat on this side of Lagos tastes somehow lesser, more curated, like it has been sanitized of its character. I had developed, on the spot, a half-baked theory involving psychology and economics and the particular sadness of expensive street food. He had humoured me the entire way through. Asked questions. Follow-up questions. Like a man conducting genuine field research into my feelings about skewered meat.

And now he is outside my gate.

Having driven, in Lagos traffic, out of his way, to Oshodi and back, because I talked about it for seven minutes on a phone call he could very easily have half-listened to while doing something else.

The grin that takes over my face is immediate and entirely undignified. My cheeks start aching almost at once and I do not care even slightly. I could cry, honestly. Over Suya. Over a man who listens like this — in the way that results in action taken hours later without announcement or expectation of credit.

I pull on my joggers in a hurry and call into the house as I go.

“Timehin, I’m going out! Nosa is outside!”

“Alright,” her voice floats back, distracted by whatever she is doing, and I am already at the door, already slipping into the cool evening air, my slippers slapping against the tile in a rhythm that probably communicates exactly how dignified I am being about this.

His car is parked just outside, engine idling low, like it has nowhere more important to be. I open the passenger door and slide in, and the smell of him reaches me before anything else — that particular combination of faint cologne and the day’s work, warm and unhurried, the smell my body has apparently filed under home without consulting me about it.

“Hi, baby!”

He turns, that familiar half-smile already on his lips, eyes crinkling at the corners at whatever my face is doing. He looks at me the way he always looks at me when I arrive somewhere to him — like the room has become slightly more interesting.

“You don’t jump this excitedly when I come visiting normally,” he murmurs, voice low and unhurried and entirely amused, one eyebrow lifting just enough.

“Well.” I am already reaching for the white nylon bag resting between us, unable to help myself. “Today you came bearing good news.”

I pick it up carefully. Heat seeps through the newspaper wrapping, and when I open it the smell hits me first — rich and smoky and deeply, specifically Oshodi, thick with the kind of spice that mainland pepper knows how to be and Island pepper has simply stopped trying to replicate. It fills the car immediately, complete and uncompromising.

I pause.

Look up at him.

He is watching me. Eyes quiet, glinting with soft amusement and something underneath the amusement that is not quite amusement at all — something more open than that, more unguarded, the specific look of a man who has been carrying something small and good across a city just to see this expression on this face, and is now watching it land exactly as he hoped.

“Babe.” The words come out almost in a pout. “You actually went to Oshodi.”

“I did.” He reaches across and tucks a loose strand of hair behind my ear, his fingers lingering a beat past what the gesture strictly requires. The touch is small and it does something disproportionately large to my chest. “Left work a little early to beat the traffic. Drove the streets you said you used to live in.”

His brow creases slightly.

“Kikelomo. How did you survive staying there? Genuinely.”

A laugh escapes me. The worry on his face is so sincere, and the Oshodi he is worried about is the same Oshodi I spent years living my best, most alive, most gloriously unmonitored life in after years of gate men and curfews and Iya Kuti’s careful watching.

“Babe, I swear it was interesting. People were always throwing parties on my street. There was this woman — I never even properly learned her name — who would bring me food and souvenirs from every party she attended. Every single one. She just decided I was worth feeding. Completely unsolicited. I loved her.”

He is shaking his head slowly, but the smile is there, helpless.

I slide a stick of Suya free and hold it out to him. He leans in and bites carefully, his eyes not quite leaving mine even mid-bite, and there is something about the domesticity of it — the two of us in a parked car at dusk, sharing food, looking at each other — that settles in my chest like something I want to keep.

A little dry pepper dust catches at the corner of his mouth.

Without thinking I reach up and brush it away with my thumb, the touch unhurried. His eyes stay on mine the whole time, patient, warm, the eyes of a man who is in absolutely no hurry to look elsewhere.

“Thank you,” he murmurs, voice soft. “So you genuinely enjoyed the hard life.”

“It wasn’t hard for me, really.” I pop a piece into my mouth and close my eyes briefly, just to receive it properly. The spice blooms meaty and perfect, exactly as I remembered, the specific taste of a chapter of my life that cost less and felt more. “I was usually broke, yes. But Kuye was always covering what I couldn’t. And honestly—it was exhilarating. Every evening felt like anything could happen.”

He shakes his head again, the fondness fully winning out over the mock concern. “I cannot believe you enjoyed the hood life.”

“It’s because you’re a beneficiary of nepotism,” I tell him, nudging another stick against his lips playfully before letting him take it. “If I took you to Mushin nko? Oshodi is practically Banana Island compared to Mushin. You’d come back different.”

He chews slowly, with the expression of a man conducting a formal sensory evaluation. “It’s spicier. Meatier too. Different from what Tife and Adanna usually have.”

“Yes! The one they sell here is basically seasoned air.” I shake my head solemnly. “I’m not even trying to be cruel. It simply is what it is.”

He nods in agreement, then reaches for a tissue from the console, unhurried, still smiling at me sideways, and I watch him wipe his mouth and think: I love this man. I love him quite a lot. An unreasonable amount, probably.

“Did you check the bag properly?” he asks. “I got two wraps. One for Timehin as well. You mentioned she was home.”

And there it is. The thing he does. The thing that keeps catching me off guard no matter how many times it happens — taking a name mentioned once in passing, hours ago, tucked in the margins of a conversation, and acting on it without being asked, without making a production of it, like thoughtfulness is simply the water he moves through.

“Babe.” I look at him. “Thank you.”

“It’s my pleasure.” He says it simply, like generosity has no alternative, like the default setting he operates on has never once considered the other options.

I let myself look at him properly now. Unhurried. Cataloguing him the way I have apparently started doing every time we’re in the same space — as if some part of me is still half-convinced he might become less real if I look away too long. The haircut suits him, cleaner and sharper at the edges, making the set of his jaw look more defined, more like the version of him I sometimes catch myself thinking about at unreasonable hours. We haven’t seen each other since the day I came back, not properly, not like this. Our planned meeting had fallen through because his week had been relentless — resuming as Presiding Director of his father’s company, learning the weight and shape of an entirely new life as fast as the days would allow.

And yet he drove to Oshodi.

For a seven-minute tangent about skewered meat.

I had spent the last two days trying to find the right welcome-to-this-new-chapter of your life gift for him, especially after reading the Business Day piece that made him sound impossibly accomplished — systems engineering knowledge from the Naval Academy, a new directorship, a family legacy he was now learning to carry — in a way that still feels slightly unreal to reconcile with the man currently licking pepper off his thumb beside me. Adanna and Tife had helped me settle on something eventually. The thought of the moment he opens it makes something quicken in my chest, a small private excitement I’m keeping close.

“Babe,” I say softly, the other thing rising before I can hold it back any longer. “Thank you. For the car.”

The words come out a little shy, which is probably appropriate given that the car is a significant understatement for what he did — the way he had sent Chuks back that very evening with the papers now rewritten in my name, making the whole thing irrevocable before I could find a new reason to refuse.

A small, warm smile curves his mouth. “It’s my pleasure. I’m glad you didn’t send it back a second time.”

“Well.” I press my lips together, failing entirely to suppress my own smile. “You asked nicely.”

He looks at me for a moment. Then: “Kikelomo.”

Something in the shift of his voice makes me look up properly. “Hmm?”

“Tomorrow we’re going to see Bimbo.”

The Suya goes forgotten in my lap.

My heart does something complicated — a skip, a drop, a kind of dull foreboding that has been living at the back of my chest all week and is now stepping forward with this reminder. “Yes, we are.”

“How do you feel about it?” He asks it with the particular quality of attention that means he wants the full honest answer.

I breathe in. Let myself actually sit inside the question instead of skating past it. “Honestly — I don’t know, Nosa. I don’t know what it will feel like to see her. I don’t know what nine years have made of her. Whether she’ll be receptive, or whether she’ll turn it into a scene and we’ll be asked to leave. I don’t know if I’ve actually, truly forgiven her, or if seeing her in person will make all of that unravel.” I exhale, long and unsteady. “I don’t know a lot of things. And the not knowing frightens me more than anything she might actually say.”

He doesn’t look away. His eyes stay on mine with a steadiness I have started to need more than I probably should.

“It’s alright not to know,” he says. “That’s why we have a better option than worrying.” His thumb finds my hand, moves once across my knuckles, slow and absent. “The Bible gives us an instruction for this. In everything, by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, we can make our requests known to God. We can chart the course of tomorrow’s meeting in the place of prayer, before we ever set foot in that hospital. We do the one thing we can actually control.”

I nod, listening, feeling his words settle over the unease.

“Let’s pray about it,” he says. “Right now. Right here.” His fingers find mine and lace through them, warm and steady, his thumb resting across my knuckles. “That’s actually part of why I came tonight. ” A small smile. “I realized we hadn’t prayed about this together yet. And I couldn’t let us go into tomorrow without us bringing it to God first.”

I squeeze his hand. “I’ve been busy worrying when I could have been praying. As usual. Story of my life.”

“Are you ready?” he asks softly.

“Yes.” I mean it. “I am.”

He nods, and something shifts in his face — settles, centers, the particular stillness that comes over him when he steps into prayer, like the rest of the world has agreed to wait.

“Alright then,” he says. “Let us pray.”

Nine years ago I sat in a hospital in Ikeja and listened to Bimbo explain, in a flat and businesslike voice, how she had arranged everything that turned my life upside down. No hesitation. No apology. She spoke like she was reading me a recipe. I watched her walk away and believed, with every fractured piece of me, that my life was finished. I thought if God was real He had absolutely no sense of justice.

Today I walk down this corridor toward the Female Medical Ward with my man’s hand wrapped firmly around mine and his lawyer walking quietly a few steps to our left.

And I almost laugh.

At how completely, catastrophically wrong I was about how this story was going to end.

The hospital smells of Dettol and weariness, the specific weariness of a building that has absorbed too many difficult days and long since stopped being moved by them. The walls have the look of things that have seen too much — not hostile, just exhausted, indifferent in the particular way only institutions can be. A man is wheeled past us on a gurney, tubes trailing, and we step aside without speaking, and I watch the scene the way you watch things when you are floating slightly outside your own body, grateful with a quiet guilt that this particular hallway is not the site of your own emergency today.

Nosa’s fingers tighten gently around mine as we near the ward entrance.

The pressure says: I have you. Just that. Just the pressure of his hand.

I am so glad he is here. Having the man I love standing beside me while I walk back toward a past that was almost destroyed partly because of another man — there is something in that irony that is tender, the kind of plot detail you could not have written and would not have believed if someone had told you.

“Babe.” His voice is low when we reach the doorway. The worry on his face is the careful kind — concern without pressure, leaving me room to answer honestly. “Are you okay?”

I nod. My voice has gone somewhere quiet, tucking itself away. We prayed again in the car just before we stepped out, and the memory of his voice — firm, unhurried, speaking on my behalf in that small warm space — is still loosening something tight in my chest. It had given me the certainty that I would be held through whatever waited on the other side of this door.

He turns slightly. “Mr. Banks — could you give us a moment, please?”

Mr. Banks, a man of extremely few words and apparently limitless composure, simply nods and steps back a respectful distance. He has been mostly silent since we left the house. I had wondered, on the drive over, whether lawyers were supposed to be this still. Nosa had told me quietly that this particular stillness was efficiency rather than indifference — that Mr. Banks was a man who knew exactly when to move and simply did not waste himself on the in-between.

“Hi, babe,” Nosa says, turning back to me. The smile is soft, small, the one that makes the world feel marginally more navigable.

“Hi.” My voice comes out barely above a breath. I wince at how thin it sounds.

His hands come up and cup my face — thumbs light against my cheeks, warm and grounding. I lean into the warmth before I have consciously decided to, closing my eyes for just a moment, letting myself feel the steadiness of him fully before I have to walk into that room and feel everything else.

“You’re doing well,” he murmurs. “I want you to know that.”

“Am I?”

“You are.” No hesitation. “You’re a strong woman, Kikelomo. Not everyone can go through what you went through and still love the way you do. That is not a small thing. That alone is a testimony, whatever happens in that room today.”

I open my eyes. Blink back the beginning of tears.

“In everything you’ve told me about this—” his voice is quieter now, unhurried, like a man choosing each word for exactly what it is worth— “I can see that you still care about her. You were still thinking about how she would receive the news that the church wants to sponsor her treatment. You put her feelings into consideration even now, even after everything she did.” He holds my gaze. “That is not weakness.”

He lets it sit between us for a moment, patient with the landing.

“So let’s go in there the way we prayed. Showing the love. Pursuing justice without cruelty. Not performing superiority. Relating to her as people who have received mercy—” he breathes— “and who are going to extend that same mercy to someone who may not look worthy of it. Because none of us looked worthy of it either, when we received ours.”

I press my lips together. My chest is so full I am not entirely sure what happens if I try to speak. So I don’t.

“Can I hug you, babe?” I ask instead.

He nods, arms already opening.

I step into him and press my face against his chest and breathe — slowly, deliberately — the scent of his cologne filling my lungs, the steady beat of him beneath my ear, his hands settling warm at the small of my back like they belong there. I stay for several long seconds. Long enough to let the steadiness of him transfer to me, or at least enough of it to get me through the next hour.

When I ease back, I find his eyes.

“Are you ready?” he asks softly.

“Yes,” I say. “I am.”

He gives a small nod to Mr. Banks, who moves toward us with measured steps, briefcase in hand, unhurried and entirely professional.

“Are we ready to go in?” Mr. Banks asks, eyes moving gently between us.

“We are,” Nosa answers.

“Shall we then.”

“Hello. We’re here to see Bimbo Akintunde.”

The nurse at the station — young, possibly early twenties, the particular look of someone who has been on duty long enough that most arrivals have stopped being interesting — glances up with mild, professional curiosity.

Then her eyes land on Nosa.

Her entire posture changes. I watch it happen in real time, the professionalism dissolving from the top down, her spine straightening in a completely different way than before, eyes going wide, mouth opening slightly. “Hi!” she says, and the word comes out breathy in a way her previous interactions today have certainly not been.

The two nurses beside her turn to look at whatever caused the shift.

“I know you,” the second one says, leaning in, a smile forming with the particular energy of someone accessing a mental filing cabinet. “I follow Efe on Instagram. You’re that prince she’s dating.”

I close my eyes briefly. Open them.

The first nurse has her phone out. Her thumb is hovering over the camera with the focused energy of someone who has identified an opportunity and intends to act on it before it passes.

I feel something in me that is equal parts amusement and a very sincere desire to explain to these women that I am about to walk into the most emotionally significant conversation of my adult life and I genuinely cannot spend myself on this first. I look up at Nosa. His expression has not changed at all. He is completely, constitutionally unmoved by small swirls of attention, which is either deeply admirable or slightly unnerving and I have decided it is admirable.

“It’s lovely to meet you both,” he says, pleasantly, in his usual register. Then his eyes land on the phone. “Please—” polite, quiet, the edge of authority arriving without raising his voice— “I’d prefer not to be photographed.”

The older nurse at the end of the counter turns sharply to the other two, something senior and no-nonsense switching on behind her eyes. “Please stop this.” Her tone is not unkind but it is final. “Can’t you see they’ve come for something important?”

I exhale quietly. I could absolutely hug this woman. I might, before we leave.

“We’re here to see Bimbo Akintunde,” Nosa repeats, patient, returning to the point with the ease of someone who has learned that the fastest way through a detour is simply to restate the destination.

“Miss Bimbo?” The older nurse’s professionalism is fully back now, curiosity sitting lightly but not intrusively.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Bed 016.” A small, understanding smile. “Down the ward, on your left.”

“Thank you.”

His hand finds the small of my back as we turn toward the ward. Then, loud enough for the nurses to hear, unhurried but deliberate, he murmurs: “Let’s go in, babe.”

Babe.

I catch the soft sound of the youngest nurse recalibrating somewhere behind us, the small exhale of a woman updating her understanding of the situation. I press my lips together to keep from smiling, because we are about to walk into something serious and I need my face to cooperate.

“Thank you,” I say to the nurses, genuinely, over my shoulder.

Then we walk into the ward together — his hand steady at my back, Mr. Banks a quiet presence beside us, Bed 016 somewhere ahead, and nine years of everything that needs to finally be said waiting at the end of the row.

The person on Bed 016 looks nothing like the Bimbo I used to know.

I stop walking before I mean to. My feet simply stop, somewhere between the bed before hers, and I stand there taking her in because my body has decided it needs a moment before it can go any further.

She is frail. Not thin in the way people sometimes describe as delicate — frail in the way that means the body has been in a long, losing argument with itself and is running out of things to bargain with. Her legs are swollen beneath the thin hospital sheet, heavy and stretched tight, the skin over them shining with the particular wrongness of fluid where fluid should not be. Her complexion has gone pale and sallow under the fluorescent light — none of the warm brown glow I remember from the girl who used to spend her Saturday afternoons at the salon simply for the pleasure of being attended to, who used to walk into a room and make it aware of her arrival. She breathes in short, shallow pulls, each inhale a small visible effort, her chest rising in careful increments like a woman rationing what she has left.

The dark circles under her eyes are deep. Bruised. Like two thumbprints pressed hard into her face by someone who meant to leave a mark.

I piece her together slowly, detail by detail, and each piece costs me something. This is not the girl who walked the university hallways beside me with her hips and her laughter going three rooms ahead of the rest of her. Not the girl people used to call Mirinda while they called me Fanta, back when we were both just girls trying to be free, trying to mean something, trying to find the shape of ourselves in rooms that were not always built for us.

This woman has been worn down. By sickness, by years, by whatever roads her choices led her down after the last time I saw her. She looks older than she should. Not five years older — decades older, in the way that happens when life presses down on a person without mercy for long enough.

I do not know what I was expecting to feel when I saw her.

I know what I feel now: something that is not what I had prepared for. Not the clean, organised anger I had carried for a long time. Not the steady, manageable grief I had prayed through last night. Something more complicated and less navigable than either — something that lives in the chest, formless and heavy, the feeling of seeing a person you once loved become the proof of what bitterness does to a life over time.

She is watching me. I am watching her. We stay like that for what feels like much longer than it probably is, the distance between us held still by everything that has never been said in nine years of silence.

“I’ve been waiting for you.”

Her voice is weak. Thin. Nothing like the sharp, carrying voice I remember — the one that could dismantle you in a sentence and smile while doing it. Nothing like the voice that walked into my hospital room nine years ago and left ruin behind without a backward glance. This voice has been used up. It arrives in the room and goes quiet almost immediately, like it cost her more than she expected.

I feel Nosa’s hand settle lightly against the small of my back. A quiet, wordless question. I turn to him, needing that anchor, needing to feel the solidity of him before I can make myself close the last few meters between us and her. He gives the smallest nod toward the chair beside her bed — not a push, just a direction, a gentle indication that I can go, that he will be here when I need to look back.

I walk forward. Pull the chair closer to her bed. Sit slowly. Behind me, I hear Mr. Banks quietly borrow two chairs from the neighboring beds, his movements efficient and entirely unobtrusive.

Her eyes track every movement I make. She studies me the way I just studied her — cataloguing, measuring, doing the arithmetic of time on a face she hasn’t seen in nine years. Then her gaze drifts past me to Nosa, and something moves briefly behind her eyes — something calculating and old — before it settles back on me.

“Hi, Bimbo.”

My voice comes out steadier than I expected. I am quietly grateful for this, for my body choosing this moment to cooperate.

Her tired eyes rest on me for a long moment before she speaks. When she does, the words arrive carrying something rawer. Something that sounds almost like pain that has nowhere left to hide.

“I’ve spent a long time imagining this.” Her fingers find the hem of her hospital gown and begin working at it, twisting the thin fabric between them, the unconscious habit of hands that need something to do while the mouth says difficult things. “I imagined what you’d look like now. How you were doing. I even asked Jaiye when he came.” A small sound escapes her, somewhere between a laugh and something sadder. “Pathetic, isn’t it. Even sick. Even like this. I still couldn’t stop thinking about you.”

I say nothing. Nosa’s hand finds mine and holds it — warm, steady, pressed into my palm like something I can borrow from.

Her eyes drop to our joined hands. Something moves across her face before she continues.

“I imagined so many versions of us meeting again. Even before I came here. I imagined you being there the day I got married—” she stops, something catching in her throat— “so you could finally see that Abimbola also found a man. That I managed it too.” The laugh that follows is thin and self-lacerating, the laugh of someone laughing at themselves because the alternative is worse. “At every point in my life, I was competing with you in my head. Every single point, Kike. Every single one. You have absolutely no idea.” Her gaze drifts to Nosa again, lingers, then comes back to me with something wondering in it now, something almost reluctant. “And look at you. You walked in here looking fresher and more beautiful than you ever were in school. Look at you with a man far more handsome than Jaiye ever was.” Her voice cracks on the last word. “And look at me. A pathetic woman in a hospital bed, still measuring herself against someone who was never even in the same race. Who didn’t even know there was a race.”

The knot in my chest tightens. It is a complicated thing — grief and old anger and something that is almost, almost pity, all pressed together into a shape I don’t have a clean word for. I want to ask her: why? Why did you chase that emptiness for so long and at such cost? Why did you make yourself the villain in a story that could have been entirely different? But I hold the questions back. That is not what this visit is for. Not today.

She stops twisting the hem of the gown. Her hands go still, something shifting in her face — a door opening onto something harder, more present.

“Kikelomo. You’re here. You’ve seen me.” She draws a breath that costs her, the whole effort of it visible in the way her chest rises and struggles, and for a moment she just sits with her mouth slightly open, like the next words are too heavy to lift. “The doctors came two weeks ago with news.” Her hands find each other in her lap and grip, knuckles pressing pale against the IV tape on the back of one wrist. “My dialysis has completely failed. My body can no longer tolerate it.”

Her voice thins further, drops almost to nothing. “I need a transplant. Soon.” A short, broken laugh, more air than sound. “But soon doesn’t look—” She stops. Swallows. I watch her throat move with the effort of it, watch her eyes go glassy and fixed on some point past my shoulder, like she is looking at the thing she is describing rather than at me. “There’s politics here. And I have no one to advocate for me. No one to push my name up the list.”

Her shoulders curl inward. Not dramatically — small, involuntary, the posture of a body trying to make itself take up less space in the world.

“They’ve asked me to go home.”

She looks down at her hands. Picks at the tape on her wrist with one finger, not really trying to remove it, just needing somewhere to put the tremor that has started there.

“I know what that means. When they say go home.” Her voice drops to something barely above a whisper, cracking in the middle of the sentence so that the last words come out in two pieces. “They mean go home and wait for the end.” A breath. Ragged. “But Kikelomo—” and here her composure finally goes, all at once — “I have no home to go to. I have nowhere.”

The tears come without warning, without the buildup tears usually have: one moment her face is merely wet at the eyes and the next it is streaming, her breath hitching audibly, her whole upper body curling around the sound the way a person curls around a wound. She presses the heels of her hands against her eyes, hard, like she can push the crying back in, and when that fails she just sits there with her hands over her face, shoulders shaking, the monitor beside her bed ticking faster with whatever her heart is doing under all of this.

I watch the full weight of her situation sit on her. Watch her hands, still bandaged where the cannula sits, still shaking against her own face — and I feel my own eyes go hot, uninvited, because even now, even after everything, I am apparently still the kind of person who weeps for people who do not deserve my weeping.

“Bimbo.” My voice comes out with a crack in it I didn’t plan. “What did you do to yourself?”

She lifts her eyes. The tears are already running freely now, quiet and uncontained.

“I was trying to survive.”

The words come out small, scraped thin. Her fingers have found the hem of her gown again, twisting it into a rope. “I grew up somewhere where surviving meant getting there first. Exploiting before you got exploited. Jaiye was my way out — my chance at something different, something better than what I came from.”

“But you hurt me.” The words break as they leave me, and I feel the break travel down into my chest, into my hands, which have gone cold despite Nosa’s warmth around one of them. Nine years of held breath, and it is coming out now in pieces I didn’t choose. “You hurt me so badly, Bimbo. And you didn’t even look back. You walked away and you never apologized. Not once.”

I have to look away from her, my eyes going somewhere past her shoulder to the wall, to a water stain in the shape of nothing, because if I keep looking at her directly the grief will get too large to speak through. My jaw is tight. My throat has closed around something I refuse to let out as a sob, not here, not in front of her.

“And look at you now. Lonely. Sick. Waiting.”

Nosa’s thumb moves in slow circles on the back of my hand, grounding me, pulling the sharpest edge off just enough that I can look back at her.

“Kikelomo.” Her voice has gone entirely undone now: mucus at the edge of her nose, composure abandoned, nothing left to perform for. “Since Jaiye came, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. I saw something in his face when your name came up.” She swallows, the effort of it visible, her whole throat working. “It did something to me…”

She works at her hands in her lap, and I watch her fingers — the same fingers that used to hold a compact mirror up in lecture halls, checking her face between classes, so sure of the world’s attention — now trembling around nothing.

“I know what I did was evil. I know Jaiye has threatened legal action. I don’t know what your plans are.” Her eyes find mine, stripped down to something almost naked now, the defenses worn thin, and for a moment she looks less like the woman who ruined me and more like the girl who used to fall asleep on my shoulder during boring lectures.

“But can you give me this one thing? Can you let me keep my pride? Because Kikelomo… look at me.”

The gesture she makes toward her own body is small and tired, barely a lift of the hand before it falls back to the sheet. “I’ve lost everything. There’s nothing left. I’m just — waiting, in this bed, with nobody. Can you at least not take the last thing I have left?”

I close my eyes for a moment. My chest feels like it is being asked to hold two entirely different weathers at once: a storm and a stillness, both true, neither cancelling the other out.

Jesus, steady me.

Because what I am feeling right now is almost impossible to organize. The compassion that will not leave, the grief that keeps arriving in waves I thought I’d already survived, the stubborn love I apparently still carry for this woman despite having every reason not to, and underneath all of it, the firm, clear certainty of why I am here and what I came to do.

I open my eyes. My hand tightens around Nosa’s, once, an anchor thrown and caught.

“Bimbo. I can’t.”

I hold her gaze, and I do not look away this time, even though every old instinct in me wants to. “I’ve carried what you did for nine years. I’ve walked past people who judged me because of the story you wrote about who I am. I’ve lost things I cannot get back because of what you chose to do with my name.” My voice is steady, but I can feel the effort behind the steadiness. “I need my name back. It was the one thing that was actually mine, and you took it. I can’t keep living under a story I never authored, Bimbo. I won’t.”

I lift Nosa’s hand and rest it visibly in my lap. Her eyes drop to it. Pain moves across her face, fast and unguarded, and she looks away before I can see the full shape of it.

“This man loves me,” I say, and something in my chest loosens slightly as I say it. “We’re building a life together. He knows everything you did, and he is not willing to let me keep carrying your story into our future. Neither am I.”

Her face tightens. The shift is almost immediate: something old surfacing behind her eyes, the familiar hardening, the calculation returning, quick as a curtain dropping over a window. She must still believe that the right combination of tears and frailty will be enough to fold me. That I am still the girl who went soft at the sight of suffering, even suffering she engineered. That nothing fundamental has changed in nine years.

Something has changed.

“What do you want me to do?” Her voice has gone flatter now, something retreating. “There’s nothing I can do anymore.”

“Actually—” Mr. Banks speaks for the first time, his voice unhurried, precise, the voice of a man who has been waiting for exactly this moment and has not wasted a single second of the wait— “there is.”

He leans forward, folder open, everything in order.

“We have a formal demand letter. You are required to make a public video confession: your voice, your face, your account of what you did to my client. You are also required to pay a specified sum in damages.” He pauses, deliberate. “Following that, the matter will still proceed through the courts. What you did constitutes a criminal offence, and you will face the appropriate legal consequences.”

She turns to me, real alarm breaking through now. “Kikelomo. You want to take me to court? Like this? In this state?”

“Yes.” The word comes out calm. Certain. From somewhere in me I didn’t know was this settled. “I’m not trying to harm you beyond what your choices have already cost you. But I want to be finally be free of something I’ve been carrying for a very long time.”

“Wow.” Her mouth stays slightly open after the word, genuine shock sitting on her face.

“But I’m dying.” The tears arrive again, fast, her voice climbing. “How much more do you want to take from me? Can’t I at least — can’t I die with a good name?”

“And I should live with an evil name that was never mine?” I hold her gaze. The ache in my chest is enormous but my voice does not waver. “I feel sorry for what you’re going through, Bimbo. I mean that. I will be praying for your recovery. Genuinely.”

She blinks. “That’s — that’s hypocritical.”

“Is it?”

“Yes.” Something sharpens in her voice, the old Bimbo surfacing briefly, the one who could find the nerve and press it. “You want to sue me and pray for me at the same time? What kind of life am I supposed to live if the rest of it is spent in prison?”

“People survive worse things,” I say quietly. “I did.”

She goes silent. The fight drains out of her, visibly, like something unplugged. Her eyes move to the middle distance and stay there, some calculation running behind them that I cannot follow and am not trying to.

“What if I don’t make the video?”

“Then we publish the confession ourselves.” Mr. Banks hold her gaze steadily. “You wrote it. It exists. We are giving you the opportunity to control how it comes out. If we release it without your participation, that option disappears.”

The long silence that follows has more in it than quiet. It has nine years, and the shape of a life badly lived, and whatever Bimbo has been sitting with in this bed in the weeks since Jaiye visited.

“I shot myself in the leg, didn’t I.” It comes out hollow. Not quite a question. The hollow laugh that follows is entirely without warmth. “I sent Jaiye a confession and then — of course he sent it to you. Why didn’t I see that coming?” She shakes her head slowly, something almost like wonder in it.

“Kikelomo, honestly.”

She exhales. Long, tired, complete. “Fine. I’ll make the video.” She swallows. “But reconsider the lawsuit. Please. That’s all I’m asking.”

“We can discuss further terms after the first demand is fulfilled,” Mr. Banks says evenly, giving nothing away.

She sniffs. Nods once. “You’ll have it.”

“Good. And I’ll note that this conversation has been recorded in its entirety. Every word exchanged here today will be referenced should any of the agreed demands go unmet.”

A sound escapes her — something between resignation and dark amusement. “You people really came prepared, didn’t you.”

A long breath leaves her. “Fine. Expect the video.”

I nod. I am quietly grateful — to God, to Nosa, to the steadiness that arrived in prayer and held through the conversation despite everything I felt. I am about to rise when something stops me. A small nagging thing at the back of my mind, tugging. I look at her again, more closely this time. Something in the particular performance of her despair.

“Bimbo.”

She tenses immediately, instinctively, before I’ve even finished saying her name. “Yes?”

“Did your dialysis actually fail?”

She stares at me for a long time, something working behind her eyes. Looks away. Looks back, caught.

“I thought it might make you pity me,” she says at last. Quiet. Almost bored, in the way people are bored by their own confessions when they no longer have the energy to care about the impression they make. “I thought if you believed I was closer to the end, you’d be more — lenient.”

The cold that moves through me is different from anything I felt during the rest of the conversation. Not anger. Something quieter and more final than anger. The cold of confirmation — of discovering that the thing you half-suspected is exactly what you suspected, and that there is nothing left to be surprised by.

I look at her for a long moment.

“You have not changed,” I say. “Not even a little.”

She meets my eyes. And in them, for just a moment — beneath the exhaustion and the defeat — I see the girl I used to know. The one with the hips and the laughter and the hunger for something she never quite had a name for. She is still in there, somewhere. Still running the calculations. Still looking for the angle.

“Neither have you, apparently,” she says.

Author’s Note: 😂

Target: 300 likes, 100 comments, 60 restacks.

Catch Up On Previous Episode Here.

Before I read it, my eyes were already brimming with tears, fearing what your words might reveal. I never imagined that the next time we’d hear from you—fifteen years after you waved goodbye and boarded that plane to London—would be now, through a letter.

I thought about waking Mama to share the news that her only surviving son had finally written to her. But your words stopped me. How could I read them to her? How could I add heartache to her already aching back? I couldn’t do that, Mohmoh. I couldn’t do that to her.

You included your phone number at the end of the letter and asked me to respond as soon as possible. But the only response you’ll receive is this letter. Its contents may either bring you back home or push you further away. Either way, I’ve done my duty: I’ve laid bare the thoughts of Mama’s heart.

Mohmoh, do you remember Baba Alajo’s warnings? He used to tell you that a day would come when you’d be torn between choosing your roots or evolving with the world. Do you remember how you’d stubbornly refuse to believe such a choice would ever confront you? I’m not bringing this up to shame you, Mohmoh. I’m simply marveling at how time changes us, sometimes for the better, sometimes not.

Mohmoh, on the day you left, Mama stood at the edge of the airstrip, her wrapper fluttering in the wind, her hands clutching the hem of her blouse as if to keep herself from running after you. She didn’t cry—not then. She waited until the plane was a speck in the sky, until the other people had dispersed, until it was just the two of us walking back. And then she broke. I had never seen Mama cry like that, not even when Baba Alajo passed. She said, “He will forget us, He will forget us! Like the others did.” I told her she was wrong. I told her you would never forget where you came from. But now, Mohmoh, I’m not so sure.

You asked for a response, and here it is: Mama is dying. The backache she complains about is more than just firewood and old age. The doctor says it’s her kidneys, and there’s nothing more they can do. She doesn’t know I’m writing this. She still prays every night for your return, even after all these years of silence. But I can’t keep lying to her, Mohmoh. I can’t keep pretending that you’ll come back, that you still care.

Mohmoh, I don’t know what it is like where you are. I don’t know if the seasons there have softened your heart or if time has built walls around it. But I do know that here, in this village you left behind, the harmattan still cracks our lips, the rains still pound on our tin roofs, and Mama still calls your name in her sleep.

She never stopped waiting, you know? Each market day, she buys an extra portion of dried fish, muttering that you used to love it. Each evening, she sighs as she lowers herself onto the wooden bench, whispering that if you were here, her back might ache a little less. And each year, on the day you left, she ties her wrapper tight around her chest and sits by the doorway, watching the road as if she expects a figure, taller now, broader, maybe even unrecognizable to walk down and call out, "Maami, I’m home."

But you never came.

And so I wonder, Mohmoh, if home is just a place that waits for the people who have long forgotten it. If family is meant to keep stretching its arms, even when the people they long for have stopped reaching back.

You wrote that you wanted a response. Here it is.

If you still remember the way home, come back before it is too late. Come back while Mama still remembers the sound of your voice, before the waiting turns into forgetting. But if you have chosen the world over your roots, if we are just a shadow in your past, then let this letter be our last conversation.

Either way, I will not write again.

Maami will not wait forever, Mohmoh. And neither will I.

I murmur the words against the soft curve of Ore’s cheek, my lips barely moving as he continues his determined assault on my ear. There must be something particularly tempting about it today. For the past few minutes he has refused every other point of contact—my nose, my chin, the hollow of my neck—returning again and again to the same small lobe with the single-minded focus only a toddler can possess, as though he has personally decided this is the one part of me worth conquering. His tiny teeth press carefully, not hard enough to hurt, just enough to claim ownership, a small proprietary act I have missed more than I knew how to admit until this exact moment. I don’t mind at all. I have missed this exact weight in my arms more than I realized, the particular warm heaviness of a sleepy toddler settled against my chest, solid and trusting in a way nothing else in my life has felt these past eleven days.

I shift him higher against my chest and feel the warm press of his little body settle more comfortably, one small foot kicking lazily against my hip as he readjusts. The pure joy that had lit his face the moment his eyes found me at the door still lingers in my mind: the sudden widening of those dark eyes, the way both arms had shot out toward me without hesitation, fingers opening and closing in the air as if he could already feel me lifting him before I’d even crossed the threshold. That single image had been enough to undo something in me right there in the doorway. It reminded me how deeply these people have woven themselves into the fabric of my days… and how completely I have woven myself into theirs, so completely that walking away from all of them, even for eleven days, had left a hole shaped like this exact room.

Ten minutes earlier the door had swung open and Adanna had stood there, framed by the soft morning light of the hallway, one hand still on the handle. For a long second she simply stared, her whole body gone still. Shock came first, sharp and visible, then a wave of visible relief that softened every line of her face all at once, her shoulders dropping an inch. I watched the emotions move across her features—surprise, worry, then something close to gratitude—before she recovered herself, stepped aside, and wordlessly let me in. After that, silence. She had not spoken a single word, had simply turned and walked back into the house, leaving me to follow or not.

I understood.

The call I had tried to place to her and Tife the night before had gone nowhere, ringing endlessly into emptiness for reasons I still could not explain, each unanswered ring landing like a small, deserved verdict. Nosa had finally suggested I simply appear at their door this morning. Standing here now, with Ore already claiming my ear and Adanna’s silence still hanging fresh in the air behind me, the suggestion felt, in hindsight, like a slightly reckless idea. A text, even a short one, would have been kinder. Would have given her the dignity of choosing the moment instead of having it sprung on her over breakfast.

“Tee-teh.”

Ore’s soft babble pulls me back. He tugs gently at the same ear again as I rise from the sofa and carry him toward the kitchen, his small weight shifting easily against my hip. Tife is not home. A small part of me wishes he were; seeking forgiveness from both of them at once might have felt less exposed, less like walking twice through the same fire.

“Adanna.”

I say her name quietly when I reach the doorway, testing the water before stepping fully in. She stands at the sink, sleeves rolled up past her elbows, carefully washing a whole chicken under the running water, her movements brisk and practiced. Her shoulders move in a slow, rhythmic motion, and she is humming to herself, which tells me — with some relief — that we are making progress. Five minutes ago, she was completely mute, and mute Adanna is far more frightening than loud Adanna will ever be.

“Good friends are hard to find,

and when you find them never let them go…”

The lyrics are completely invented, strung together in the moment, and I have to press my lips together to keep from smiling at how deliberately terrible they are, how she’s clearly composing this on the fly purely for my benefit. The only redeeming quality is the warmth of her voice, filling the big kitchen despite the pointed content of the song.

“Adanna… now…” I try again, still holding back laughter while adjusting Ore, who has begun to wriggle for more attention, sensing correctly that he is no longer the sole center of the room’s energy.

She does not turn. Instead the humming continues, the made-up song evolving, gaining verses like it’s been rehearsed for exactly this occasion.

“Some people hurt their friends

and show up when they like.

That’s not the mind of Christ…”

The last line is delivered with such pointed sweetness that the laughter finally escapes me. Out of the corner of my eye I see the corner of her mouth twitch, fighting a smile she is not yet ready to give away for free.

“Forgive me… even as Christ forgave you, Adanna,”

I sing back, matching her tone as best I can, my voice cracking slightly on the high note in a way that makes it funnier rather than less effective. Ore leans away from my shoulder to watch the strange exchange, his small face solemn with confusion, as though he is trying to decide whether this is a game or something far more serious happening between his mother and her best friend, his dark eyes swinging between us like he’s refereeing.

Adanna finishes rinsing the chicken. She turns off the tap, lifts the pieces carefully, and places it into the waiting pot with a soft, deliberate clatter. Only then does she face me fully, arms crossing, an eyebrow already raised.

“Is that all you have to say?”

“Finally,” I breathe, the word carrying real relief, my shoulders dropping their own inch now. “Finally, she’s talking to me.”

Her expression settles into a deliberate frown, though it doesn’t quite reach the eyes. “You have five minutes to change my mind. If not, I’ll go mute again. And this time I mean it.”

I let my eyes widen theatrically and stretch out my free hand, palm open, in mock surrender, careful not to jostle Ore too much in the process. He watches the gesture with interest, small head tilting.

“My woman, please forgive me. I acted hastily. I hurt everyone in the process and thought only of myself. I made you worry and then I appeared at the time that suited me, no consideration for your own heart in all of this. It was completely inconsiderate, and I regret it with every part of my heart. Will you please let it go? I cannot stand the thought of you not speaking to me, Adanna. I mean that.”

By the time the last word leaves my mouth I am almost out of breath, the speech having tumbled out faster and more sincerely than I’d planned. Even Ore has gone still against my chest, his dark eyes fixed on the performance as though his big aunty has suddenly become the most fascinating person in the room. Adanna turns away for a moment, shoulders shaking once with the effort of holding back a laugh she’s clearly losing the battle against.

“That was cute,” she murmurs, almost too quietly to hear.

“Say it out loud, my woman.”

I step closer and rest my forehead lightly against the warm space between her shoulder blades, Ore squeezed carefully between us. The cotton of her blouse smells faintly of her perfume and the morning’s cooking, an ordinary, achingly familiar smell that nearly undoes me more than anything either of us has said. “I miss you, Adanna,” I add, softer still, the words landing directly against her back.

She is quiet for several heartbeats. Then she sighs — a long, releasing sound that seems to travel the whole length of her — and turns. “I miss you too. And I prayed you would come back to us. Every single day, Kike.”

Carefully, mindful of the small body between us, she draws both me and Oreoluwa into her arms. The hug is unhurried, patient, the kind that doesn’t check the time. We stay there longer than necessary, letting the silence settle into something gentler than words could manage, Ore squashed contentedly between us, apparently deciding this new arrangement suits him fine too.

When we finally separate, she is smiling, all the way to her eyes — and the sight of it loosens something tight in my chest that had been sitting there since I first knocked on the door. Adanna’s anger has never been the lasting kind. I had known, somewhere beneath the nervousness, that she had already forgiven me before the door even opened. The entire performance had simply been her way of making the moment hers, of not letting me walk in and skip straight to being welcomed without first sitting in the discomfort I’d caused, even briefly.

“Are you okay, Kikelomo?” she asks now, searching my face with real concern, the playfulness set aside for a moment.

“Now that you’re happy with me,” I answer, and mean it completely, “I am.”

She nods, accepting the answer as enough for now. “Let me put the chicken on the cooker. Then we’ll sit and talk properly.”

Later, the living room feels softer somehow, the earlier tension fully dissolved into the ordinary comfort of a shared afternoon. Oreoluwa has finally surrendered to sleep on one of the sofas, one small fist curled near his cheek, after a brief but thorough campaign of kitchen chaos that had, at one point, involved an entire drawer of wooden spoons. Ever since he learned to pull himself upright, the house has existed in a new state of alertness. Quiet moments are no longer automatically peaceful; they are merely the calm before the next exploratory disaster. Only sleep brings true rest — the kind we are enjoying now, the whole house exhaling around his small, even breathing.

We have been talking for some time, the conversation unfolding in unhurried stretches. Every so often one of us rises to check the chicken simmering on the cooker, then returns to the same sofa, picking up the thread exactly where it was left. I have told her everything: the meeting with Jaiye, the things he said about Bimbo, the unexpected encounter with Nosa at Iya Kuti’s place, and the long shape of the hours that followed. I left nothing out. That is simply how Adanna and I speak — slowly, thoroughly, with room for every detail, no matter how small or embarrassing.

“So Nosa told your mum he wants to marry you!”

Adanna’s clap is soft but bright with excitement, her whole face lighting up in a way that makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. “God gave you this man, Kikelomo. I’m telling you.”

“Yes,” I say, feeling the familiar warmth rise in my cheeks all over again, as though the story hasn’t already happened. “Even while Iya Kuti was still advising him to pray about it, take his time, he simply said he wanted to marry me. Just like that. No hesitation.”

She gives me a long, knowing look, eyes narrowing playfully. “He’s a gone man. Completely gone. What exactly did you put in your stew, Kike?”

“Even I don’t know o.” I press a hand to my chest in mock innocence. “God alone did it.”

Her smile turns sly, something mischievous kindling behind it. “So because the two of you didn’t see each other for over a week, you just wanted to jump on each other?”

“Adanna!”

I reach across and tap her arm lightly, scandalized, my face fully warm now, heat climbing all the way to my ears. This is the inevitable price of telling a friend everything: they will circle back to the most vulnerable parts and enjoy watching the color rise, again and again, with absolutely no mercy.

She grins, thoroughly satisfied with herself, then lets the expression soften into something more serious, the teasing settling into genuine counsel. “This is the time to up your discipline. Because it will keep doing you people like that, this pull towards each other. Honestly. It doesn’t get easier just because… you know?”

I nod, the humor settling into agreement. “I know. That’s why I’m grateful for Nosa. Would you believe he refused to get on a call last night? After he left, he only texted me.”

“Seriously?” Her eyebrows lift.

“Yes.” I shift slightly on the cushion, tucking my feet beneath me. “I had assumed that because he grew up partly in America those boundaries might not matter as much to him. That maybe he’d think it was too old-fashioned, too Nigerian-church for him.”

A laugh escapes her, quick and genuine. “Pastor Emmanuel hammered these teachings into all of us, no exceptions. And even before that, Nosa was always a disciplined man, even before he was fully sold out to God. I never knew of any woman with him — not even in the years before he became born again.” Her phone lights up with a brief notification; she glances at the screen and sets it face-down again without a second thought. “There was a time we genuinely thought he might never marry. Too focused on everything else.”

“Wow.” The word comes out small, something in it landing differently now that I know him the way I do.

“Yes, my dear.” She covers a soft yawn with the back of her hand, apologetic. “Sorry. I didn’t sleep well last night.”

“Pele.” I reach over and squeeze her wrist gently.

“Thank you.”

She stretches, arms rising above her head, then her expression shifts — curiosity rising slowly. “Meanwhile, Kike… you mentioned something about Bimbo being at UCH, awaiting a kidney transplant.”

“Yes.” I run my fingers slowly through the neat rows of my cornrows. “That’s what Jaiye told me.”

Adanna’s face grows thoughtful, the earlier lightness giving way to something quieter, more careful. “That’s interesting. Because the lady the church has decided to support with her medical fees is also awaiting a kidney transplant at UCH.”

My eyes widen almost of their own accord, and I feel my heartbeat pick up speed beneath my ribs.

“Seriously? Do you know her name?”

She shakes her head once. “I don’t. But Tife might know. He’ll be home in a few minutes. We can ask him then.”

She pauses, looking at me with a kind of careful wonder, something almost solemn moving behind her eyes now. “If she turns out to be the same person… then I’m going to be in utter fear and dismay of this God we serve. Because what are the actual chances of something like that? Out of every person in this country?”

I let out a long breath, trying to quiet the sudden thrum in my chest, my fingers stilling in my hair.

“I know, right. It’s going to be a very interesting thing to witness, whatever it turns out to be.”

Tife’s voice reaches me before I fully turn.

“Look who has finally decided to grace us with her face.”

The words are warm, teasing, and already carrying the easy affection of an older brother, no edge in them at all. He steps forward and draws me into a hug without hesitation. His arms settle around my shoulders with a familiar firmness, and I lean into it, breathing in the faint scent of his cologne mixed with the outdoor air he has just brought in with him. He taps the back of my head once, lightly, the way he has always done when he wants to remind me I am still under his watch, still someone he considers his to look after.

“Thank you for coming back to us.”

I hold on a second longer than necessary, something in his simple gratitude landing harder than any lecture could have, before we ease apart.

“Wow, babe,” Adanna says as she moves past us, arms full of plates and cutlery on her way to set the dining table. “You reacted better than I did. I guess I still need some more growing up to do.”

The three of us share a soft laugh. Tife’s eyes crinkle at the corners in that way they always do.

“Babe, you’ve already done the reaction for me,” he answers easily, setting his bag down. “That’s why I’m doing the embrace for you.”

“Shioor.” Adanna sets the plates down with a deliberate clink and plants her hands on her hips, the smile already playing at the edges of her mouth despite the mock-offense. “It’s only because you’re trying to act like a pastor.”

“Technically,” he replies, entirely too pleased with himself, “I am her pastor.”

“But you were first friends,” she shoots back, the retort light and affectionate, an old argument clearly well-worn between them.

“True.”

Tife’s expression softens as he looks down at me, searching my face the same careful way Adanna had earlier, checking for something only he’d know to look for. “Hope you’re not hurt anywhere?”

“No,” I answer, still enjoying the gentle rhythm of their banter settling around me. “In fact, I’ve been healed, Pastor Tifss.”

He nods slowly, a quiet glint of understanding in his eyes, something knowing passing across his face. “That’s a beautiful testimony. I reckon my brother was a contributor to this healing, yeah?”

Heat rises in my cheeks again. “Pastor Tifeeee!”

Adanna walks back toward us and slips into Tife’s arms for a brief, warm welcome-home hug, his hand finding the small of her back automatically, without either of them seeming to notice they’d done it. For a moment they exist in their own small circle — heads close, voices low, some private exchange passing between them that isn’t for me — and I stand slightly apart, watching the easy way they fit together, feeling the small private ache of wanting exactly this, someday, with Nosa. Then the moment breaks. Adanna turns back to me with a mischievous tilt of her head.

“Kike blushes anytime anyone mentions Nosa.”

“He does the same when I mention her to him,” Tife answers, still holding her lightly, clearly delighted to have this information to share. “It was even from the way he spoke with me last night that I knew she was back. His whole voice changed.”

“Really, babe?” Adanna turns fully toward him, mock-betrayed. “And you didn’t tell me?”

He shrugs, the movement unhurried, entirely unbothered by her outrage, and walks over to the sofa where Oreoluwa is still sleeping. He bends and presses a soft kiss to the crown of the boy’s head. Ore stirs once, a small sigh escaping him, one hand flexing briefly, then settles again, undisturbed. Only then does Tife straighten and face us both.

“Nosa asked me not to. Besides, you were too tired last night to be told anything useful.”

“You guys,” I say, my voice quieter than I intend, half-laughing. “I’m still here, you know.”

“Sorry,” they answer at the exact same time, the timing so perfect it startles a laugh out of both of them before they catch themselves, both glancing toward the sleeping child at once, guilty and synchronized. We cannot risk the young champ waking and resuming his campaign of soft havoc just yet, not before the food is even done.

Adanna settles back onto the sofa and stretches once more, the movement slow and heavy, more tired than the moment calls for. Looking at her, I feel a quiet pang of concern and make a mental note to ask later what has been weighing on her sleep, noting it away for a quieter moment between just the two of us.

“Babe,” she says, voice still a little tired, “the woman the church is helping at UCH — do you perchance know her name?”

Tife shakes his head, settling into the armchair across from us, loosening his collar. “No, I don’t. You know I’m not directly involved in this one. The person you should be asking is Pastor Goke. He’s leading the committee.”

“Oh.” Adanna’s voice softens with realisation, a hand rising to her forehead. “I’ll ask him then.”

“Why the sudden interest, though?” Tife’s gaze moves from Adanna to me, curious, some instinct already sharpening behind his eyes.

“We think she might be the Bimbo who hurt Kikelomo.”

If the words surprise him, he hides it well — but not completely. Something flickers across his face, a brief tightening around the eyes, gone almost as soon as it appears, before he speaks.

“Wait. Have you been able to find her whereabouts?”

“No, we haven’t.” Adanna glances at me, seeking silent permission before saying more. I give a small nod, and she continues. “Kikelomo met with Jaiye during her hiatus. He told her he’d seen Bimbo. Apparently she’s at UCH right now, awaiting a kidney transplant.”

Tife is already reaching for his phone, his whole posture shifting into something more urgent. “Hold on. Let me just check something.”

He steps a little farther into the room, thumb moving across the screen as he dials, the soft ringing filling the quiet space between us, stretching a little too long before it connects. Then a voice answers on the other end, tinny and distant through the speaker.

“Hello, Pastor Goke.”

There is a brief exchange I cannot hear clearly, just the low rise and fall of a voice on the other end. Tife’s posture remains respectful, shoulders squared, one hand braced against his hip.

“Yes sir. Thank you sir.”

Adanna opens her mouth as if to speak, leaning forward, but Tife lifts a hand gently, asking her to wait, his eyes fixed on some point on the wall as he listens.

“Pastor Goke, please — I’d like you to forward the information from the Hospital Outreach committee about that woman we’re raising funds for.”

Another pause, longer this time. The voice on the line says something low, something that makes Tife go very still. He listens, then his eyes find mine and stay there, holding my gaze deliberately, as he speaks the next words clearly, each one measured.

“Yes sir. Sister Abimbola Akintunde.”

Something rises in my chest — slow, heavy, and unmistakable, gathering itself the way a wave gathers before it finally breaks.

I’m still in my room, laptop propped against a nest of pillows, when Nosa’s face fills the screen. He’s calling from the headquarters of his father’s company, and the soft afternoon light catches the sharp lines of his suit — deep charcoal, perfectly tailored, the kind that makes ordinary men look competent and makes him look like the best thing since sliced bread. I try not to stare. I fail almost immediately, my whole chest doing something soft and unhelpful at the sight of him.

“Babe, did you confirm from the Jaiye guy?” he asks, voice low, the same voice that somehow always manages to settle somewhere behind my ribs.

I shift against the headboard, tucking one leg beneath me, and force my eyes back to his face instead of the way the suit sits on his shoulders, an entirely losing battle.

“Yes,” I murmur eventually, the word carrying a sigh. “I checked the email she sent to Jaiye again. It was Abimbola Akintunde. Clear as day.”

“Wow.” His eyes darken with worry, the soft crease appearing between his brows that I have already memorized. “So she’s the sister the church has been raising money for?”

“Unfortunately,” I answer, the admission tasting bitter on my tongue. “My own contributions are even part of it. I’ve literally been giving toward her transplant without knowing.”

Silence stretches between us for a few heartbeats. On his end I can hear the distant hush of an office— phones, the soft click of a door, someone’s muffled voice far off. When he speaks again his voice is quieter, almost careful.

“Do you still want to go see her now?”

I shrug. “I don’t know, babe. If she finds out my church is the one helping her, she might think I’ve only come to show off how good God has been to me. It could harden her heart even more… keep her from ever telling the truth.”

He listens without interrupting, his soft, attentive eyes never leaving mine, giving me his full, undivided focus even through a screen.

“There’s also a selfish part of me,” I continue, slower now, “that wants to make her confession a condition for the help. But that would mean mixing my own interest with the work of the church. And I can’t do that.”

“You’re right,” he says, the words coming gently, no judgment in them at all. “I had the exact same thought, if it helps. You’re not the only one wrestling with it.”

I adjust the laptop, angling it so I can see him better, and lean closer to the screen as if the few extra inches might close the distance between us.

“I guess I’ll just meet her and not mention anything about the church.”

“Yes,” he agrees softly. “That’s what we should do.” He turns his head for a moment, murmuring something to someone off-camera, his voice dropping into a different, more clipped register for a beat, then faces me again, and the warmth returns to his eyes instantly. “Besides… I already reached out to our family lawyer. I explained everything. He suggested he come with us to the hospital.”

The thoughtfulness of it lands warm and sudden in my chest, unexpected in the middle of an already heavy conversation.

“Babeee.” My voice softens without permission, going soft and a little helpless. “Thank you.”

“Anything for you, Kikelomo.”

My cheeks warm instantly, heat rising at the way he says my name.

“So what’s the lawyer going to do?” I ask, a spark of nervous excitement threading through the question, glad for a reason to look away from him for a second and gather myself.

“He said he’ll do most of the talking. Present the evidence. He also wants a written confession from Jaiye if possible — so we can show her that someone who was complicit has already put his own statement down.”

“Yes, that’s true.” I shift again, tucking the pillow more firmly against my lower back. “The last time we spoke, Jaiye said he’d be willing to help in whatever way he can.”

“Good.” Nosa’s gaze stays steady on me. “Also, your mum… and anyone else who can give a clear account of what happened. We’ll need their statements.” He pauses, a new thought flickering across his face, brow furrowing slightly. “Did she take any videos or pictures that day? From the whole event that happened?”

“I never asked.”

“You should, babe. I hope she did. We’ll need them if this goes to court.”

The word settles between us, heavier than everything that came before it.

“So we’re really pursuing this in court?”

He draws a slow breath, and I watch his shoulders rise and fall with it even through the screen. “Yes, we are. Hopefully she does a public confession first. It would make everything cleaner.”

“But won’t they consider that she’s in hospital, awaiting a transplant? That she can’t move around freely?”

“They will,” he answers, calm and certain. “But being sick doesn’t cancel legal responsibility. That’s why I’m already praying she recovers — because she needs to be competent and fit enough to stand trial.”

I nod, thoughtful, tracing an absent pattern on the pillow in my lap. “I was thinking we could go to the hospital next week. What do you propose, babe?”

“Next week is fine. But it’ll have to be a weekend — especially since you’re resuming physical work.”

“Yeah. I told HR I wanted a full month remote. They only approved two weeks.” I pause, watching him, unable to help it. The way the light catches the side of his face, gilding the sharp line of his jaw. I could watch this exact angle of him for an embarrassingly long time and never once get bored of it.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asks, a small smile already threatening at the corner of his mouth, like he’s caught me and is thoroughly enjoying it.

“Like what?”

He glances away for half a second, almost bashful, then back, the corner of his mouth lifting further. “With dreamy eyes.”

“Because you look dreamy. It’s not my fault. Blame your mother for making you like this.”

The smile finally settles, soft and a little shy, spreading slow across his face in a way that makes something in my own chest ache pleasantly. “Do you want some pictures? I can send them to you. For your, uh, personal archive.”

I rest my chin on my hands and bat my lashes at the camera, shameless, thoroughly enjoying the performance now. “You took pictures?”

He shakes his head, a quiet laugh escaping, the sound doing something warm and immediate to my whole body even through a laptop speaker. “Actually, it wasn’t me. They had a whole media team waiting when I arrived. They’re publishing it in Business Day tomorrow.”

“Wow,” I draw the word out, delighted. “You’re a big deal. My man is a whole big deal, oh my days.”

He looks almost embarrassed, ducking his head slightly, and I love that about him, love that all this recognition still sits a little uncomfortably on him. “I’m not. All of this still feels strange to me. I’m built for war…” His voice drops lower, warmer, something private entering it now. “And apparently, for love.”

My heart does that ridiculous little flip it always does around him, the one I’ve stopped even trying to control.

“This man,” I say, smiling so wide my cheeks already ache from it, entirely helpless against him. “You’re so corny. I like you. I like you so, so much, honestly, it’s a whole problem.”

“I know you love me, Kikelomo.” His eyes do that thing again — softening at the corners until it feels like they’re smiling on their own, independent of the rest of his face.

“I do.” The two words come out simple, unguarded, absolutely true. I take a screenshot of the call, capturing the way he’s looking at me right now, wanting to keep this exact expression somewhere I can return to it later, then ask the question that’s been hovering at the edge of my mind since we started talking.

“So… when is our date?”

“Curious much?” A smirk plays at the corner of his lips, entirely too pleased with himself.

“I just want to know. I’m literally dying of anticipation, Nosa. Have mercy on me.”

He watches me with quiet amusement, eyes glinting, that soft smirk never quite leaving, clearly savoring holding this over me. “I’m planning it meticulously. You’ll thank me later for making you wait.”

“Seriously, babe? Just give me a hint. One hint.”

“Okay.” He nods once, as if making a great and difficult decision purely for my benefit. “Here’s one: it’s going to last a whole weekend.”

“Seriously? you’re so extra, this man.” I press a hand to my chest, feigning faintness, though I’m grinning too hard to sell it properly.

“It’s because I love you.” His voice is low, honest, all the teasing dropping away for a moment. “I’m a man in love. Don’t blame me. Blame Jesus, He’s the one who made you this easy to spoil.”

I laugh, the sound bright and free. “Who am I to argue with that logic? I’m just a woman receiving all the love her man has to offer, humbly, gratefully, without complaint.”

Somewhere off-screen a voice calls his name. He turns, listens for a few seconds, his profile sharp and handsome, then faces me again with an apologetic look that softens every hard line of the suit.

“Kikelomo… I have to go now. Can I come see you later this evening?”

“Hmm.” I raise my brows playfully, drawing it out just to watch his face fall a little. “Tunmise is coming over. We’re going for a girls’ hangout later with Timehin.”

“So no space for me in your life this evening?” he says, mock-hurt lacing the words just enough to make me smile, his hand rising briefly to his chest as though genuinely wounded.

“Don’t say it like that, babe. It’s because I already promised them. How about tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow evening, when I get back from work?”

“Yeah. Is that okay?”

He nods, some of the mock-hurt melting into something softer, more patient. “Yes. It is. I’ll survive the wait. Barely.”

“Alright, babe.” I’m still smiling, unable to stop.

“Kikelomo?”

“Yes, babe?” Something in the shift of his voice makes my whole body lean in a little closer to the screen.

He looks at me for a long moment, long enough that I feel it somewhere low in my stomach, then exhales softly, like he’s steadying himself for something. “Something will be delivered to your place this evening. Please don’t reject it when it comes.”

I frown, curious, my heart already picking up its pace at the mystery of it. “What’s that?”

“You’ll find out.” The smirk is back, infuriating and adorable in equal measure.

“Okay…?” I draw the word out, narrowing my eyes at him, trying and failing to read anything further from his expression.

“I love you.” His voice is quiet, certain, no teasing left in it at all now. “Talk to you later, baby.”

My cheeks are already hurting from smiling, and I don’t even try to hide it, don’t even care how ridiculous I must look sitting here alone grinning at a laptop screen.

“I love you too. Bye, babe.”

“Bye.”

The screen goes dark, but the warmth he left behind stays long after the call ends, settling into the room and refusing to leave, the way it always does now, the way I’m slowly learning to let it.

Author’s Note: Few more episodes to go!

Target remains the same.

Catch Up On Previous Episode Here.

Nosa is listening but his hands are on me, sometimes; I’ll feel them still against me, quiet and grounding. Other times, he’s rubbing them, slow and absent, reassuring me or himself, I can’t tell which now, and honestly, I don’t think it matters. Maybe it’s both. Maybe that’s exactly what love is supposed to look like — one hand doing two jobs at once.

The sitting room feels smaller with every sentence my mother speaks. Not physically — the walls have not moved, the furniture has not shifted. But something is happening to the air in here, some compression of it, and I want to stop her. To put my hand up and say: enough, he has enough now, he doesn’t need the rest. But I also know that he does. I know that Nosa deserves to hear this from the woman who was present for all of it. The woman who found me. Who sat beside a hospital bed and prayed and wept and refused, with everything she had, to stop believing. He deserves to hear it from her mouth, in her voice, exactly as it happened.

So I stay still and I let her speak.

When I walked through the door of this apartment and found him here, I stopped mid-step. I had spent the entire journey from Abeokuta rehearsing a different version of this. I was going to meet him at Adanna and Tife’s place, privately, calmly, on my own terms. The speech would take approximately one hour. I would tell him everything in the right order. I had the whole thing mapped and sequenced in my head, and it made sense there.

But God, apparently, had already arranged the room before I arrived.

And watching it unfold now — my mother's voice, Nosa's hands, the way the three of us are sitting in this shrinking room with the full truth between us — I understand that God's arrangement is better than mine. It always is. I just keep forgetting this and then being surprised when He reminds me.

“I did not speak on the matter for a long while,” Iya Kuti continues, her voice steady in that particular way she gets when she has prayed about something so many times it has passed through fear into settled conviction. “Because I believed my daughter is going to conceive a child. Womb or not.” Her eyes move from me to Nosa, who is sitting slightly forward, his whole body attentive. “I still believe so. But I think it is right to present these options to you. To have you look at this fully, examine it with wisdom, and make your decision before God.”

My heart rate climbs.

This was the conversation Pastor Efua was supposed to hold with us. In a room with our spiritual parents around the table, in the careful, structured way she had planned. And now my mother is having it — on an ordinary evening, in her sitting room, with the television off — and somehow it is more right than the planned version ever could have been.

Nosa’s hand tightens on mine.

I almost pull away. Not because I want distance but because his closeness is making it harder to hold myself together, and I need to hold myself together for what is about to come out of his mouth.

“Nosa.” Iya Kuti folds her hands in her lap, that small, deliberate gesture she makes when she is about to say something she has considered carefully. “I want you to pray on this. I know you love Kikelomo. You have said so and I have seen it, and I believe you both carry a genuine conviction about this relationship.” A pause. “But I want you to go back to God. To ask Him to lead you through this clearly. If after your prayers He confirms you forward, then we trust Him together. And if He asks you to step back—” her eyes hold his without flinching— “do not feel pressured to stay.”

Do not feel pressured to stay.

The words hit me and I almost jolt at the reality of it, at how casually my own mother has just handed him a door, wide open, no judgment attached, no hard feelings implied. At how Nosa can, right now, at this exact moment, consider all the variables involved and choose to walk through it. I swallow, watching him, waiting for his response, my whole body gone still in the way it goes still right before something important.

He’s silent for a long time, longer than feels comfortable, and when he eventually speaks, he’s picking his words carefully, each one weighed before it leaves his mouth.

“I didn’t think there’s a need to say this now, but since you began talking, I couldn’t ignore the prompting in my heart to speak.” His hand stays on me and for a moment, he squeezes it softly, a small anchor thrown my way before he continues.

“When I was still trying to win Kikelomo’s heart, I used to talk to the Lord about her a whole lot.” An embarrassed laugh escapes him, boyish and unguarded, and I rub his hand slowly to encourage him, some instinct in me needing him to know I’m still right here, still listening, still his. “One morning during Bible study, He told me these exact words: I am your shield and exceeding great reward.”

“Hmm.” Iya Kuti nods, slow and thoughtful, following where his words are moving to before he’s even finished laying the path.

“I waited on that verse throughout the week. It was the same thing He said to Abraham, and I kept asking myself — why was He saying the same to me? I didn’t understand it then, but somehow I knew, deep down, that it had to do with Kikelomo.”

I stay still on my seat, waiting for the rest of his words, my chest tight with something I don’t have a name for yet.

“Two nights ago, I was talking to the Lord again. I was bothered, deeply bothered, about everything Adanna had told me and even Kike herself. And I was speaking to the Lord about it, laying it all out, every fear I had.” He pauses there, his jaw working, like the memory still costs him something to revisit out loud. “Then, He said the same words to me again.”

He moved forward a bit, closer to the edge of the sofa.

“And it was the assurance I needed to know that I was not mistaken about this.” He paused, and continued, his voice gaining a settled strength. “I know I’m a prince and I might become a King someday, the Lord willing. I know every throne wants an heir to it. And I know this is a complex situation to a mere man, ma’am — I’m not pretending it isn’t. But I take God by His word. And I’m going to rest in the assurance of what He has said to me. Whatever that costs me, wherever it leads.”

The room goes very quiet.

I am looking at him and I do not fully trust what my face is doing. This man. This specific, extraordinary, impossible man sitting beside me in my mother’s sitting room, holding my hand and saying these things like they are simply true, like the complexity is real and the conviction is bigger than the complexity, and the choosing is already done.

I look up at the ceiling to keep the tears from falling. I have had enough good crying today. My eyes are already tired of it. But I make a note — a deep, private, pressing note in the back of my heart — to get on my knees tonight and thank Jesus specifically, with specificity and detail, for Nosa. For the gift of a man who knows how to hold God by His word.

I look at them both — my mother believing God for a child I’m told my own body can’t carry, and Nosa holding on to Jesus’s word about me like it’s the only ground solid enough to stand on — and feel the faith rise in me, stronger and deeper than it was even an hour ago. I want to hug these people, to draw them both close and let them feel the bursts in my heart, the overwhelming love encompassing the entirety of my being as I look at them. But I stay seated because we’re not done with this conversation, and some things need to be said out loud, in order, before I’m allowed to fall apart with gratitude.

"So, Mummy." His voice is warm when he says it — Mummy, like the word is already familiar. "Nothing has changed. Jesus's word is still the same. If anything—" and here something softens in his face, something that is not for my mother but for me, though he is still looking at her— "I think I love this woman considerably more, having learned the things I now know about her."

I stop looking at my mother.

My eyes are solely focused on this man beside me. At the sincerity of his words, the depth of his mind, the carefulness of his approach — nothing rushed, nothing performed, just a man saying true things because they are true. I look at him and I want to be a better woman. I want to be a grounded woman. Because this man, as much as he’s my man, is such a grounded child of God, and standing next to that kind of steadiness makes me want to grow roots of my own just as deep.

His voice makes its way through my thought and I blink back to reality.

“Besides,” he adds, and now there is a gentleness in his voice, the voice of someone speaking a truth he wants to land softly, “many people walk into marriage certain they will have children and they don't. And others wanted none and God surprised them. The outcomes have never been entirely in human hands.” He pauses. “How much more when the God who has already spoken is the same God we are both following?”

Iya Kuti is nodding. I can see the peace settling into her face — the particular peace of a woman whose prayers have been working in secret for years and are now, quietly, arriving in the light. I see her exhale, just slightly, just once, and something in it tells me she has been holding that breath for a very long time.

His hand finds mine without him looking down to find it.

“So, ma’am.” A beat. Quiet. Then: “Could you please grant us your blessing? I’d like to marry your daughter. As soon as she’ll have me.

“Nosaaa!” I hit him playfully, my cheeks turning red, heat rushing up my neck so fast I’m sure my whole face has gone the color of stew. This guy is too direct. It was the same thing he did when he was trying to ask me out — no warning, no buildup, just straight to the point like subtlety was a language he never learned. “You haven’t even asked me, babeee.”

A soft smile plays on his lips, unbothered, entirely pleased with himself. “I should ask your mom first.” He turns back to Iya Kuti and inclines his head, a small, respectful bow, as natural as breathing. “You have taken extraordinary care of her, ma’am. You have held her through things I am still learning the full shape of, and she is who she is in no small part because of who you are.” He holds my mother’s gaze. “I’d like to take it from here. Would you allow me?”

The sitting room is completely still.

Iya Kuti is looking at him. Then she looks at me. Then back at him. The movement of her eyes between us is slow and deliberate, the look of a woman who has been praying a specific prayer for a long time and is now sitting inside the answered version of it, taking inventory of all its details.

“So,” she says, turning to me with that particular expression — the one that has always meant she is about to make a point and is going to enjoy making it. “You want him to ask you first before he asks me?”

I shake my head quickly. “No ma.”

“Do you know,” she begins, settling deeper into the cushions like a woman preparing to teach a lesson, “are you aware that if your father was here, he would have pulled Nosa aside to ask for his intention towards you? In private, man to man, before either of you got a single word about it?”

“Yes ma.”

“So Nosa is doing the right thing. He is asking the right person first.”

“Yes ma,” I say again, quieter.

Beside me, Nosa is waiting, and I can see a bit of nervousness in his frame even though he’s trying so hard to act tough, sitting up a little too straight, jaw set a little too firm. I almost smile at how cute he is — this man who faced down my mother’s tears and a woman’s brutal history without flinching, now visibly bracing for a different kind of verdict. Iya Kuti focuses on him fully now, her expression shifting into something more deliberate.

“Nosa.” Her voice has settled into the register she uses when she has made a decision and is walking toward it. “I have heard you. And I believe God has been doing a genuine work in you.” A pause. “But I have a few questions before I give my answer.”

Nosa nods once. “Of course, ma’am.”

“Your family. Your people.” She folds her hands. “Are they aware that you are with a Yoruba woman?”

“Yes ma’am. They know.”

“And they are comfortable with it?”

“My father gave his blessing before I travelled back to the States. And now that I’m back, he is asking when he will meet her.”

“I’ve spoken to him on a video call,” I add, because I cannot help it.

Iya Kuti turns to me. “I didn’t ask you. I am speaking to Nosa.”

“Sorry ma.” I mutter, biting back the smile that wants to surface anyway.

Nosa smiles beside me and I pinch his side softly, punishing him for finding my scolding funny. He gently pulls my hand away from him and rests it on my lap, patting it once, mock-serious. Okay, no playing. We’re having a serious conversation. Noted, apparently, though the corner of his mouth still hasn’t fully behaved itself.

“Good.” She nods, returning to him. “I ask because marriage is a serious commitment, and a woman cannot fully separate herself from her husband’s family. I would not want Kikelomo going somewhere she is not truly welcome.” She pauses. “If your father has given his blessing, that is enough for me on that matter.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“One more question.” She adjusts the throw pillow behind her back, unhurried, making him wait not unkindly but deliberately. “You are a prince. Will this mean that Kikelomo would have to relocate to Edo when you marry?”

“No ma’am.” He sits slightly forward. “My father has business operations here in Lagos — a consulting firm, Haydires, working with the federal government on tax collection, digital infrastructure, large-scale projects. I will be overseeing the headquarters here.” A small, self-deprecating smile finds his mouth. “I’m just beginning to learn the ropes.”

Iya Kuti looks at him for a long moment. The silence is not uncomfortable. It is the silence of a woman arriving at the end of her questions and finding that the answers have satisfied her.

Then she smiles.

“That’s good. Well done.” She pauses, letting the silence stretch just long enough to make both of us hold our breath, before finally allowing the smile she’s clearly been saving. “I have no other question for you, Nosa. You are a capable man, and I believe you’ll treat my daughter well. You have my blessings.”

He bows his head a little, something in his shoulders visibly loosening, minutes of worry finally allowed to unclench. “Thank you, ma’am.”

Iya Kuti smiles widely, the smile of a woman who has been waiting a long time to give exactly this answer. “You’re welcome. I’ll be praying for you both.” Her eyes move to me, softening further, something private passing between mother and daughter that needs no words at all. “The two of you.”

“This man.” I shake my head slowly, the smile already on my face before I can do anything about it. “You just have your way of surprising me.”

We are sitting in his car now, engine off, the world outside gone quiet and unimportant. I have turned toward him in my seat the way I always end up turning toward him — inevitably, some orientation that happens before I notice I have done it. The excitement from our conversation is still warm in my chest, a little dizzy, the kind of feeling I had locked carefully behind a door for eleven days and am only now, tentatively, letting back out.

He moves his eyes to me slowly. A small smirk plays at the corner of his mouth — the particular one that tells me he already knows exactly what he is about to do to my composure and has made peace with doing it anyway.

“You’re surprised I want to marry you?” The teasing note in his voice is unhurried, comfortable. “From the first time I carried you, I somehow perceived I was prophesying into my future.”

“Whatttt?“ The laugh bursts out of me before I can catch it — loud and surprised and entirely undignified, and I do not care even slightly. “Nosa, I was so mortified. You just picked me up like you go about picking people up as a regular activity.”

The smirk has deepened. His eyes are tracking my mouth the way they do when he is enjoying himself more than he intends to show.

“I swear, that night, I could not stop thinking about it.”

“Oh.” He bats his eyelashes, and it is the most unfairly attractive thing I have seen in eleven days. It should not be legal. Something so small should not be allowed to be that effective. “You were up thinking about me?”

The heat rushes to my face so fast I press my palm against my cheek. “No. No, not in the way you’re implying. Not at all.”

“Hm.”

“I’m serious. I was mostly angry at myself for getting carried away with how good you looked and how nice you smelled. I was not thinking about you because I liked you. I want to be very clear about that.”

“If you say so, babe.” The smugness is unbearable. Truly, genuinely, world-historically unbearable.

“I’m serioussss!” I can hear myself losing the argument in real time and I hate that he can hear it too. He raises his eyebrows and smiles — wide and unguarded, the smile that lives in the upper half of his face as much as his mouth — and something in my chest does the thing it always does when he smiles at me like that.

“Why are you smiling now?”

“Because I missed you.” The teasing drains out of his voice all at once, replaced underneath it with something rawer, something that has been waiting behind the banter for exactly this moment to surface. “I missed this. I missed teasing you and watching you try to defend yourself and fail completely.” He exhales — long and slow, the exhale of a man letting something go. “God, Kikelomo. It was so hard. These eleven days.”

“I’m sorry, babe.” The playfulness goes quiet in me too. I reach for his hand, needing the contact, needing my hands to confirm what my eyes are telling them — that he is here, within reach, real. “I missed you too. I couldn’t let myself think about you because I knew — I knew — the moment I did, I would come running. And I was trying so hard to be strong. To be the one protecting you, for once, instead of the other way around.”

“So who convinced you to come back?”

“I willed myself to think about you.” I say it simply, because it is simply true. “I sat on that balcony in Abeokuta and I stopped cutting the thought off before it finished forming, and I let myself feel the full weight of missing you. And it was—” I pause. “It was a lot. It was a considerable amount of weight.” I move my hand to his shoulder, needing more contact, needing the realness of him. “I also met with Jaiye.”

He sits upright sharply. The ease drains from his frame in an instant. “You did?”

“Yes. What’s wrong?”

He runs a hand briefly through his hair, the gesture of someone reordering their thoughts around unexpected information. “We’ve been trying to reach him. Kuye and I. Since yesterday. Nonstop.”

“Really?”

“Yes.” He nods, still visibly recalibrating. “We were trying to find a way to get to Bimbo. To get her whereabouts. Kuye thought Jaiye might know.”

“Wow.” I sit straighter, something like disbelief settling over me at how close our paths had run without either of us knowing. At how the Holy Ghost had apparently been coordinating things from angles neither of us could see. “That was one of the reasons I invited him over. To get Bimbo’s whereabouts.” I pause. “And to forgive him. I needed to say it where he could hear it.”

His eyes go soft at that. Admiration moves through them. Then, almost immediately, something else — worry, sharp and parental, arriving fast behind the warmth.

“Kikelomo. Was it safe to meet him alone? You should have waited until—”

“Babe.” I rest my hands on him. “Brother Kuti arranged the meeting. He was aware of everything, from start to finish. Nothing about it was reckless.”

“I don’t want you meeting with men alone.” He draws a careful breath, and I can see him choosing his words with real attention, not wanting to sound like he is issuing a decree so much as confessing something that lives in him. “I know your brother orchestrated the meeting. I trust him completely. But I wasn’t there. And your safety—” he exhales— “your safety is something I can’t be casual about. Not even when the threat is probably low. Not even then.”

“You’re right.” I do not say it to placate him. I say it because he is. “I should have thought it through better. I’m sorry.” I find the back of his hand and trace soft circles on it, wanting him to feel that I mean it. “I was completely safe. The security guard was present the entire time. And Jaiye—” a small sound escapes me, something almost like a laugh— “Jaiye could not hold my gaze for more than two seconds at a stretch. If that helps.”

Something in his jaw eases.

“I’m just glad you’re back.” The roughness in his voice when he says it is the kind that comes from a feeling too large to carry neatly. He picks up my hand and presses his lips to the back of it, letting them rest there a beat longer than the gesture strictly requires. “I’m glad you’re back here with me, Kikelomo.”

I look at him holding my hand against his mouth and I feel it move through me — the warmth of it, the simplicity of it, the particular devastation of a gesture so small and so complete.

“You’ve become home to me,” I say quietly. “That’s the only way I know how to say it. These past few days — I felt like a woman who had left the one place that actually fit her. Like I was carrying myself around in a place I didn’t belong, going through the motions of existing.” I lift my free hand and bring it to his jaw, feeling the faint roughness of it under my palm, the warmth of his skin. “I’m sorry for making you feel the way you felt. I love you, this man.”

I lean in and press a soft kiss to his right cheek. I stay there a moment longer than I planned to. Long enough to breathe him in — that particular combination of cologne and clean fabric and him, the combination my body has apparently decided means safe, here, home — and I feel him go very still under my hands.

When I pull back, his voice comes out low and rougher than before. “You’re trying to bribe me.”

“Is it working?”

“No.” He says it with an expression that is doing everything except convincing me.

“I’m sorry now. What more do you want, sir?”

He is quiet for a moment, something turning over behind his eyes. Then: “Go on a date with me.”

I blink. “What?”

“That’s the only apology I’ll accept.” His eyes find mine, and there is the teasing note, but underneath it, there is something more earnest. Something that is sincerely waiting for my yes, some nervousness tucked behind the confidence like a hand held behind a back.

Our first date. Since he came back. Since everything.

“I’d like to,”

He lets out a breath — an actual, audible breath of relief, and this time I do almost laugh, and I do let a smile take over my whole face.

“Thank you for saying yes.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“It’s a surprise.”

I nod, already making peace with it, because this is who Nosa is — everything arrives wrapped in thought, considered, prepared, nothing small or careless about how he chooses things for me. “You wouldn’t tell me even if I begged, would you?”

“No.”

“I know.” I let it go. “Anyway, there’s something else I need to tell you.”

He shifts to face me fully. “I’m all ears.”

“Jaiye forwarded Bimbo’s confession to my mail.” I watch his face as I say it. “She sent it to him some months ago, apparently, when she thought she was going to die. Because — according to Jaiye — she is currently at UCH Ibadan. Waiting for a kidney transplant.”

“Wow.”

“I know.” I am still turning it over myself, still unsure exactly what to do with the strange mixture of things it stirs in me. “And apparently she’s not sorry. She sent the mail out of obligation rather than remorse. Facing death has a way of making people confess things they would never otherwise say out loud — whether or not the confession comes from a changed heart.” I unlock my phone and open the mail and pass it to him. “Here. It’s quite a lot.”

He takes it from me carefully. He reads.

I watch his face.

His jaw tightens at intervals — working, holding something back, something that has to do with me and what was done to me and the particular protectiveness he cannot help where I am concerned. His eyes move down the screen slowly, taking in everything Bimbo wrote in her own words in the shadow of what she believed was her ending. At some point he draws a long, controlled breath, and then sets the phone down gently on his lap, like it has become heavier than he expected.

“Babe.” His voice is quiet. “This is a lot.”

“Yeah.” Mine comes out smaller than I intend.

“And it’s enough. It’s enough to clear your name.”

Hope threads through me before I can stop it — bright and quick and a little frightening in how much I want it. “Is it really?”

“Yes.” He nods, certainty settling into his voice. “Initially, we were thinking we could get her to do some videos, you know, something more active, more current. But this is enough on its own.” He pauses, thinking, one hand drumming lightly against his knee. “The only thing is — we’d pull more traction if she’s able to confess by herself, publicly, in her own voice, rather than us just producing an old email.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.” I murmur, genuinely confused, tilting my head. “What traction are you trying to pull, exactly?”

“We want to partner with BBC to air the story.”

“What?” My voice comes out sharp, fear rising fast in me, sudden and cold. “Why do you want us to do that? Wouldn’t that mean letting everyone know I lost my womb? Everyone, Nosa. Strangers. People I’ll never meet, forming opinions about my body.”

“Kikelomo.” He shifts in his seat, turning fully toward me, giving me his whole attention. “We can discuss with them and have that part left out entirely, if that’s what you want. That is your decision.” His voice is firm, the voice of someone who has thought about this carefully and wants me to feel that. “But—” he softens— “can I say something?”

I nod, not quite trusting my voice yet.

“It’s not your fault that you do not have a womb.” He says it plainly, without ceremony. “You speak about it as though you did something wrong. As though you were complicit in what happened to you.” His eyes hold mine. “You were a girl, Kikelomo. A girl who trusted the wrong person in a season when she had no reason not to. That is all that happened.”

I press my lips together.

“And do you know what your story would be,” he continues, leaning in slightly, his voice dropping lower, carrying something underneath the words that is not argument but genuine wonder, “when the world finds out that a woman who was told she could not have a child ends up carrying one anyway? Do you know how many women are sitting somewhere right now believing the exact thing that was told to you — believing it about their own bodies — who would find something to hold onto in your story?” He exhales. “That story belongs to them too. Not just to you.”

I sit with it.

I feel his words working their way through the fear, past the first layer of it and then the second, finding their way into somewhere softer and more honest underneath.

“Thank you, babe.” My voice has gone quiet with it. “Your words — they really are balm to my soul. I mean that completely.”

“That’s what I’m here for.”

The car goes quiet and we let it. It is the comfortable kind of quiet — the silence of two people content simply to exist in the same small space after eleven days of not. I let myself feel it. The warmth of him nearby, the smell of him, the particular quality of being in a car with someone who is home to you.

“Babe.” A thought surfaces, insistent enough that I can’t leave it unsaid.

“Yeah?”

“I want to go and see Bimbo. At UCH.” I watch his face carefully as I say it. “And I want you to come with me.”

Something tightens in his jaw. An old tension returning. He nods, measured. “I just —I just do not know how to see her without thinking of how to get her arrested. I’m being honest with you.”

“Especially with the confession, yeah?”

“Yes.” He exhales. “That mail could put her in a room she doesn’t come out of for a very long time. I know people who could make that happen efficiently, if that’s the direction we go.”

“I know.” I rest my hands over his, feeling the tension still coiled underneath, wanting it to ease. “But I want to give her the chance to do it herself first. And then BBC can come in after.”

He thinks about it. “That gives us two separate forms of evidence. The written confession and her own public admission on top of it.”

“Exactly.”

“Hmm.” His voice grows teasing again, the tension finally easing out of him. “Detective Kikelomo Adeyemi.”

I flip an invisible hair over my shoulder, playing along instantly. “Yeah, that’s me.”

“Discoverer of hidden things…”

“Yesss.” I flip another invisible hair, thoroughly enjoying myself now.

“Mysterious above them all.”

“Babeeeee.“ I press a hand to my chest in theatrical outrage. “I’m not mysterious abeggg!”

He is smiling widely now, the earlier heaviness gone from his face completely, and I feel the corresponding lightness in my own chest — the particular relief of watching someone you love stop carrying something heavy.

“I discover new things about you literally every day, Kikelomo.” His eyes are glinting with laughter. “You are mysterious. Deeply, thoroughly, undeniably mysterious.”

“In Adanna’s words — shioor.“

“Speaking of Adanna.” He shakes his head, the smile still there. “You need to call them. You need to call them both and receive your earful.”

“I know.” I shake my own head, equal parts dread and anticipation. “Adanna is going to have a speech prepared. With structure and supporting points.”

“Oreoluwa missed you too.” His voice softens completely at the name, something gentle moving into it. “Adanna said he’s been pressing buttons on her phone trying to call someone. Muttering tee-teh. Apparently that’s his version of your name.”

My eyes fill before I can stop them. “Aww. My baby.”

“They all missed you.”

“I’ll call them tonight.” I mean it the moment I say it, the thought of their voices already warming something in me that has been slightly cold for eleven days. “I’ll call them, babe.”

“Good.”

He smiles and I smile and our eyes hold, and the silence shifts—thickens, warms, becomes something dense and alive that presses against my skin. I feel it the way you feel a storm front move in: the sudden drop in pressure, the charge in the air, long before you can name the danger. The car has shrunk. The space between us has collapsed into a single, trembling inch.

I can see myself reflected small and bright in his eyes.

His gaze travels across my face without hurry, without the usual careful control, as if he has momentarily forgotten that looking at me like this is a risk. Then it drops to my mouth and stays. One second. Two. Long enough for the air to change temperature. Long enough for every nerve ending in my body to lean toward that single point of contact.

My breath snags halfway up my chest. Everything in me tilts—barely, invisibly—toward him. I can feel the heat of his body an impossible distance away. I can smell his skin. I can hear the quiet, deliberate way he is still breathing when I am not sure I am breathing at all.

His jaw flexes once, hard.

Then, with visible effort, he looks away. I watch the entire decision unfold in real time: the sharp cut of his gaze, the disciplined drop of his head against the headrest, the rough drag of his hand through his hair like a man physically forcing himself back into his own body. The looking had cost him. The not-reaching had cost him more. And the knowledge of that cost moves through me like heat and panic and desire all at once.

“Kikelomo.” His voice is low, scraped raw at the edges. “I think it’s time for me to go.”

I nod once. I do not trust my mouth. My heart is hammering against the cage of my ribs hard enough that I’m half-convinced he can hear it. I am grateful—genuinely, desperately grateful—that one of us still has discipline, because in this exact second I am not certain I possess enough for both of us.

“I’ll text you the details of our date.” Quieter now. The roughness still there, vibrating under every word.

“Alright, babe.” My fingers find the door handle. Close around it like an anchor.

“Kikelomo.”

I pause. Look back.

“I love you.” He says it the way he says every true thing— with the absolute certainty of someone who has already looked all the way down into the words and found them solid.

“I love you too.” I give it back the same way. Same quiet. Same certainty. Same barely contained desire underneath.

Then I open the door and step out into the evening, carrying it with me like something warm pressed against my chest, and I do not look back, because if I look back I will not leave, and I have a phone call to make, a date to look forward to and a life to return to.

And it is a very good life.

Author’s Note: Happy weekend yall. I’ll try so much to be consistent with posting. Next week, we may have our posting back to back. I’m trying to finish up as soon as possible. Thank you as always, for reading.

Catch up on previous episode here.

Nosa blurred out the rest of Iya Kuti’s conversation with her lace supplier in Germany, the words dissolving into background noise the way a fan hums itself out of notice after enough minutes in a room. He had arrived about thirty minutes earlier and spent the first ten calming her down about the sudden spike in lace prices and the import duties she was bitterly complaining about, nodding at the right moments, murmuring the sympathetic sounds she needed to hear. The next ten minutes he spent helping her bring down materials from the store, his arms full of fabric that smelled faintly of camphor and dust. Only when Kuye walked in did he remember why he had actually come.

Now he sat with Kuye, listening as the younger man explained how the assignment had gone, his own hands laced together between his knees, elbows resting on them, the posture of a man holding himself carefully upright.

“I called the Jaiye guy twice, but his line was busy. I sent him two texts so he’d know who was trying to reach him, but still nothing.”

“Since yesterday?” Nosa’s voice came out flatter than he meant it to, worn thin by too many days of asking variations of the same question and receiving the same shape of disappointing answer.

“Yes.” Kuye drew a deep breath, dragging a hand down his face. “Yes, Nosa. Since yesterday.”

Nosa nodded slowly, turning the silence over in his mind. Was the man refusing to help because of their last encounter? Kuye’s account of his meeting with Jaiye had not sounded pleasant. The guy could easily dig in his heels and refuse them out of pure, petty spite, and there would be nothing any of them could do about a closed mouth on the other end of an unanswered phone.

Lord, Nosa muttered inwardly, the prayer arriving without ceremony, worn smooth from overuse this past week and a half, please touch that man’s heart. Please.

Nothing mattered more than having Kikelomo home again—safe, with him, with all of them, whole in whatever way she needed to be whole. If it meant begging the Jaiye guy, he was ready. He looked up at Kuye, forcing something steadier into his voice than what actually lived in his chest. “We’ll keep trying. Well done. You’ve done more than most people would have.”

Kuye nodded, the compliment landing somewhere he didn’t quite know how to hold, and looked away first. From the passage, Iya Kuti moved into the dining room, still haggling over figures with the supplier, her voice rising and falling in that particular cadence she reserved for people trying to overcharge her. Nosa made a mental note to ask later whether the negotiation had succeeded, some small, ordinary corner of his mind still functioning even now, even through everything.

“Bro, I had a long day,” Kuye muttered, rising to his feet, already half-turned toward the passage. “I need to take some re—”

The rest of the word died on his tongue, swallowed whole. Nosa followed his gaze, more out of instinct than urgency, expecting nothing more than Iya Kuti returning with her phone still pressed to her ear.

Kikelomo.

She stood at the entrance, frozen, as if she could not decide whether to step inside or turn and flee back into whatever days of hiding had felt like. Nosa blinked, hard, once, twice, half-expecting the image to dissolve the way exhaustion had conjured her face for him more nights than he wanted to admit—in the ceiling above his bed, in the shape of a stranger’s silhouette on the street, in the particular slant of afternoon light through a window. It did not dissolve. She was real, unmistakably, achingly real—standing in the doorway in clothes he didn’t recognize, sadder than he remembered, her eyes locked on his, his on hers, and for a long, suspended moment neither of them seemed to remember there was anyone else in the room at all.

Time did something strange then. It didn’t stop, exactly—he could still hear Iya Kuti’s voice threading through the passage, still register the hum of the air conditioner overhead—but it thinned out, stretched itself so far that a single second held an entire flood inside it. Relief arrived first, so violent and physical it nearly buckled something in his chest, a wave breaking against a shore that had spent eleven days believing the water might never return. Then, close behind it, anger—a low, steady heat, the kind that had been banking itself for days under the weight of not knowing whether she was alive or safe or thinking of him at all. Then sadness, sudden and enormous, for every hour she must have spent alone somewhere carrying this, for every version of himself he’d had to be for other people while quietly falling apart in private. And beneath all of it, holding all of it together, something fiercer than any of the rest: compassion so complete it nearly hurt more than the anger did, an ache to simply reach her, to close the distance and confirm with his own hands that she was whole.

“Iya Kuti,” he heard Kuye call toward the passage, the word arriving from somewhere very far away, but the rest of the room had narrowed entirely down to the two of them, to the eight or nine feet of tiled floor separating him from a woman he had grieved without a body to grieve over. His heart stumbled through the storm of it all at once—relief, anger, sadness, fierce and unrelenting compassion—each one arriving on the heels of the last with no space to properly land before the next one crashed in behind it. All the days of fear and silence began to unravel at the simple, staggering sight of her standing there, breathing, upright, present.

“Oluwa o ṣé ooo! Elédàá mi, e ṣé o! Thank you, Jesus!”

Iya Kuti’s voice yanked him back into the room, into his own body, into the present moment he’d briefly stepped clean outside of. She rushed forward, her short frame almost bouncing between jump and run, slippers slapping against the tile, and pulled Kikelomo into a bone-crushing hug, murmuring “Thank you, Jesus” over and over into her daughter’s hair while tears brimmed on her lashes and finally spilled, unashamed, down the deep grooves of her face.

“Mum, I’m sorry,” Kike whispered against her shoulder, her voice cracking clean in half on the word, her arms coming up slowly, almost disbelieving, to return the embrace. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Ó tí dáa, Kike. It’s alright, my girl.” Iya Kuti pulled back just far enough to hold her daughter’s face between both hands, thumbs sweeping roughly at her own tears. “I’m just glad you’re home. I’m just glad you’re home.” She patted her daughter’s head repeatedly, small insistent taps, as if reassuring herself with each one that this was no dream conjured out of desperate prayer.

They drew apart, though Iya Kuti’s hands stayed anchored on her daughter’s shoulders, unwilling yet to fully let go. Her eyes stayed fixed on Kike’s face, roving it the way you’d study something you’d been told you might never see again. “Pẹ̀lẹ́, ọkọ mi.”

A soft sniff, Kike’s chin trembling. “Thank you, Iya Kuti.”

Nosa watched the way Kike’s gaze struggled to remain on her mother, dutiful, present, and failed, over and over. Every few seconds it flicked toward him—quick, involuntary, like something pulled rather than chosen—a flash of guilt crossing her face each time before she looked away again, unable to hold his eyes for longer than a breath.

She’s feeling guilty, he thought, and the observation arrived without triumph, only a strange, aching tenderness. That’s a good start.

He wanted to go to her—wanted it with an intensity that made his hands curl faintly at his sides—to check with his own eyes and hands that she was unharmed, to pull her somewhere private where the walls wouldn’t have ears, and tell her exactly how terrified her absence had made him, how her letter had shattered something in him that he wasn’t certain had finished putting itself back together, how simply seeing her standing there, breathing, was already beginning to heal cracks he’d thought were permanent. Instead he stayed seated, spine straight, hands still laced between his knees, giving mother and daughter the moment they needed, though it cost him something real to sit still through it.

“Hope you’re not hurt anywhere,” Iya Kuti asked, her hands moving now to Kike’s arms, checking, patting, the instinctive audit of a mother reassuring herself limb by limb.

Kike shook her head, lips forming a small pout that Nosa felt land directly in his chest. “No, Iya Kuti. I was kept safe. I promise.”

“Yes.” The older woman’s eyes scanned her from head to toe, missing nothing. “Kuti did a good job. I’ll thank him properly.”

Kike’s eyes widened, alarm breaking through the guilt for the first time. “Wait—what? You know?” She sighed, long and heavy. “I told him not to tell you. I specifically told him.”

Iya Kuti gave a short sneer, entirely unbothered by the accusation. “Kike, come closer.”

Kike stepped forward, slowly, the way you’d approach something you weren’t fully sure was safe yet. Her gaze found Nosa again and lingered this time—two full seconds, maybe three, longer than any of the glances before it. He swallowed hard at how thoroughly that one ordinary look undid him, at how something as simple as being seen by her could still, after everything, knock the wind clean out of him. Jesus, help me say what I need to say to this woman without getting distracted.

“Ouchhhh! Iya Kuti!”

Nosa’s head snapped up, and the scene almost made him laugh despite everything sitting heavy in his chest. Iya Kuti had seized Kike’s ear and was twisting it firmly, with the brisk efficiency of a woman who had done this exact maneuver many times before and considered herself something of an expert. Beside him, Kuye smirked, thoroughly enjoying the show, arms crossed like a man settling in for entertainment he felt he’d earned. Nosa felt the conflicting urge both to laugh and to rescue her—but this was Iya Kuti. There was an order to things. They could only watch.

“You see, Kike,” she said, addressing the two men more than her daughter while still twisting, her voice carrying the particular satisfaction of someone finally getting to deliver a speech they’d been rehearsing for days, “I have Someone called the Holy Spirit. He unveils every secret to me. Every single one. You cannot hide from me and think you have hidden from Him.”

“Mummy, please—”

“Please what?”

“My ear…” Pain coloured her voice, thin and pleading. The lobe was turning red between Iya Kuti’s fingers. Something in Nosa’s chest tightened sharply; he looked away, unable to watch her hurt even in something this small, this deserved, this almost affectionate in its violence.

“Iya Kuti, don’t listen to her,” Kuye called, grinning openly now. “Twist it some more. Maybe it will restore her sense of reasoning. God knows she needs it.”

Nosa shot him a look sharp enough to make Kuye lift both hands in mock surrender, muttering, “Okay, okay, Mummy, I think that’s enough now.”

“Má bà mí sọ anything. Don’t say anything to me.” Iya Kuti kept her grip on the ear a beat longer, savoring it, and fixed Kike with a stern stare that held no real anger underneath it, only relief wearing anger’s clothes. “Did you think I would welcome you home without reminding you that I am still your mother? That I still have rights over this body I carried for nine months?”

She glanced around the room, almost wistful. “It’s only because I don’t have a cane here. Otherwise I would have wiped you with it, and you would have thanked me for it after.”

“Iya Kuti.” Nosa spoke before he realized he had stood, his chair scraping back, his voice coming out quieter than he intended, worn soft at the edges. “Please, ma’am. Kikelomo is sorry. We’re all sorry for worrying you.”

“Yes, Mummy, I’m sorry,” Kike echoed, tears already gathering, spilling over before she could stop them. “I’m sincerely sorry for worrying everyone. I never meant to hurt anybody, I promise, I only ever meant to protect—” Her voice broke off there, unable to finish the sentence in front of the room.

Iya Kuti released her ear at last. Kike stepped back quickly, cupping the side of her head, face contorted between real pain and reluctant, watery laughter.

“It’s because of you, Nosa. Tori ti ẹ ni o.” The older woman looked from daughter to almost-son-in-law, something knowing and warm in her expression now. “Someone you ought to be angry with, and yet here you are, still begging on her behalf before she’s even said a proper word to you.”

A small smile tugged at Nosa’s lips despite everything still churning beneath it. “We’re sorry, ma.”

“It’s alright.” Iya Kuti sighed, some of the fight visibly leaving her shoulders all at once, exhaustion finally allowed to show through the theatrics. “Ìfẹ́ ló ń ṣe yín. It’s love that’s doing this to both of you.” Then her eyes lit with sudden recollection, widening. “Jesus! I completely forgot I was on a call with my supplier.” She rounded on Kike. “Ṣé o rí nǹkan tí o fà? Can you see the trouble you’ve caused? That man is going to think I abandoned the negotiation.”

She hurried back toward the dining table and snatched up her phone, already talking before it reached her ear. “Let me finish this call. That man is insisting on a figure I cannot accept. It’s either he comes down or I call my other supplier, simple.”

“I hope he agrees,” Nosa said, a fond, tired smile in his voice.

“Abi.” She disappeared around the corner, her voice already rising back into negotiation mode.

“Where’s Timehin?” Kike asked, carefully looking at Kuye rather than Nosa, as though redirecting her attention there were a small mercy she was granting herself.

“You have your phone now, yeah?” Kuye retorted. “Turn it on and call her yourself.”

“Kuye…” She took a step closer, her hand finding his shoulder, and his whole posture shifted at the touch, the fight visibly draining out of him in one long exhale. “I’m sorry. I really am. I know I put you through it too.”

“Did you use a different phone to contact Brother Kuti?” His voice had gone quieter, the teasing edge softening into something closer to genuine hurt trying not to show itself as hurt.

She pursed her lips and nodded slowly, guilt flickering openly across her face now that it was just the three of them. “He delivered a new one to the house where I was staying. It was the only way I knew you wouldn’t find me.”

“I see.” Kuye nodded, jaw working. “I’m still very displeased, though.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again, softer this time.

“This one you’re just saying ‘sorry, sorry, sorry’…” He shook his head, but a teasing note had crept back in, softening every word around its edges. “Abeggg.”

“But I am sincerely sorry,” she retorted, a small, familiar smile finally appearing, the first real flash of the old Kikelomo breaking through. “Or shouldn’t I say sorry again? Should I kneel? I can kneel.”

“Say it. Kneel, even. I went through a lot these past few days, managing Mummy alone.”

Nosa watched their exchange quietly, something loosening in his chest at the familiar banter, at how easily it still moved between them, unbroken by everything else. She was still the same Kikelomo with them—quick, warm, teasing even through tears. He only wondered, with a quiet ache he tried not to let show on his face, whether the same ease would be true with him, or whether the absence and one devastating letter had changed the shape of what stood between them for good.

“I’m glad you’re back.” Kuye tapped her lightly on the head, the gesture almost boyish, years of sibling shorthand compressed into one small motion. “I’ll leave you to Nosa now.”

Her eyes widened, panic flashing bright and sudden. “Uhm, Kuye, maybe you—”

“Nope. Face what you’ve done.”

Nosa nodded at him as he turned to leave, a silent thank-you passing between them, man to man. Kuye nodded back, a small smirk already forming on his lips as he retreated down the passage, leaving the room.

They were left alone in the sitting room.

From the corner, Iya Kuti’s voice continued on a lower, more measured octave, negotiating figures with a patience that belonged to an entirely different conversation than the one about to unfold here. Nosa’s eyes never left Kikelomo. He watched the faint, tell-tale shimmer gathering in her lashes—the one that always appeared right before she broke, the one he’d learned to recognize and had spent days aching to see again, even knowing it meant tears. She was looking at him too, unable to look away any longer now that no one else’s eyes were in the room to hide behind. The apology in her gaze was raw, almost physical, something he could feel land against his own chest before she’d said a single word, and it pulled at something deep inside him, something that had been clenched tight since the evening he’d read her letter on the floor of his empty house.

He sighed and took a slow step closer, the space between them shrinking by degrees, each one deliberate.

“Adeyemi.”

His voice came out lower than intended, rougher, carrying more of the last eleven days than he’d meant to let show this early. His gaze traveled over her face with deliberate slowness—forehead, the soft arch of her brows, the wet curve of her lashes, the slope of her nose, the full, trembling line of her mouth—memorizing each part the way you’d memorize something you’d nearly lost the right to look at again, before locking back on her eyes. The air between them thickened, charged with everything neither of them had said yet.

“You must be really mad at me,” she whispered, voice small, testing. “You’re calling me by my father’s name.”

“It’s a good name.” His eyes stayed on hers, unblinking, refusing to let the deflection work. “Kikelomo… are you okay?”

She turned her face away, lifting her chin as if gravity could stop the tears gathering there, could hold them in place through sheer will. “You’re looking at me like this… after everything I said to you.”

“Like what?”

A soft, broken sniff escaped her. When she brought her eyes back to his, the space between them felt charged in a way that had nothing to do with anger. “Like you’re still in love with me.”

“Because I am.”

The words left him quietly, almost roughly, no hesitation behind them at all, as though the question hadn’t been a question so much as an invitation he’d been waiting days to accept. A small, helpless sound followed, something between a laugh and a groan. “It’s not a difficult thing to know, Adeyemi. I’m a man in love with you. That hasn’t changed. Not for one single hour of these eleven days.”

“But I hurt you…” Her voice cracked on the last word, barely audible.

“Yeah, you did.” His voice stayed soft, but there was heat under it now, banked and real. “You hurt me. You hurt yourself and everyone around you.” He let that sit a moment. “That’s why I’m asking: are you okay?”

The tears came hard and fast, no longer held back by anything at all. “I’m not, Nosa. I’m afraid… I’m… I’m—”

He closed the last step in one fluid movement and pulled her into him, not waiting for the rest of the sentence, some instinct in him understanding she didn’t have the words left to finish it and didn’t need to.

She collapsed against his chest with a quiet, broken sound, fists twisting tightly into the fabric of his shirt as though she was terrified he might vanish the moment she loosened her grip. The contact was immediate and overwhelming—her soft curves pressed fully against the hard plane of his body, the faint scent of her skin rising between them, achingly familiar after days of only remembering it. He felt every tremor that ran through her, each one landing in his own chest like something transmitted directly, no barrier between her shaking and his own heartbeat.

He didn’t speak.

He simply held her while she shattered, his own heart pounding against the place where her cheek rested, hard enough that he wondered, distantly, if she could feel it too. One arm locked firmly around her waist, eliminating every last inch of space between them. The other hand slid up the length of her spine and into her hair, fingers threading through the soft strands, cradling the back of her head with a tenderness that contradicted the tension coiling low in his stomach, the ferocious need to simply keep her here, upright, safe, real.

“We’ll be fine, Kikelomo,” he murmured against her hair, voice rough, the words less a promise than a prayer he was speaking directly over her. “The Lord will teach us what to do.”

“But you’re mad at me.” Her words were muffled against his chest, warm breath ghosting through the fabric of his shirt. “You’re mad at me, and I’m mad at myself for making you mad at me.”

“Kikelomo… I’m not happy, yes. But I can’t stay mad at you.” He said it simply, without drama, like a fact he’d already made peace with long before she’d walked back through that door.

She cried harder at that, tears soaking through cotton and onto his skin. He felt every single one—hot, intimate, each drop its own small confession. Still he did not pull away. His thumb stroked slow, deliberate circles against the nape of her neck, the same patient rhythm he might have used to calm something wild and frightened, which, in this moment, wasn’t so far from true.

“I can’t stay mad at you,” he repeated, lips brushing her hair. “I’m just glad you’re safe.”

“You called me Adeyemi,” she sobbed, body shaking, arms tightening until there was no room left to breathe between them. “You’ve never called me Adeyemi. Not once. Not ever.”

Her heartbeat hammered against his chest—fast, erratic—then, slowly, over the space of several long breaths, gradually began to sync with his, the two rhythms finding each other the way water finds its level.

“Adeyemi is a beautiful name. I think it’s prophetic,” he murmured, pressing a soft, lingering kiss into her hair.

“Why?” She adjusted slightly, cheek sliding against his shirt until she found the perfect place over his heart.

“Because it means ‘I am worthy of the crown.’” He paused, letting the words settle before continuing. “And Kikelomo… you need to believe that. You need to believe you’re worthy of the crown God is bringing your way. Not because I’m saying it. Because it’s true whether I say it or not.”

She pulled back just enough to look up at him, still pressed close, unwilling to fully release the anchor of his arms. Their faces were inches apart. He could see the wet gleam on her lashes, the slight parting of her lips, the disbelief still fighting for space against something softer underneath it. Without quite thinking about it, he lifted a hand and brushed his thumb beneath one eye, catching a tear before it could fall further, the touch so gentle it seemed to startle her more than the tears themselves had.

“You looked the meaning up?”

“Yeah.” A shy, almost sheepish note entered his voice, the first lightness since she'd walked through the door, but his eyes never left hers. “When I was still trying to win your heart.” His thumb traced once along her cheekbone, unhurried. “I used to look up all sorts of things about you, you know. The meaning of your name. Your birthday. Things you posted on your Instagram page that would tell me more about you.” Then, quieter, charged with something that made her breath catch: “I think I'm still in the process of winning your heart… seeing that you ran from me the moment we hit a problem.”

She tried to ease away. His arms tightened instantly, a low note of amusement threading through his voice. “Are you trying to run away again?”

“No… I thought we were about to have a serious conversation.”

A slow smile curved his mouth, the first full one she’d seen from him since she’d walked in. “We can have it like this.” He tipped his forehead gently to rest against hers, foreheads touching, noses nearly brushing, the gesture more intimate somehow than the embrace had been. “I like you close. Humor me. I think I’ve earned it.”

His gaze drifted over her face. The air between them felt heavy, electric, eleven days of separation compressing itself into the small space still left unclosed.

“With the way you’re looking at me and holding me?” Her voice dropped, barely above a whisper. “Nosa… I’ll be distracted.”

“Good.” The word came out low, unrepentant, a small grin tugging at one corner of his mouth. “Be distracted. I’ve had eleven days of nothing but distraction myself, worrying about you. Consider this fair exchange.”

“Nosa!”

He released her with deliberate slowness, fingers trailing down her arms before finally letting go, reluctance visible in every inch of the retreat. “Yeah. Let’s sit… before I start getting other ideas.”

Her cheeks flushed a deep, beautiful red. She blinked rapidly, flustered in a way that looked almost like relief, like the return of something familiar and safe. “Babeee, stop!” She almost fled to the sofa, the sudden distance doing nothing to cool the heat still lingering on her skin.

“At least you’re not feeling sorry for yourself anymore,” he muttered, the smirk on his lips far too knowing as he followed and sat beside her.

He watched the way her throat worked as she swallowed. Her eyes found his again, searching.

“I don’t understand this our relationship, Nosa.”

“What do you not understand?”

“Why can’t we fight like normal people? I was prepared for the mean things you were going to say to me.”

“What?” A soft frown, genuine confusion breaking through. “Why would I do that?”

“Because that’s what people do when they fight. They say mean things… and sometimes they don’t even mean them.”

“Was that what Jaiye did to you when he found out?”

Nosa’s voice was quiet, intimate, no accusation in it, only a gentleness that invited rather than demanded. He reached out and took both her hands, turning them palm-up in his. His thumbs began tracing slow, deliberate lines across the sensitive skin of her palms.

“Adanna has told you everything.” Half question, half surrender, her eyes dropping briefly before returning to his.

He exhaled, unhurried, letting her see that this didn’t frighten him. “Yes, she has.” His fingers continued their unhurried path across her palm. “I won’t do that to you, Kikelomo. I do not say things I don’t mean. Not to hurt you. Not ever.” His eyes lifted to hers—full of everything he felt and had spent days unable to say to anyone. “Babe… please don’t cry.”

“I won’t.” She shifted closer without realising it, knees brushing his, seeking his warmth. “I’m just wondering what I did to deserve you.”

The words settled low and warm in his chest, and for a moment he simply sat with them, letting them land fully before answering. He had always felt undeserving of her—had felt it from the very first time he’d bumped into her. When Adanna told him the full story, the only thought that had remained standing in the wreckage was why God had chosen him—him, of all the men who might have loved her better, more easily—to be the one allowed to soothe her soul, to love her the way Jesus intended a woman to be loved. He had felt unworthy. And now, here she sat, feeling the exact same thing about herself. Two undeserving people finding each other anyway, learning—slowly, imperfectly, through the love of Christ—how to love each other rightly.

“Babe,” he began, voice lower now, more deliberate, “we’re a couple. Two people in love with each other.” He paused, searching her face for understanding before continuing. She nodded, eyes soft and open, giving him the permission to keep going. “When we have issues, we shouldn’t run from each other. That only shows there’s a lack of trust somewhere. And I understand why that trust isn’t automatic for you. I do.”

“Nosa, I’m—”

“Kikelomo… please let me speak.”

She fell silent immediately, something in his tone stilling her mid-sentence.

“I know I may have to prove myself to you over and over before you fully trust me…”

“You don’t have to do that…”

“I do.” His thumbs stilled on her palms, holding her gaze steady with his own. “Because your mind has been wired differently. People have hurt you badly—terribly. They’ve judged you without knowing you. So it’s normal, Kikelomo, completely normal, that you’d expect the same from me eventually. But it’s my responsibility to show you, again and again if I have to, that I’m a man you can safely hand every part of yourself to. Your pain, your fear, your insecurities… your love, your trust… your romance. All of it. I’m not going anywhere.”

Her eyes dropped to their joined hands, then rose again, something shifting open in them. “I was scared. That’s why I ran.”

“But you don’t have to be scared anymore.” He shifted closer, the last remaining distance closing without either of them quite deciding it should. “We’re going to clear your name, babe. We’re already working on it.”

Her eyes widened, lips parting in genuine surprise. “Wait—what?”

“Yes. We will. We can’t let you keep carrying the weight of someone else’s actions for one more day than you already have.”

Just then Iya Kuti appeared in the doorway.

Her eyes landed on them—on the way they sat pressed together, hands still linked—and a knowing smile tugged at her mouth, wide and thoroughly unbothered by whatever she’d interrupted.

“Ẹ̀yin lovers. You’ve resolved an eleven-day problem in under thirty minutes?”

Nosa smiled softly, unhurried in his retreat this time. Kikelomo snatched her hands back and covered her face, the tips of her ears burning bright.

“Mum, stoppp,” she mumbled into her palms, mortified.

Iya Kuti walked over and settled into the single-seater with the satisfaction of a woman who’d earned front-row seats to exactly this, clearly enjoying herself. “Can you see why it’s difficult to interfere in a romantic relationship between two people?” she asked Nosa, gesturing broadly. “Because left to me, I would have thought you two would still be dragging this thing on till Christmas. Look at them. I walked in and found you holding each other like one of you might disappear if you let go.”

“Mummmmm!”

“Ẹhn, kí ni? Were you not holding each other ni?” She gestured between them again, then shrugged and folded her arms, entirely satisfied with her own logic.

“We were,” Nosa answered, his gaze sliding back to Kikelomo with quiet intensity, unashamed of the admission. “I missed her. I love your daughter so much, ma.”

A deep blush flooded Kike’s cheeks. She looked away first, but not before he saw the way her breath caught, the small, betraying hitch of it.

“Good,” Iya Kuti murmured, satisfied, folding her hands in her lap now like a woman settling in for business. “That means I can now have this conversation with both of you.”

“What conversation?” Kike asked.

Iya Kuti turned her full attention to Nosa, the playfulness draining slowly from her face, replaced by something graver, older. “Nosa… I want to believe Kikelomo has told you about the loss of her womb.”

Nosa swallowed, the shift in atmosphere sharp and sudden, the warmth of a moment ago cooling instantly into something else. He leaned forward slightly, the earlier heat in his eyes settling into something heavier, more protective, more alert. “Yes, ma’am. She has.”

A deep sigh, Iya Kuti’s shoulders dropping with the weight of what she was about to say. “Did she tell you how she lost it?”

He shook his head once, glancing briefly at Kike before answering. “I was going to ask her myself. We haven’t had that conversation yet.”

“I’ll tell you then.” Iya Kuti pressed her lips together, glanced briefly at the ceiling as though gathering strength from somewhere above it, then met his eyes again, steady and unflinching. “My daughter was poisoned by her roommate, Bimbo.”

Nosa’s eyes widened, the words landing in the room like something dropped from a great height, the last of the afternoon’s warmth going utterly, completely still.

Author’s Note: If you like, go and put mouth in two lovers matter. 😂 It will shock you.

Target: 300 likes, 100 comments, 60 restacks.

Catch up on previous episode here.

I have never understood the need for it when we have other cocoa beverages, perfectly good ones, that don’t require you to burn your tongue and pretend you enjoyed it. I used to wonder why Kuye drank it almost all the time, standing over the kettle at odd hours like a man keeping vigil. I would lean in the doorway and laugh at him for it, arms folded, sure of myself in a way I can no longer locate.

The coffee maker hisses now. I stand over it the way he used to stand over his kettle, watching the water climb and spit, and I do not laugh at anyone.

It’s been ten days of doing things I hated.

The wet bathroom floor no longer makes me recoil when my sole meets it in the dark. This morning I mopped it at six, on my knees, wringing the rag with both hands until my knuckles paled. When the tiles were dry I stayed down there anyway, tracing the same clean patch over and over with the cloth, because standing up meant deciding what to do with the rest of my body, and I wasn’t ready for that decision yet.

Brother Kuti says it’s my way of distracting my mind from the pain I’m feeling. I’ve told him — twice now — that I don’t feel any pain. Both times he went quiet. Both times he looked at me the exact way he used to when I was nine, insisting into the dark that I wasn’t afraid, my fist knotted so tightly in his sleeve that he had to peel my fingers off one at a time once we got home.

I pour the coffee slowly. My hand does not shake. I watch it not shake, waiting to see how long it can be sustained before something gives.

Then I think about Jumia. About checking, right now, this minute, what a coffee maker costs, or a rug, or anything at all with a price tag and a delivery date — something with edges I can hold onto that isn’t a memory. It’s a small, deliberate detour, and I let myself take it. Brother Kuti has always had good taste. The coffee maker looks quality. The sofa here is wider and softer than the one in Lagos, wide enough that a person could disappear into it, and some mornings I have. The bed is the kind that makes a woman briefly, treacherously reconsider the wreckage of her own decisions. I lay in it last night with my eyes open until the ceiling stopped being a ceiling and became just a pale nothing I was staring into, and I told myself that was rest.

But the silence is the part I can’t dress up.

Not the silence of the apartment itself — that one has texture. It has birds. It has the prayer call drifting in at dawn. It has Brother Kuti’s phone calls, and the caretaker’s questions about the generator. I mean the other silence, the one that sits behind my chest. It used to have a name. Now it just hums there, low and constant, refusing to resolve into a single feeling I could point to and say: this.

I wonder about Nosa.

I don’t let myself finish the thought. I’ve gotten good, these ten days, at cutting it off early — at the second syllable of his name, usually, the way you’d yank your hand back from a cooker before you’d even registered the burn. But it gets further each day before I catch it. Today it got as far as: is he eating. I pictured Adanna standing over him with a plate, nagging him the way Adanna does, and my throat moved on its own, a small involuntary swallow around nothing at all.

Blankness is a bad thing.

Brother Kuti said that once, right here on our video call in this kitchen, watching me stir sugar into a cup I never drank. He didn’t explain it further. He didn’t have to. I watched my own spoon go around and around long after the sugar had dissolved, long after there was anything left to stir, and neither of us said a word about it. We just let the spoon keep turning.

To feel would mean pressing on the bruise on purpose — the way you do with your tongue against a sore tooth, just to make sure it’s still there, still yours. It would mean sitting inside the wondering instead of changing the channel on it. It would mean admitting, out loud, that this quiet is not peace. That I have rehearsed, more than once, the exact sound of his voice saying my name, and then had to physically busy my hands — wash a cup that was already clean — just to make the rehearsal stop. It would mean letting myself picture what waits on the other side of this silence, and understanding I might not survive the picture. It would mean walking out that door with no shoes and no plan and no dignity left to protect, straight back into the one place I am forbidden, by my own hand, from returning to.

So I don’t do that.

I drink the coffee instead. All of it, every morning. The cup goes back into the sink, and I dry my hands on my yellow top, and I do not look at my reflection in the kitchen window while I do it — because I already know what’s there.

The TV is on in the living room. I turned it on myself, before coming in here, so it isn’t company exactly. It’s more like a second voice in a house where my own thoughts have stopped feeling like mine and started feeling like something that moved in without asking. Sometimes I catch myself mid-sentence, mid-argument, mouthing something back to no one, and I stop and glance around, half-expecting to find someone watching.

This apartment has stopped feeling like a hiding place. Some mornings it feels more like an accomplice — offering me good sheets and better coffee, asking nothing in return except that I keep performing fine for it. I perform fine for the birds outside the window too, and for the prayer call, and for the cold that never quite leaves the tiles no matter how high the sun climbs. I wake. I dress. I sit. I do not cry. And I call all of that a day.

I walk to the living room and fold myself onto the sofa— the same posture I’ve kept since I was a girl, the one habit that has outlasted everything else about me. On the screen, a woman is mourning beautifully: bone-straight wig, full face, weeping into a lace handkerchief that has clearly never once touched a real tear. Something in my chest moves, unbidden, closer to a laugh than I’ve come in days. She should come and learn from me. I catch my own reflection, ghosted faint in the dark corner of the television glass, and don’t quite recognize the woman looking back — hollow-cheeked, hair unmade, a woman who used to care so much about looking good before she’d even step outside her own bedroom.

And then, without my permission, the memory arrives again.

Lanre’s hand on Nosa’s shoulder. The glass door of the church swinging shut behind them, unhurried — so unhurried — while something in me arrived a full beat too late to stop what was already coming. I remember reaching Tife’s office and finding it empty. I remember knowing, before my mind had even caught up to what my body already understood, that they hadn’t gone there at all. That the thing I had buried nine years ago, the thing I had built an entire second life on top of, was climbing back up out of the ground — in front of the one person I could not bear to watch it happen to.

My phone lights up on the arm of the sofa.

Kikelomo, he’ll be here soon.

I don’t move, not right away. My thumb hovers over the screen for longer than three words should take. When I finally press down to type, my hand is not steady, no matter how still I hold the rest of me.

Okay, thank you, I send.

I stand. I smooth my top down with both palms — once, twice — though there’s nothing on it that needs smoothing. And I walk toward the bathroom, to see what can be done about how homeless I look, if not about anything else.

“Hi, Jaiye.”

The words leave me quieter than I planned, almost lost in the warm afternoon air as I step through the door. He is already seated — spine straight, shoulders held carefully, as though the soft chair might somehow refuse him if he lets himself sink into it. His eyes move slowly across the compound, the windows, the low fence, checking everything the way a man does when he is not entirely sure he is still welcome anywhere. Only when he hears my voice does he glance up.

Relief crosses his face for one unguarded second.

Then something softer, more careful, takes its place — the expression of a man who has rehearsed this moment so many times that now that it is here, he doesn’t trust himself to be inside it without supervision.

“Kikelomo.”

He says my name as though it might break if he speaks it too loudly. He stands, then stays standing, hands loose at his sides, unsure whether to come closer or remain exactly where he is. The particular paralysis of a man who has done damage and cannot assume, even now, that the space between us is his to close.

I manage a small smile.

He studies it the way someone studies a photograph they haven’t seen in years — trying to match this version of me against the one who once turned away from him before he could finish a sentence. Concern gathers slowly in his eyes, and I understand it. The last time we stood this close, I made my feelings about his proximity extremely clear.

“You can sit,” I say. “Please.”

I pull a chair closer and lower myself into it. He nods and sits with deliberate care, as though sudden movement might disturb whatever fragile quiet we have managed to create in the thirty seconds since I stepped outside. His gaze drifts to the railing, the floor, the sky — anywhere that isn’t my face.

I let myself look at him properly.

This man. This man I loved with the whole of my young, unguarded, catastrophically trusting heart. He looks better than the last time I saw him — rested. His hair is cut close, the overgrown waves gone, and there is something in the set of his shoulders that reads as older. Steadier. More accountable, somehow, to the weight of himself. It suits him, this new gravity. It is strange to sit three feet away from a person and watch the years show up on them like weather.

“You cut your hair,” I say. Just to have something small and safe to point at first.

He lifts his head. A small, almost shy smile touches his mouth. “Yes. A few weeks ago. I needed — something different.”

“It suits you.”

“Thank you.” He pauses. Then, quietly: “You look different too.”

I don’t know what to say to that, so I only nod. My heart is beating hard against my ribs. My hands are trembling faintly in my lap and I press them together until the shaking becomes a dull, manageable ache. Nine years. This is what nine years looks like from three feet away. Everyone else seems to have learned how to live again, how to move through time the way time is supposed to be moved through. I am still sitting on this balcony trying to remember how to breathe normally while the past looks at me with careful eyes and waits.

“Thank you for coming,” I murmur.

“Thank you for inviting me.” His eyes meet mine for a second — just long enough for me to see the same careful trembling in his expression that I feel in my own body — and then he looks away, blinking slowly, like a man protecting something fragile behind his eyes.

A neighbor steps out from next door, unlocks her car, and drives away. The ordinary sound of the engine feels strangely loud in the quiet of the compound. I turn my face toward the flowerbeds by the fence. Someone has watered them today; the soil is dark and glistening where the sun catches it. The sight pulls Iya Kuti into my mind without invitation — her hands in the earth, the low hum she kept while she worked, the worry that must be living in her right now like a resident, permanent and unwelcome. Tears gather before I can stop them and I have to blink hard and look away. I cannot look at Jaiye yet. Not directly. Even though I asked Brother Kuti to bring him here, his presence is almost more than I know how to hold at one time.

“Kikelomo.”

His voice is careful.

I turn toward him slowly.

“I can go,” he says, still not quite meeting my eyes. “If this is too hard. I don’t want to make it worse.”

Something moves through me. The feeling of looking at a person and seeing clearly, maybe for the first time, exactly how human they are. How breakable. How much they have been carrying in the years between then and now.

“I’m doing this poorly, aren’t I.” Not quite a question. “I asked you to come, and now I don’t know how to start.”

He shakes his head gently. “There’s no right way. We can just sit. If that’s easier.”

I look down at my hands. “Do you remember the first night you walked me back to the hostel?”

A long pause.

“Yeah. You’d stayed behind after everyone else to work on some videos.”

“You talked for almost an hour,” I say softly. “And I listened like the whole world had narrowed to just that path and your voice.” I look past him at the flowerbeds. “I was already gone by the time we reached my door. You didn’t even know it.”

A small, sad smile touches his mouth. “I didn’t.”

“Yes,” I answer. “You didn’t.”

We go quiet again. A butterfly lands on one of the flowers — I watch the slow open and close of its wings against the petals, the unhurried decision of it, the ease of a thing that simply goes where it needs to go without negotiating the going. Must be something, to be built like that.

“Are you still in the ministry?” I ask.

His smile fades. “No. Everything stopped when Revd Richards fell ill.”

“I’m sorry about your father.” The words leave me on a quiet breath. “He was a good man.”

“Thank you, Kikelomo.” He presses his hands together. “I really appreciate that.”

His phone buzzes in his pocket. He turns it off without looking at it.

We sit in the quiet that follows, and I feel the conversation gathering itself underneath the surface. I have been waiting for the courage to speak the real thing since before I stepped outside. I find it, finally, in the most ordinary of places — in the butterfly lifting off the flowers and disappearing over the fence, in the wet dark soil, in the fact that I am here at all.

“Jaiye.”

He looks at me.

“I asked my brother to call you because I couldn’t do it myself,” I begin. “Which probably tells you more about the state I’ve been in than anything else I could say.”

He listens without interrupting. His eyes are steady and open, the eyes of a man who has decided, for this conversation at least, to be nothing except present.

“I asked you here for two reasons.” I let a small silence sit before I continue. “I’ve been talking to Jesus a lot these past ten days. More than I have in a long time. And in all of that talking, your name kept coming up.” I look down briefly. “I said something to you two months ago — something about forgiveness. And I meant it when I said it. But I wasn’t entirely inside it yet. I was standing at the edge of it and calling it done.”

He nods, almost imperceptibly.

“So I want to say it properly now. From the inside.” I look at him steadily. “I’ve spent these days turning everything over — what you were trying to protect, and how clumsily you went about protecting it. And I understand you a little better now. I understand you because I have been trying to do the same thing. Not to the extent you did. But I know the fear — the specific fear of thinking: what if they see this part of me and decide I am less? What if I give them the whole truth and it costs me the thing I most need to keep?”

His hands tremble faintly in his lap.

“We all want to offer the best version of ourselves to the people we love,” I say. “Not perfect. Just the best we can manage. So we hide. We shape the truth. We break things while trying not to break them.” I let my mind go, for just a moment, to Nosa — to wherever he is right now, to however heavily the silence must be sitting on him — and the ache of it steadies me. Gives me somewhere to come from. “Even though what you hid cost me real pain — pain I carried in my body, in my name, in years I can’t have back — I understand enough now to forgive you.”

I wait until he looks up.

His eyes are already rimmed red, the tears right at the surface, held back by something barely strong enough to hold them.

“Jaiye.” I say it the way you say something you need to land properly. “I forgive you. Wholeheartedly. Without condition. Without remainder.”

And he… breaks.

The tears come fast and he doesn’t even try to catch them — his hands go up to cover his face and his shoulders shake with the sound of something that has been waiting years for these exact words and has now, finally, received permission to move. I sit very still and let him have it. You don’t talk over a storm like this. You sit inside it with the person and you do not flinch at the sound of it, because flinching would tell them it is too much, and it is not. It is a man putting down something he has been carrying in secret for years, and that deserves to be witnessed without apology, without rushing, without anything except stillness.

When he finally lowers his hands, his face is raw and open — the face underneath all the composure, the one he keeps covered in rooms full of people. He presses a folded handkerchief to his eyes, methodically, the small discipline of the gesture the only thing holding the rest of him together.

“Kikelomo.” His voice cracks around the syllables. “Thank you. I — I needed to hear you say it.” He presses his lips together until the trembling slows. “I know I cannot fix what I broke. But thank you for forgiving me in spite of it.”

I look at him. At the reality of what he has just said. At the mess that, to any observer, looks permanent and irreparable. And I think of Adanna’s voice, calm and certain: Put the past at the feet of Jesus. Let Him hold it. Stay in this new life and enjoy it.

“Thank Jesus,” I say softly. “Not me.”

He nods. A small smile — the first genuine one since he arrived — finds his mouth, and for one flickering second he is the Jaiye I used to know: certain, carrying something larger than himself, sure of where he was going. The man in front of me is quieter now, and more weathered, and still holding the weight of words he genuinely doubted he would ever hear. But he is also, I think, lighter than he was twenty minutes ago.

Our eyes meet. He looks away almost immediately, as though the contact itself is still more than he can sustain.

“I will,” he says quietly. “Thank Him. I will.”

We sit in the silence that follows, and it is a different silence from the one at the beginning. That one was full of everything we were afraid to touch. This one is emptier in a cleaner way — the silence after a long-held breath has finally been released, the particular quiet of something finished.

I almost smile.

“There’s a second reason I asked you here,” I say. The words arrive differently now — with a steadiness that surprises even me. Something has shifted in the twenty minutes since I stepped onto this balcony. Something in my chest has found its floor again.

I let the silence sit for a moment before I say it, because I want to hear myself say it once, quietly, inside my own head, before I hand it to him.

“I need to find Bimbo.”

His head comes up quickly. Something like fear — or deep, complicated worry — moves across his face, and for a second neither of us says anything. A vehicle passes somewhere below on the street, its engine fading into the afternoon, and I watch him draw a slow breath, the kind that fills a person up before they ask a question they’re not sure they want answered.

“Kikelomo… Why?”

“Because I want to clear my name.” I say it simply, like something that has finally finished clarifying itself after days of fog.

“I have spent ten days in this apartment letting fear write different versions of how her evil continues to follow me. How it keeps arriving in new rooms in new clothes and I keep absorbing it without ever once standing up and saying: this was not me. I was in that story too, and not the way people think.” I look at him steadily. “I’m not doing that anymore.”

He is quiet for longer than I expect. His hand moves along the arm of the chair, once, an absent motion, like he is deciding how much of the truth to hand me back.

“I think it’s a good idea. A very good one. I’m willing to help however I can.” A pause, smaller this time, his eyes dropping briefly to ground. “But she’s not in a good place, Kikelomo. I saw her last month. She’s very sick. And… not sorry. The years haven’t done anything to that part of her.”

I absorb it slowly, in a spreading, settling wave.

Bimbo isn’t sorry.

I have been imagining this meeting— the words I would say, the things that might happen — and somewhere in the imagining I had allowed a softened version of her to appear, a version worn down by time into something more contrite. Hearing that she hasn’t changed settles something in me rather than breaking it. I feel my shoulders come down a fraction, some tension I didn’t know I was carrying releasing itself into the plastic chair beneath me. The Bimbo I don’t know what to do with is a changed one. The Bimbo I’m familiar with — her colors, her patterns, her specific brand of unrepentant cruelty — that Bimbo I know how to face.

“Is she going to survive it?”

My voice comes out quieter than I expect. Even now. Even after everything. Some stubborn, inconvenient part of me is still afraid for her, and I sit with the strangeness of that for a second.

He shakes his head slowly. “I don’t know, Kikelomo. She needs a kidney. She’s on a long waiting list.” A pause, longer this time, his gaze somewhere past my shoulder. “I only hope she lives long enough.”

The words hang there.

“I still want to see her.”

He studies me for a moment, trying to find the seam between what I’m saying and what I actually mean. Then he sighs, and something in his face loosens, like a decision settling into place.

“She’s at UCH, Ibadan. Female medical ward. She doesn’t use Oguntunyi anymore. She goes by Bimbo Akintunde now.”

“She got married?”

“Yes. Estranged. Her husband left when the illness became too much.”

Jaiye looks past me, out toward the low rooftops of Abeokuta, as though even the thought of her disturbs something old and unresolved in him. I don’t ask what. Some things between him and Bimbo are not mine to step into.

“Thank you for telling me.”

When he looks at me this time, I finally understand why he kept turning away. The old look is still there — the one he used to give me when the world felt small enough to hold between us. Hope, dashed but not entirely gone. He sighs, long and quiet, and for a moment the only sound on the balcony is that breath leaving him.

“I wish I could do more. If there’s anything else you need me to do, I’ll be willing to help.”

Just then, a thought arrives, like something the Holy Ghost has been holding for the right moment. I feel it land before I understand it — a small, certain weight settling into my chest.

“Actually there is.” I lean forward slightly. “The last time we met, you told me Bimbo reached out to you. That she confessed everything.”

“Yes.” His eyes find mine and hold there. “She sent a mail. When we met, she said she sent it because she thought she was going to die.”

“Do you still have it?”

Something shifts in his expression. Recognition. A glint. “Yes. It’s still in my inbox.”

“Would you be kind enough to send it to me?”

He nods, slowly, the understanding of why settling across his face as it settles across mine. “With all pleasure, Kikelomo.”

“Thank you.” I mean it completely. “If I need anything else, I’ll let you know.”

He nods and we go quiet again — a longer quiet this time. A breeze moves across the balcony, lifting the edge of the tablecloth, and somewhere below a man calls out something I don’t quite catch. Then he turns to me, and something in his expression has gone soft in a way that costs him something to show.

“Kikelomo.”

“Yeah?”

He doesn’t answer right away. He looks down at his hands first, then back up, and when he speaks his voice has changed.

“I hope you’re happy.” He says it like a thing he’s been wishing to say for a long time. “I pray for that every day. Every single day. I messed up so thoroughly that all I can do is ask God, morning and night, to make sure that you are held.”

I feel the tears rise slowly, warm and heavy behind my eyes before it spills. This time I let them stay. I don’t reach for anything to wipe them, don’t look away, don’t do any of the small automatic things I’ve trained myself to do with grief. This time they are not the tears of grief or of sitting too close to the past. They are something else — something that arrives when you realize, in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, on a balcony in Abeokuta with a man who once broke you, how many people have been quietly praying you into your own life while you were busy being afraid of it.

“Yes, Jaiye.” I smile through the wet of it. “I’m happy.”

I let myself think about them, one at a time, unhurried, the way you’d walk slowly through a house full of people you love, pausing in each doorway.

Adanna and Tife and Oreoluwa, their house in the evenings, the easy warmth of it. Iya Kuti and her garden and her absolutely undignified drama. Pastor Efua’s voice. Timehin on my couch. Kuye being Kuye.

And then, finally, because I have been holding the thought at a distance for ten days and I am done holding it —

Nosa.

His smile. The specific way he says my name. The warmth of his hand lacing through mine over the centre console of his car, his thumb making those slow circles on my knuckles, unhurried, like he has all the time in the world and intends to use it on me. His laugh, low and quiet, the one that lives in his chest before it reaches his mouth. The way he looked at me over Oreoluwa’s head that evening at Tife’s house — like I was the fixed point his eyes always returned to, without effort, without searching, just naturally, because that is where they went.

I feel them. All of them. Right here on this balcony.

I feel their arms, across the distance, and for a moment I just sit inside that feeling and let it hold me the way it wants to.

And something in my chest — the thing that has been flat and humming and refusing to resolve for ten days — cracks open, finally, into something I recognize.

Joy.

The kind that comes suddenly from being so thoroughly, embarrassingly surrounded by love that the only reasonable response is to stop sitting still.

I look up. Jaiye is watching me, uncertain what is happening on my face, unable to follow where my mind just went. I don’t explain it to him.

“I’m surrounded, Jaiye.” My voice has changed — I can hear it, the new register in it, something live and certain that was not there when I stepped outside. “I am totally surrounded. I am not ever alone. And I hope He surrounds you the same way. When we meet again — wherever, whenever — I want us to meet joyful. I want us to look at each other and see only how much His work has been done in us, and barely recognize the people we used to be.” I breathe, and let the breath do some of the work the words can’t. “In the story of salvation, there are no coincidences.”

My voice goes softer for just a moment. “I do not regret meeting you, Jaiye. Because of everything that happened — all of it, the good and the devastating and the years in between — I found someone who redefined every meaning of love I thought I knew.” My voice rises. “And that man is in Lagos right now, waiting for me. And I have spent ten days sitting in this apartment being afraid, and I am done.”

I get to my feet.

The movement is simply decisive — the movement of a woman who has located the floor again and is standing on it. I feel it in my legs first, some old strength returning to them, and then in my spine, straightening itself without being asked. The excitement moving through me is not the giddy kind. It is warmer and quieter and more serious than that. It is the feeling of knowing exactly where you need to be and understanding, with your whole body, that nothing is stopping you from going there except the distance, and the distance is driveable.

“Thank you, Jaiye.” I say it looking at him directly, and I mean every layer of it. “Your presence gave me the clarity I needed. I didn’t know that was what I was missing until you sat down across from me.”

He stares at me for a long moment. Something in his eyes that is joy and grief braided together — the specific expression of a man watching someone walk toward a happiness he played a part in making harder to reach, and understanding that the walking is still good, that the arriving is still right, even if his own role in the story was never the one he wanted it to be.

I see it. I do not look away from it.

“Take care of yourself, Jaiye.”

Then I walk back through the door.

And I go to pack.

Author’s Note: Our woman is going back home!

Meanwhile, I’m sorry I couldn’t meet up with yesterday’s post. NYSC is not for the weak. That’s all I have to say.😅

Catch Up On Previous Episode Here.

We want to make basic services: water, healthcare, education, food, shelter; accessible only to a select few. A gated existence.

We want to raise a society that does not ask why. A society trained to nod, to scroll, to accept.

So, let’s dumb people down.

First, we introduce them to social media.

We fragment their attention until 8 seconds feels too long. We reward reaction and punish reflection. We flood them with dopamine in 15-second bursts until their minds can no longer hold a thought without itching for the next one.

We raise a generation of distracted humans. People who cannot read a full page, cannot sit in silence, cannot finish a conversation without reaching for their phones. People who are always online and never present.

Then, we introduce AI.

We sell it as convenience. As progress.

We teach them to outsource their memory, their writing, their decisions, their arguments, even their prayers.

We erode their ability to think critically by giving them answers before they’ve learned to ask questions.

We erode their ability to communicate effectively by letting machines speak for them.

We tamper with their cognitive memory until the brain, unused, begins to atrophy. Until a person can’t recall a phone number, can’t hold a thesis, can’t wrestle with a hard idea without asking a machine to do it for them.

We don’t take their intelligence. We make them willingly hand it over.

Then, we erode the reading culture.

Because books demand slowness. Books demand attention. Books demand they sit with someone else’s mind for hours.

And we cannot have that.

So afterwards, we begin to destroy books through the Panama Project.

We burn them quietly. We digitize them and then edit them. We rewrite history in footnotes no one will check.

We remove their sense of identity by contaminating the one thing that can preserve the originality of history down to its very context: literature.

When we control the stories, we control the ancestors. When we control the ancestors, we control the children.

We make them lose interest in communities.

We replace neighborhoods with comment sections. We replace elders with influencers. We replace fellowship with followers.

We make solitude feel like connection and connection feel like labor.

Until they would rather live on their phones than break bread with other humans like them. Until loneliness is normalized and called “independence.”

We ensure our data centers consume enormous amounts of water.

Gigawatts of power. Rivers diverted to cool the machines that now think for them.

Because we also plan to make that water inaccessible for everyone in the nearest future.

We will create thirst, and then sell the cup.

Then we bring in a new world order.

We rebrand it as efficiency. As personalization. As access.

A world where intelligence becomes a utility. Metered. Billed monthly. Tiered.

Basic thought: free, and slow, and full of ads.

Premium thought: instant, accurate, creative. Paywalled.

A world where there would be a stark contrast between the intelligent and the non-intelligent, as it is now with the poor and the rich.

The divide won’t be by skin or country first. It will be by cognition.

Those who can afford to think, and those who can only afford to be thought for.

The intelligent ones would be the beneficiaries of the world’s resources.

They will sit on the boards, write the laws, design the systems, own the patents.

Economic power would be concentrated in the nations, the cities, the zip codes where the intelligent reside.

The rest will be offered subscriptions.

Rent your memory. Rent your analysis. Rent your creativity.

And if you cannot pay, you will be managed. Fed, tracked, entertained, and kept too tired to ask questions.

This is the world we are building.

Quietly. One scroll, one prompt, one closed book at a time.

Partner with us to make this new world possible.

The words reached him as if from a great distance, filtered through layers of sleep and something heavier than sleep. Nosa only curled tighter beneath the blanket, drawing it over his head until the world narrowed to the dim warmth of fabric and the faint, bitter scent of herbs and oil. Something else lingered beneath it—something sharper, closer, like the weight of another person’s worry pressing against the air, thick enough to feel through cloth. He tried to breathe it away. It stayed, patient, unmoved by his refusal to face it.

“Nosa.”

A hand touched his shoulder, light but insistent, unwilling to be shrugged off this time. He opened his eyes.

Adanna stood above him. Worry sat deep in the lines of her face, etched there in a way that told him this was not the first time she’d worn that particular expression, only the first he’d been awake enough to see clearly. For a fraction of a second something sharper—frustration, maybe—moved across her features and was gone, tucked away as quickly as it had surfaced.

“Adanna?” His voice cracked on the name, still thick with sleep and the heaviness that sleep had only temporarily pushed aside. He squinted against the light and pushed himself up slowly, every muscle reluctant, protesting the return to consciousness. “What time is it?”

She pulled the blanket away and crossed to the window, drawing the curtains wider with two brisk tugs. Afternoon light spilled across the room, unkind in its brightness, and he flinched from it like something newly surfaced from water. “Time for you to get up.” Her tone softened before he could brace against it. “You’ve been out of it for hours, Nosa. We had to come and wake you ourselves — Chuks was already knocking on this door for how long before he gave up and called me.”

Her gaze returned to him, and something in it cracked open a little, worry finally allowed room over frustration. “You can’t stay like this. He said you were running a temperature yesterday. You didn’t even tell anybody.”

He nodded once, fingers raking through his hair, the motion automatic, giving his hands something to do while the rest of him caught up. The room still felt foreign, as though his body had never fully agreed to accept it as home. “Is Tife here?”

“He’s in the kitchen. Cooking for you. Ofada, I think, or he’s trying to — you know that man and his cooking.” A pause, weighted, her voice dropping the small joke as quickly as she’d offered it. “Nosa. We can’t continue to let you lock yourself away in this house like this. Moping around like a heartbroken man who has given up.”

“I am a heartbroken man.” It came out flat, unguarded, no fight left in it to dress the words up as anything gentler. “What do you want me to call it?”

The admission left him quietly, almost without breath, the words slipping out before he’d decided to release them. The moment they existed in the air, the pain rose to meet them—sharp, familiar, and absolute, a wound he’d been pressing his hand against for nine days finally allowed to bleed in front of a witness.

Ten days.

Ten days since Kikelomo left him. Left them.

Those days had worked themselves into him the way water works into stone: patient, invisible, irreversible, wearing grooves he suspected might never fully smooth back out. He had not left the compound since the Sunday her phone stopped answering, since the ringing had turned to silence and the silence had turned to something with teeth. Since the car he gave her sat in the garage like an unanswered accusation, gathering dust he refused to let Chuks wipe away, as if keeping it exactly as she’d left it might somehow keep the door open a crack longer. Since the police first sat in his living room and asked the questions that grew flatter with every hour—arguments, money, depression, threats of leaving. He answered every one of them, his voice level even as something in him screamed at the indignity of it. He sat through the interviews without raising his voice, even when the detective asked, flat and procedural, whether he had ever raised a hand to her. The question landed like a slap he refused to let himself feel, refused to let show on his face, because rage would only make them look harder at him instead of for her, and he knew—with the bitter clarity of a man who’d watched too many of these stories unfold from the outside—exactly how these narratives got written when a grieving man let his anger show first.

The house became a place of soft footsteps and covered dishes. Tife and Adanna. Kuye and Timehin. Pastor Efua. Pastor Dimeji. Yesterday, Iya Kuti arriving with jollof and moi-moi and bitter-leaf soup enough to feed a small congregation, her own eyes red-rimmed beneath the determined set of her jaw, each visitor murmuring the same careful comfort: We’ll find her. Pastor Sharon called every evening at seven, faithful as a clock. Pastor Emmanuel called twice, the worry in his voice so deep it felt personal, like a father’s, and Nosa had had to hold the phone away from his ear for a moment both times, just to breathe.

There were the false leads—the woman in Ibadan who claimed she saw Kikelomo in Bodija market, certain enough that hope had flared white-hot in his chest for one entire afternoon before it curdled into nothing. The man in Port Harcourt insisting she had checked into a hotel under another name. The police chased them until hope turned sour in his mouth each time, until he learned to receive each new lead the way you’d receive a knife—carefully, expecting the cut. Eventually Nosa blocked the unknown numbers. His phone grew quieter. Lonelier. He hated the quiet almost as much as he’d hated the false hope.

In front of people he stood upright. They called him strong. See how he’s handling it. See how he hasn’t broken.

Only he knew the truth.

Every time the screen stayed blank—no message, no strange sticker sent for no reason at all, no sudden voice note filled with her laughter cutting through an ordinary Tuesday—another fracture opened inside him, hairline-thin, invisible from the outside, but he could feel each one, could have mapped his own chest by now like a man reading a crack in a wall he watched grow daily. Every time a call came and it was not her face, lips pursed in that familiar, teasing pout he used to complain about and would now give almost anything to see again, the fracture deepened.

This was not ordinary heartbreak. It was the terror of not knowing where she was, a fear with no edges, nothing to push against. Her card had not been used. No trail. No airport record. Nothing. She had simply vanished, swallowed by a silence so complete it felt engineered, and the anger came in waves—sudden and crushing, arriving without warning and leaving him gripping the edge of whatever surface was nearest. Why decide their love was not worth the fight? Why measure everything against a past she could not change, weighing his love on a scale she’d rigged against herself before he ever got the chance to prove otherwise? Why disappear instead of stay and cry, accuse, fight—anything but this clean, surgical silence that left him with nothing solid to push back against?

He felt like a widower with no body to bury, no grave to stand over, no ritual to move him from one stage of grief into the next. She had taken the future they had spoken of in the dark and left him holding only the shape of its absence, a future-sized hole he kept reaching into out of habit.

Now he sat here, still waiting for the moment she might decide he was worth returning to, though some quieter, more honest part of him had begun to wonder if waiting was even the right word for what he was doing anymore.

He looked up. Adanna was watching him, her expression quiet, as if she had been carrying the weight of his silence alongside her own this whole time, matching him step for step through a grief that wasn’t even hers to carry.

“Yes,” she said at last, gently, like she was setting the word down rather than throwing it. “You are heartbroken, Nosa. And honestly? I’m glad you’re finally saying it out loud, because you’ve been walking around here trying to be strong for everybody except yourself.”

Nosa smiled sadly, his eyes moving past her, out toward the window and the ordinary brightness of an afternoon that had no business looking so unbothered. “Somebody has to hold it together.”

“Does it have to be you? All the time?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Kikelomo is my friend too, you know. Not just yours. And if I tell you I’m not a little pissed at her right now, for making all of us sit here and worry like this — I’ll be lying to your face.”

She let out a soft breath, one that seemed to cost her something to release, her hands folding together in her lap like she needed somewhere to put them.

“But Nosa. I’ve prayed. I’m still praying. I will not stop praying.”

Her eyes found his, and he could see the effort she made to hold back her tears, her chin lifting slightly against the pull of them, voice thinning but refusing to break. “I love that girl o. God knows I do. I know you’re the one who introduced us, but I love Kikelomo like she’s my own sister. And it’s paining me — it’s really paining me — that she can’t see how much. That whatever happened to her back then is still holding her by the neck, even now, even with all of us right here loving her.”

Adanna sniffed and her lips trembled, the composure she’d been holding cracking briefly at its edges. “But then I put myself in her shoes, Nosa. I try to imagine carrying what she’s carried, for as long as she’s carried it. And honestly? I don’t think I would have done better. I don’t think I would have stayed and fought either.”

She raised a finger towards him, the gesture gentle rather than accusing, more plea than reproach.

“But you. Look at you. You’ve been acting like this thing belongs to you and you alone to fix. Like Kikelomo is only your loss and nobody else’s. So you’re pretending to be strong for all of us — today you’re the one calmly answering police questions, tomorrow you’re on a call with Tife’s detective friend, and meanwhile who is holding you, Nosa? Who?”

Her fingers dropped and her eyes softened further, the worry in them turning into something steadier. “I know you’re hurt. I can see it from here. But we are hurting too — me, Tife, all of us. Letting us help you carry even a little of this is not weakness, you hear me? It is not weakness, Nosa. It’s the only way any of us actually survive this.”

He moved to the edge of the bed, the sheets tangled around his ankles, his body slower than his intention to rise. Adanna drew a chair close and sat facing him, near enough that the space between them felt deliberate, a closeness she’d chosen rather than drifted into.

“Nosa.” Her voice was low, unhurried, the voice of someone who had thought carefully about what she wanted to say before she came in here to say it. “I know Kikelomo is coming back. I am assured of that because Jesus is the foundation of our fellowship. He is the foundation of what the two of you have. And He knows how to speak to storms.”

She drew a quiet breath, giving the words room to settle before continuing. “But there is a need for us to help in clearing Kikelomo’s name. She cannot continue to bear a past she had no hand in.”

Nosa nodded, following Adanna’s thoughts carefully, something in his chest loosening a fraction at the sound of a plan, at the shape of something he could actually do with his hands instead of simply enduring. “You’re right.”

The door opened just at that moment and Tife entered, wiping his palms on a kitchen towel slung over one shoulder, the smell of frying onions trailing in behind him.

“Guy you don wake.” He closed the door behind him and walked towards them, grinning like a man who’d been waiting all morning to say exactly that. His hands found Adanna’s back and he patted it softly, an easy, practiced gesture of a man used to touching his wife in passing. “Thank you for doing a good job of waking him, because I was about to try my own method.”

A laugh escaped Nosa, small and rusty, like a hinge that hadn’t been used in days, catching him almost by surprise. “And what does your method entail?”

“Cold water, bro. I was going to pour it straight on your head. Reduce the temperature and enjoy the show as you shiver at the same time. Two birds.”

He sat on the bed, a breath from Nosa, the mattress dipping under his weight.

“Is that how you’re supposed to tend to a heartbroken man? With cold water?” Nosa asked, his hand pressed to his chest in mock-injury, and for the first time in nine days something in his face looked, briefly, almost like his old self.

“A heartbroken man wey dey form for his guys.”

“Guysss!” Adanna interjected, a playful smile tugging at her lips despite everything, one hand raised like she was separating two children. “I need the both of you to stop this. You two act like children the moment you’re together. Kikelomo is missing — let us face that first, then you two can continue your comedy show.”

“We’re facing it squarely, babe. Very squarely.” Tife muttered, turning to her, some of the softness leaving his face for something more focused now, business settling into his voice. “Have you told him what you said earlier — about trying to help clear her name?”

“We were right in the middle of that when you barged in smelling of onions.”

“Okay o, continue.”

Adanna nodded and sighed, gathering her thoughts back into order like beads onto a string. “Okay. So, what I was saying is — we investigate the whole matter properly. We find whoever actually did this to Kikelomo, and we make her admit it. On record.” Her eyes found Nosa, steady, resolved, the earlier softness now hardened into something with edges. “Then we hand whatever we find to the police and let them take it from there.”

“And I already proposed something too.” Tife leaned forward, elbows on his knees, the excitement of a plan visibly waking him up. “I know our brother, Bro Femi, at BBC Africa. Good man, solid Christian. I want to call him, have the whole story broadcast the moment we have it confirmed. Properly, in every language they run.” He turned to Nosa. “What do you think, guy? Too much?”

“I think it’s a good idea.” Nosa sat up straighter, some new current running through him now, something closer to purpose than despair, his voice gaining a firmness it hadn’t held in over a week.

“But we have to think about distribution too. It’s not enough that BBC carries it. The story has to reach every nook and cranny. We wouldn’t want it to just trend on Twitter for two days and die.”

“Exactly, exactly.” Adanna was nodding fast now, leaning in. “Facebook, Instagram, everywhere. Every platform we can push it to. And I found out something — that popular KokoBlog, from about ten years back, they’re the ones that actually carried her story past their school WhatsApp group first. If we can find that original post, we tear it down piece by piece.”

“So how do we even locate this Bimbo Oguntunyi woman?” Tife asked, rubbing his jaw. “That’s almost ten years ago. People change names, change cities.”

“That part is easy.” Nosa muttered. “Finding her won’t be the hard part. But we need to start with Jaiye first. If everything Adanna said is true, Jaiye was right there in the middle of everything. He’ll know exactly where Bimbo is, or at least know somebody who does.”

“Okay then, we have a plan.” Adanna clapped excitedly, the sound bright in the room, cutting cleanly through the heaviness that had lived there all week. “Reach out to Jaiye. Find Bimbo. Squeeze the real story out of her. Publish it everywhere we can reach. And pray, pray, pray that it reaches our girl wherever she is, and she finds her way back home.”

Nosa stared at them both, at the two people who had walked into his darkest week and simply refused to leave it, refused to let him sit in it alone even when he’d all but locked the door on them. The ache in his chest had not lessened, would probably not lessen until Kikelomo appeared. “I just wish I knew where she is. Right now. Today.” His voice caught, just slightly, on the word today. “All this plan is good, but it doesn’t tell me if she’s eaten. If she’s safe tonight.”

A small smile touched Adanna’s mouth. “You and Kikelomo will be fine, Nosa. Do you want to know how I know?”

He shook his head, something in him already leaning toward whatever she was about to say.

“Because one of you is not giving up.”

He frowned slightly, sitting with the sentence, turning it over. “I don’t — what do you mean?”

Adanna leaned forward a fraction, her voice remaining soft, almost careful, each word placed like something she’d carried a long way specifically to hand to him. “Think about it. In every relationship — marriage, dating, even friendship — storms will come. Nobody is exempted, not even us.”

She glanced briefly at Tife, a small private history passing between them before she continued. “What keeps two people standing is not that neither of them ever weakens. Everybody weakens at some point, Nosa. What keeps them standing is that when one begins to weaken, the other one is still there, still reaching across whatever distance has opened up, still pulling.

“Sometimes it’s the husband who has the strength left in a season. Sometimes it’s the wife. The real danger only comes when both of them decide, at the same time, that it’s finished. But as long as even one person keeps holding on — just one — that strength is enough to carry the both of them until the other one can stand again on their own legs.”

The words settled slowly into the hollow places inside him.

“So right now,” he said quietly, testing the shape of it in his own mouth, “I have to be the one holding. For both of us.”

“Yes.” She nodded once, firm, no hesitation in it at all. “And that’s exactly why you need joy, Nosa. Not happiness — I’m not talking about happiness, because there’s nothing happy about any of this right now. I mean joy. Joy is what gives a Christian strength; the Bible didn’t say the happiness of the Lord, it said the joy of the Lord is your strength. That’s why we’re told to rejoice always, in every season, good or terrible — because it’s only in that kind of joy that you can keep standing when everything else in your life is trying its best to pull you under.”

Nosa exhaled. The sound carried a little less weight than before, the first breath in ten days that hadn’t felt like it cost him something to release. A faint, almost reluctant warmth entered his voice. Beside him, Tife was smiling softly, quiet in the way he got when he knew better than to interrupt something taking root.

“You this woman of God…” A soft, teasing note surfaced, fragile but real, the first joke he’d made in days that didn’t feel borrowed from some earlier, better version of himself. “What did I do to deserve you? You’re exactly what I needed to hear today.”

“Of course I am.” Adanna rose, the chair scraping lightly against the floor, satisfaction settling over her face like a job properly finished. “So. First step, and it’s a simple one. Stand up. Go and clean yourself up — because, Nosa, no offense, but you smell like a man who hasn’t seen water in two days. Then come to the kitchen and help us finish this food, because your friend here can fry onions but I don’t trust him alone with that Ofada rice.”

He stood. The movement was still careful, but no longer quite as empty as it had been an hour ago. Something had shifted, small and stubborn, a single ember catching in a room that had gone cold.

“Alright, alright, madam.” A ghost of a smile that reached one corner of his mouth. “Let me go and clean up.”

“Good.” Adanna was already at the door, but she paused there, one hand on the frame, and looked back at him — not with pity this time, but something closer to pride. “And Nosa. When we start eating, make sure you eat. Properly. Not just picking at the plate.”

“Yes, ma.”

“I’m serious.”

“I said yes, ma!” But he was laughing again, soft and short, as she finally let the door close behind her.

“I was able to get Jaiye’s contact from Khalid.”

Kuye muttered the words without looking up from his laptop, more habit than announcement.

He had spent the entire day trying to fix the same stubborn error in his code, grateful for the rare silence—no Iya Kuti hovering with a fresh complaint, no Timehin’s presence pressing at the edges of every room the way it had learned to over the past months, a weight he only noticed now that it had been withdrawn.

It had been two days since their conversation. Two days since he had watched her laugh at something Iya Kuti did and felt things he had no right to feel, things that had no business surfacing in a week already this heavy with fear for his sister. After that, she had pulled back into Kike’s room as if the walls themselves could protect her from whatever had passed between them that night. She barely spoke to him now. She left for work early or trailed Iya Kuti to the market, returning only when the house was already full of other voices, as if she’d timed her arrivals specifically to avoid finding him alone.

Yesterday he had walked into the kitchen and found her on a call. She laughed at something the person said on the phone—soft, shy, the exact kind of laugh Kikelomo used to give Nosa, the kind reserved for someone specific. The sound had scraped something raw inside him, like a hand closing around something he hadn’t realized was tender. He didn’t understand why it bothered him so much. He only knew that it did, and that not understanding it bothered him almost as much as the feeling itself.

He had barely closed his door when Joshua’s text lit up his phone.

Yo Bro. Guess what?

What?

Take a good guess.

I can’t bro.

Finally got Timehin’s number. We were paired together for the hospital outreach Pastor announced.

Something hot and sharp rose in Kuye’s chest, immediate as a struck match, and he sat very still for a moment, watching the words on the screen as though staring hard enough might rearrange them into something less true.

Really?

Yep. We spoke tonight. Maybe all things are working out for my good.

He forced his fingers to type. Wish you the best bro. Five words, sent, done. But inside, something was already loosening, slipping, a floor he’d trusted giving way beneath him one board at a time. He told himself to get a grip. He couldn’t. Not when he walked into the dining room later and found her bent over her lesson notes, mouth pursed in concentration, one leg tucked beneath her the way she always sat when she was fully absorbed in something. She looked up, gave him a short nod, and turned straight back to her work. No smile. No question. Nothing—and the nothing was somehow louder than anything she could have said.

He switched on the television—something he almost never did—and told himself it was only because he was tired of his room. He tried not to glance across the table. He failed, again and again, his eyes dragging back to her like something magnetized. He wished, against every better judgment he owned, that she would look up and say something absurd. But she stayed Timehin, quiet and distant, and he had no idea what to do with the hollow that left in him, a hollow shaped exactly like her usual noise.

Eventually he went back to his room. Morning came. She left with Iya Kuti. The house emptied. The day stretched long and thin, silence pooling in every room she wasn’t in, until, less than an hour ago, Nosa, Pastor Tife, and Adanna appeared at the gate.

They came in and explained everything. Iya Kuti and Timehin joined halfway through, and the story had to be told again, each retelling scraping the same wound fresh.

Now Adanna sat forward on the sofa, hands clasped, all business. “Okay. That’s good, Kuye — since you’ve spoken to him before, I think it’s best you’re the one to reach out to him again. He already knows your face, your voice. No need starting from zero with a stranger.”

“No.” Iya Kuti’s voice cut cleanly through the room, immediate, final. “Emi ni mo fẹ́ bá sọ̀rọ̀. I want to be the one to speak with him.” Her eyes found Adanna’s, unmoving. “I just want to know him myself. That’s all I’m asking. I want to know, with my own two ears, what kind of man this Jaiye is.”

Kuye looked at her, worry tightening his features. “Mum, are you sure?”

“Yes. I am sure.” She said it the way she said most things she’d already decided, leaving no visible room for further debate.

Tife nodded, moving them along before the small standoff could grow roots. “Okay. Let’s move fast, then. We try to speak to Jaiye today, this evening if possible. See if we can get Bimbo’s location out of him.” His gaze swept the room, landing briefly on each of them in turn. “I’ve already spoken to our brother at BBC. He said it’s a story they’re willing to take up — he sounded genuinely interested.”

“That’s good,” Kuye murmured, though his eyes had already drifted back to Iya Kuti. She had gone still, her face suddenly serious in a way that didn’t match the brisk energy of a moment ago. “Mum… what’s up? You’ve gone quiet.”

Iya Kuti’s gaze moved slowly across all of them, unhurried, deliberate, as if she were counting them, making certain everyone she needed present was actually present. Something firm settled behind her eyes.

“Yesterday,” she said, each word placed with weight, “the Holy Ghost showed me Kike’s location.”

The room tightened at once, all at the same moment, like a held breath. Nosa sat up sharply, his whole body angling toward her. Kuye searched her face for any hint of a joke, any crack that would let him laugh this off the way he usually did with her more theatrical pronouncements, and found none. Her face held nothing but conviction.

Timehin’s voice broke the silence first, small and urgent. “Big Mummy… you know where Aunty Kike is? Right now?”

“Yes.” Iya Kuti’s tone remained calm, almost gentle, in contrast to the current now running through the room. “I do not know the exact place — He did not show me a street or a house number. But the Holy Ghost told me someone who does. Someone who has known exactly where my daughter has been hiding these past ten days, while you people have been running up and down like people without a God.”

Nosa’s voice came out tight, stripped of patience. “Who, Mummy? Please. Who?”

A long pause. Iya Kuti seemed to gather the name up in her chest before she’d let it leave her mouth. When she spoke again, her voice was lower, almost tender.

“There is only one person Kike can run to like this. Only one person who would refuse to say a single word once she asked them not to — refuse even under pressure, even if it broke his own heart to keep silent. Only one person who has places she can disappear into, and still be fed, still be safe, still be looked after, without one of us ever finding out.”

“And who is that person?” Nosa asked, leaning forward now, almost impatient, his hands gripping his own knees.

Kuye’s eyes widened. The realization hit him all at once, a full-body jolt, like a name he’d been circling for days finally landing where it belonged.

“Brother Kuti.” The name left him in a rush, tumbling out before he’d fully finished thinking it. “It was Brother Kuti all along.” A sharp breath escaped him, half disbelief, half something closer to relief. “It can only be him. How did I not think of that? How did none of us think of that?”

Iya Kuti folded her arms and sat back against the sofa, watching them arrive, one by one, at the thing she’d already known for a day.

Nosa stared, his mind visibly working to catch up. “Your elder brother? The one in the US?”

“Yes,” Kuye said, almost disappointed in himself, running a hand roughly over his face. “Brother Kuti is the only person alive who knows how to hold Kikelomo from a distance and still make her feel safe doing it. That’s exactly his way.” A small, reluctant relief crossed his face, the first real ease Kuye had shown in days. “That explains everything. Why we couldn’t reach her. Why she’s not spending a single naira anywhere we could trace. Why it felt like she vanished, clean, like someone who actually knew how to disappear properly.”

Adanna leaned forward, hope sharpening her voice. “So — does that mean we know her exact location now? Can we go today?”

Iya Kuti shook her head gently, tempering the room before hope could run ahead of itself. “My first son has properties across different states, all managed under one company. This very house we’re sitting in is one of them. Every single property is fully furnished, just like this one, ready for anybody to walk into and live comfortably from day one. Kikelomo is most likely tucked away in one of those houses. The only problem now is getting Kuti himself to tell us which one.”

“That shouldn’t be too difficult a problem to solve, surely—” Adanna began, already sounding as though she were mentally drafting the phone call.

“It is difficult,” Kuye cut in quietly, his voice flat with the particular weariness of someone who knew exactly what they were up against. “You don’t know my brother. Brother Kuti is not someone you can pull words from with pleading or logic. If he gave Kikelomo his word that he’d keep her secret, he will not say one syllable until she herself releases him from it. Not for me. Not for Mummy. Not for anybody.”

Tife cleared his throat, choosing his words carefully. “I want to believe, though, that the same prayer that allowed the Holy Ghost reveal this to Mummy can also soften your elder brother’s heart. God is not limited by how stubborn a man is.”

Iya Kuti nodded slowly, some old, private caution moving across her face. “Ẹ̀rù Kuti bà mí o. Even me, his own mother, I am careful with Kuti. That man is the exact replica of his father — few words, and not one of them ever wasted on nonsense.” A faint, almost fond smile touched her mouth despite the weight of the moment. “But if we pray — I believe there is nothing Jesus cannot do. Nothing.”

Timehin looked around the room, her voice steady now, cutting cleanly through the lingering uncertainty, the first fully confident thing she’d said in two days. “Then what are we waiting for? Let’s pray. Right now, before anybody leaves this room.”

Author’s Note: At least we now know who knows where Kikelomo is.😌

Target: 300 likes, 100 comments, 60 restack

Catch Up On Previous Episode Here.

Kuye stared at it, willing the seconds to hurry, though he couldn’t have said toward what. They crawled instead, each minute dragging the next behind it like something reluctant. He exhaled through his nose and looked away, searching for anything that might pull his mind off the slow march of time, off the low, constant hum of dread that had taken up residence somewhere behind his chest and refused eviction.

A dozen browser tabs had been open since last Sunday—the evening Nosa called with that strained, careful voice that meant something had gone badly wrong, a voice Kuye had never once heard him use before. Kuye had refreshed them so often the pages felt like open wounds he kept picking at out of some compulsion he couldn’t name. Find My iPhone still showed offline, the little grey dot refusing, day after day, to resolve into a location. The bank app still showed nothing unusual. No sudden withdrawal, no hotel charge, no trail, no digital breadcrumb of any kind. For a man who lived in digital forensics and open-source intelligence, the silence was almost insulting. It mocked every skill he had.

This was not like the first time Kikelomo left.

Back then he had known. He had helped her carry boxes to the flat in Oshodi, his arms aching under the weight of things she’d insisted on taking herself, and, on the quiet, told Iya Kuti that her only daughter was about to walk out. He had done it partly out of duty and partly out of self-preservation. Kikelomo was the only one who knew how to handle their mother’s theatrics, how to absorb the drama without letting it detonate the whole house. Without her, the full weight of Iya Kuti’s storms would settle on him alone, and he had resented that even as he’d helped her go.

This disappearance was different, and the difference sat in him like a stone he couldn’t digest. No warning. No packing. Almost everything still sat in her room exactly as she had left it. The makeup bag lay open on the dresser, brushes scattered as if she had simply stood up mid-routine and walked out, her earring still resting on the tissue box where she must have set it down to answer a call. That was not the mark of someone who had planned to vanish. That was the mark of someone who had run.

All week he had kept one eye on the front door, half-expecting her to stroll in the way she always did—phone in one hand, bag sliding off her shoulder, already talking before the door closed, already mid-story about something ridiculous that had happened to her on the road.

Only three people had moved through the house all week: himself, Timehin, and Iya Kuti. Kikelomo’s absence sat under his skin like a boil that refused to burst, a pressure with nowhere to go. He hated not knowing. He hated the blankness more than anything—more than fear, even, because fear at least gave him something to hold on to.

Last night he had spoken to Nosa again. The man’s voice had been raw in a way Kuye had never heard before—quiet, controlled, and clearly broken, each word sounding like it had been carried a long distance before it reached his mouth. Nosa asked, carefully, whether Iya Kuti was beginning to suspect.

She was.

Kuye had told her Kikelomo had flown to Uganda on short notice for an urgent work emergency, the lie sitting sour on his tongue every time he repeated it. Every time Iya Kuti asked, “Kilode ti Kike o fi pe mi?”—why hasn’t Kike called me—he answered that they spoke around midnight, that the network was terrible, that she would call when she could. Each lie cost him something small, a coin dropped into a well he couldn’t see the bottom of.

After the call with Nosa, Iya Kuti had come into his room and announced she would wait up until midnight so she could speak to her daughter herself. She stood by the bed complaining in a low, continuous stream, her blanket pulled tight around her shoulders against a cold that wasn’t really in the room.

“Ko pe mi. Ko post sori Instagram. Normally mo máa rí post ẹ. But I can’t find anything. Ṣé bí iṣẹ́ yẹn ṣe wọ́ lórùn niyẹn ni? Is work so hectic now that she cannot call her only mother?”

He had listened without answering, his jaw tight, his eyes fixed on some middle distance, letting her words wash over him because there was nothing true he could say back. Eventually her breathing evened out and she fell asleep sitting up, chin dropping slowly to her chest. He had never been so grateful for sleep. Sleep bought him more hours to keep searching, more hours before he had to lie to her face again.

Nothing had turned up.

A slow dread settled in his chest, heavier each night, like sediment collecting at the bottom of something still. He refused to let himself think too long about what the silence might mean. Thinking led to worry, and worry dulled the edge he needed to actually find her. So he moved through the week the way he always did—quiet, competent, normal—while every hour without word from Kikelomo scraped a little more of that normalcy away, until he wasn’t sure how much of it was left to scrape.

A knock interrupted the quiet of his room. For the first time that evening, Kuye was grateful for the distraction, grateful enough that he nearly said so out loud before catching himself.

“Who’s that?”

“It’s Timehin.” Her voice came soft through the door, muffled by the wood.

His heart skipped a beat before he could stop it—an actual, physical stutter, quick and involuntary, the kind he’d been noticing more and more lately and refusing, each time, to examine. He scanned the room in a quick, almost frantic sweep—nothing out of place, nothing that needed hiding, and still he checked—then sat upright in his ergonomic chair, fingers flying across the laptop keys as if he had been deep in important work the entire time instead of drowning quietly in dead-end tabs.

“Come in,” he said, aiming for boredom and mostly succeeding, though his pulse hadn’t gotten the memo.

She stepped inside carefully, already in her pajamas, a soft, oversized set that had clearly been chosen for comfort rather than appearance, and somehow that made it worse, the unguardedness of it. Kuye almost smiled to himself before catching the impulse and folding it away. Timehin was an early sleeper. Unless something kept her up, she was usually in bed by seven. There had been evenings he’d returned from work to find her curled on the sofa, television murmuring on low volume, already lost to sleep. More often than not, it was Iya Kuti who gently woke her and steered her toward Kike’s room. It still struck him as strange—how early she folded herself away from the day, as if she needed more rest than most people just to keep being herself.

Her eyes moved around his space without quite settling, as though she was trying not to look too closely. This was the first time she had been inside his room in all the months she had practically lived under their roof. Somewhere uninvited, a hope surfaced in him: that his taste might impress her, and he hated that he cared, hated the small, foolish part of him that was suddenly aware of the framed print above his desk, the folded throw on the chair, wondering what all of it looked like through her eyes.

Compared to Kike’s room, which existed in near-permanent darkness—as if she and the night had struck some private bargain—his own space felt warm. Soft lights, carefully chosen pieces, nothing left to chance. He had furnished it to his liking two years ago, and even Iya Kuti, who was rarely impressed by anything, had once stood in the doorway and said, simply, “Your room is beautiful, Kuye,” in a tone that made it sound like a small miracle.

Tonight, for reasons he didn’t examine, he was glad for that beauty.

“Are you going to stand there and just stare?” he muttered, eyes fixed on the screen. His fingers typed near-gibberish into a Word document, but from where she stood she would never know. She would only see a man interrupted in the middle of something that mattered.

“I wasn’t staring.” Her eyes widened a fraction. Then, almost immediately, her chin lifting: “I was trying to figure out how to say this without sounding rude.”

He turned toward her, interest flickering despite himself, something in his chest sitting up straighter than the rest of him. “Say what?”

She cleared her throat once. “Do you not love Aunty Kike?”

“What…?”

The question landed sideways, nothing he’d braced for.

“I’m asking so I don’t jump to conclusions.” Her fingers worried the hem of her top without seeming to notice, twisting the fabric into a small, anxious knot. “So—do you love her?”

He almost laughed, the sound catching somewhere in his throat before it could fully form. “Why are you asking me that?”

“At first I thought maybe it’s because you’re the lastborn. Maybe that’s why you act the way you do toward her—toward everyone.” Her chest rose and fell, a breath she seemed to need before continuing. “Then I wondered if maybe you’re autistic. Maybe you just show emotion differently, instead of that blank face you always wear. But I kept turning it over and I still couldn’t decide. So I came to ask.”

He wanted to laugh again, more genuinely this time.

He had thought many things about her, turned her over in his mind more than he would ever admit to another living soul, but funny had never once been one of them. She stood there looking completely serious, eyes steady despite the nervous hands, and he found himself wondering, with an unwelcome tug of tenderness, how long she had been circling these thoughts about him. Whether they’d kept her up some of those early nights, before sleep claimed her on the sofa.

“The question is…” He spoke slowly, eyes steady on her, watching for whatever her face would do next. “Why were you thinking about me at all?”

She blinked once. Twice. Her gaze slid past him to the artwork on the wall, as if the answer might be written there in the brushstrokes, safer to look for it there than in his face.

Her arms folded across her chest. “That’s not the point. And I wasn’t thinking about you. I was thinking about Aunty Kike. You only got pulled into it because you’re her brother.”

A small smirk tugged at the corner of his mouth—the first real expression since she had walked in. “I see.”

“Please just answer the question.” Her voice tightened, something urgent breaking through the deflection. “Aunty Kike has been missing for a whole week.” The word missing dropped lower, heavier, like she’d been avoiding saying it out loud until now and the saying of it cost her something. “And you’re acting like it’s nothing. You’re not even showing worry.”

Tears gathered in her eyes and she blinked them back hard, jaw setting with the effort of it. “I haven’t been able to sleep. All I keep thinking is what if something happens, what if—”

“Stop thinking.” The words came out faster than he meant them to, sharper too, an instruction aimed as much at himself as at her.

“What?”

“I said stop thinking.”

He turned back to the laptop, needing somewhere else to put his eyes. The sight of those unshed tears did something sharp and unwanted to his chest, a pull he felt all the way down to his hands. An urge to comfort her rose so strongly it startled him—to cross the room, to say something true instead of something flat, to let her see for one second that he was drowning too. He crushed it down, the way he crushed down most things, methodically, without ceremony.

“Oh. So that’s how you do it?” A soft sniff, her arms tightening around herself. “You just switch your thoughts off like there’s a power button in your head.”

He shrugged, the picture of mild boredom, though underneath it his pulse hadn’t slowed at all. This was already the longest conversation he had ever held with her, and some traitorous part of him hoped, quietly and against his own better judgment, that she would keep talking. That she would stay standing in his room a little longer, in her soft pajamas, worrying the hem of her shirt, saying things no one else in this house would dare say to his face.

“Great. Just great.” Her hands flew up in a small, frustrated arc. “So Aunty Kike is missing and all I have to do is flip some mental switch and stop thinking about her. Absolutely perfect.”

“Who is missing?”

Iya Kuti’s voice cut through the doorway behind them, sudden and sharp as a struck match.

Kuye’s eyes widened.

Timehin froze, the color leaving her face in one long, silent drop.

“Ẹtí mi ò dì, Timehin. I’m not deaf.”

Iya Kuti stepped into the room, eyes moving from Timehin to Kuye, sharp and unhurried, the eyes of a woman collecting evidence before she decided how loud to be about it.

“I just heard you say Kike is missing.”

The silence that followed had weight. Kuye felt it settle over the room like something dropped from a height, and for one absurd second his mind reached for some new thread to spin, before he understood, with a kind of tired relief, that there was nowhere left to run the thread to.

She pointed a trembling finger at him, the other hand already fisted in the fabric at her chest as though she needed something to hold onto.

“Kuye. So you have been lying to me all this while?” Her voice climbed, rising by degrees like something building toward a peak it had no intention of stopping short of. “O wò iyá ẹ! You looked your mother in the face and lied to her? Ah, Jesu, Jesu, Jesu.” She shook her whole body, eyes squeezed, and took two staggering steps backward as though the lie itself had pushed her.

“Mummy—” He was already on his feet, hand half-raised, though he had no idea what he meant to do with it.

“Má bà mí sọ anything!” She raised her voice; tears were already gathering, spilling before she’d even finished the sentence. “I don’t want to hear a single word from you!”

She stumbled, one hand flying out to catch a wall that wasn’t close enough. Kuye and Timehin reached her at the same time, steadying her by the arms, their hands meeting briefly at her elbow before both pulled back, the moment too urgent for either of them to notice.

“Big Mummy, please calm down,” Timehin said, her own voice tight with worry, threading through Iya Kuti’s like something trying to hold a fraying rope together.

“Má sọ fún mi kí n calm down. Don’t tell me to calm down. I don’t want to hear calm down from any of you, okay?”

The question landed nowhere in particular, aimed at the room, at the ceiling, at whatever unseen audience she was always half-performing for.

Slowly she sank to the floor, her gown pooling around her, one hand pressed flat against her chest as if to keep her heart from climbing out, muttering under her breath in a rhythm Kuye recognized instantly, the cadence of a woman who had learned, over decades, to hand her heaviest things directly to God because there was nowhere else sturdy enough to set them down.

“Ahh Jesu… Holy Spirit… Father God…” The words came in a steady stream, her free hand rising and falling against her knee in time with them.

Timehin glanced at Kuye, almost apologetic, as though she had somehow caused this, her eyes wide and searching his face for permission to do something, anything. He looked away from her—he couldn’t hold both her worry and his mother’s collapse in the same glance, not without something in him giving way—and crouched in front of Iya Kuti instead.

“Mummy.” He tapped her arm gently, the way you’d touch something you were afraid might break further. “Iya Kuti?”

“Fí mi lé!” She snapped her head up, eyes red and fierce, grief and fury sharing the same face without apology, and swatted his hand away with a suddenness that startled even her.

“Your sister has been missing and you would not have told me if I hadn’t overheard it from Timehin.” Her eyes widened theatrically, a whole new register arriving without warning. “Wọ́n ti kidnap Kike! Àwọn herdsmen ti gbé Kike ooo! Ẹ gbà mí o, ẹ gbà mí!” Both hands flew to her head and she began hitting it, the sound of her palms against her own skull loud in the small room, her whole upper body rocking with each strike.

“Mummy!”

Kuye’s voice cut sharp, sharper than he’d meant it, his hand catching one of hers mid-strike before it could land again.

That stopped her. She found his eyes, breathing hard, some of the drama draining out of her at the sight of his face so close to hers, so uncharacteristically open. Her chest still heaved, one dramatic aftershock still working its way through her shoulders.

“Nobody took Kike,” he said evenly, though his own chest was doing something far from even. “She left on her own. Something happened between her and Nosa. I think she’s just trying to take some time away from all of us.”

Iya Kuti’s face shifted into a frown, the grief momentarily elbowed aside by something else entirely, her whole body seeming to straighten with the change. “Ẹhn-ẹhn? Something happened between her and Nosa ké? Ṣé wọ́n ti break up ni?”

Kuye almost laughed, the sound rising and dying in his throat before it could fully escape. Of course that was the part that mattered. Of course, in the middle of kidnapping and herdsmen and the end of the world, his mother’s ears had sharpened instantly at the mention of a broken engagement, as if grief could be filed neatly under whichever category hurt worst.

“Mummy, I don’t know. But Nosa is worried about her too.”

As if a switch had flipped, the theatrics returned in full, seamless, no transition required. She was on her feet again before he’d finished the sentence, hands lifted skyward, palms open, gown swaying with the force of her rising.

“Oluwa! Jesu! This is not what You said to me. You told me that for my shame I shall have double. Ẹ má bà mí sọ pé Kike àti Nosa má break up. You didn’t tell me that. Kò si nínú májẹ̀mú wa, Olúwa!” Her voice had found a new octave entirely.

Kuye retreated to the edge of his bed and simply watched, the fight gone out of him, replaced by something closer to weary fondness, the particular exhaustion of a man who had watched this exact storm make landfall more times than he could count and knew, with total certainty, that it always eventually passed.

Timehin came closer, voice low, leaning toward him without quite meaning to. “Are you just going to sit there and watch her?”

He shrugged, though his eyes stayed on his mother, soft despite themselves. “Don’t worry. She’ll finish soon. This is how she gets when it’s about Kike.”

A small smile tugged at Timehin’s mouth, fighting its way up through the worry still etched across her face. In the middle of the chaos it looked like the only steady thing in the room, and Kuye found his gaze drifting to it before he could stop himself.

“What’s funny?” he asked, quieter than the question needed to be.

“The fact that you’re used to this.” Her voice trembled with held-back laughter, light and musical, threatening to spill over entirely. “Like you’ve seen this a thousand time.”

“I have.”

“That makes it even funnier.”

Eventually Iya Kuti wiped the last of the tears away, finished talking to Jesus with what sounded very much like a formal amen—complete with a small clap of her hands, a full stop she’d clearly been building toward—and looked at them both as if nothing had happened, her composure returning as suddenly and completely as it had left.

“Ṣé ẹ ti pe Police?”

Kuye nodded, straightening slightly, grateful to be handed something practical to stand on. “Yes. One of Pastor Tife’s friends is a private investigator. He’s already on it.”

She moved without assistance this time, settled into the soft armchair in the corner—suddenly the composed woman again, spine straight, chin level, as though the woman who had been striking her own head moments ago belonged to some earlier scene entirely—and asked, “Have you checked Oshodi?”

“Yes, ma. She’s not there.”

“Tunmise ńkọ́? Khalid? Have you spoken to all of them?”

“All of them. Nobody knows where she is.” He heard the tiredness in his own voice as he said it, the accumulated weight of a week’s worth of dead ends finally finding a crack to leak through.

“Okay.” She nodded thoughtfully, one finger tapping the armrest.

“Má lo bí Holy Spirit. I’ll ask the Holy Spirit. He’ll tell me where my daughter is.” Her eyes fixed on Kuye, narrowing with sudden, pointed accusation.

“Ṣé ẹ ti bi Holy Spirit? Did you ask the Holy Spirit?”

He shook his head, not trusting himself to answer out loud without something in his voice giving him away.

“See? That’s why you can’t find her.” She stood, smoothing her gown down with brisk, businesslike hands, the subject apparently closed to her satisfaction. “Timehin, the jollof rice you cooked—please bring it out of the freezer for tomorrow.”

Timehin stared, caught off-guard by the abrupt shift, blinking as though she’d been yanked without warning from one room of conversation into an entirely different one. “Okay, ma.”

“Kuye.” Iya Kuti turned to him, shaking her head with mild, almost affectionate regret. “Pray to God and repent of lying. All liars will perish in the lake of fire.”

Beside him, Timehin pressed her lips together, fighting another laugh, her shoulders shaking faintly with the effort of holding it in. Kuye almost smiled too, but that would only invite a fresh lecture, and he had exactly zero appetite left for another round tonight.

“Okay, ma. I’ll pray.”

She didn’t wait for the rest of his answer. She simply walked out, gown trailing, already muttering something new to herself in the hallway, some fresh conversation with heaven that no longer required an audience.

The door clicked shut.

Timehin finally let the laughter free, soft and helpless, one hand pressed to her mouth as if she could contain it even now, her shoulders shaking with the release of a whole day’s tension finding somewhere harmless to go.

Kuye watched her—the way her eyes crinkled at the corners, the way she had to lean briefly against his desk to keep herself upright, the sound of her laughter filling a room that had, until minutes ago, been thick with grief and confessions—and felt that familiar quiet tenderness rise in his chest again, unbidden, undeniable, refusing this time to be tucked away as easily as it usually was.

He didn’t reach for a word for it.

He had run out of other words to call it.

Author’s Note: I just love this woman. 😂

Target: 300 likes, 100 comments, 60 restacks.

Catch Up On Previous Episode Here.

The words left Nosa in a ragged rush, each syllable torn out between sharp, uneven breaths. He stood in the middle of the church park, one hand pressed hard against his side as if he could force his lungs to slow down. Sweat stung his eyes. His shirt clung to his back. He had run the entire way—down the long slope from the children’s auditorium, across the main church, past the workers quarters—only to find the space where his car should have been nothing more than bare asphalt and the sharp, unfamiliar shape of someone else’s vehicle.

No Kikelomo.

No sign she had ever been there.

He had already called her number twelve times. Thirteen. The line went straight to that cold silence every single time, yet his thumb kept finding the screen again, as if sheer insistence could force her phone to switch itself back on. When that failed, he had dialled Kuye. The conversation had been brief, almost clinical, and it had left a hollow space in his chest that was still expanding.

“She’s not home, Nosa. And the car isn’t either.”

That was all.

His heart was no longer simply beating; it was hammering against the inside of his ribs, a frantic, irregular rhythm that made him feel light-headed. The last time Kikelomo had vanished like this on him—gone AWOL without a word—he had come back to find her curled on her bed, feverish and pale, eyes too bright. The memory rose unbidden, sharp as glass. He tried to push it away, but the park around him felt suddenly too large, too quiet, every empty path a possible place she might be lying, alone.

He pressed the heel of his hand against his chest.

Lord. Where is she?

Adanna’s voice came through the phone, careful, distant. “I’ve not seen her, Nosa. Is everything okay?”

“I don’t know…” The admission scraped out of him, barely louder than a breath. “I really… do not know.”

Something cold and heavy that had been sitting in his chest for the last hour finally took shape. Fear. It was not the ordinary kind that came with traffic or deadlines, but a deeper fear that whispered she had already worked it out. That she had known whatever Lanre said about her, pieced the fragments together, and decided the only safe thing left was to disappear before the heartbreak could reach her.

He had walked away from that conversation with Lanre still unfinished in his own mind. He hadn’t been ready—still wasn’t ready—to look her in the eye and ask the questions that would follow. There were other weights pressing on him: the message from Pastor Efua, the meeting with his spiritual parents that he had hoped would be about courtship, about beginnings. Now he knew better. After everything Lanre had laid out, the meeting felt like something colder.

Time had played its usual cruel trick. The talk with Lanre had stretched past an hour without Nosa noticing. An entire hour in which Kikelomo could have gone looking for him. She might have reached Tife’s office, found the door empty, realised the two men she expected were nowhere in sight. He knew how her mind worked—swift, precise, almost mathematical. She would have run the numbers, seen the shape of the situation, and chosen the only answer that made sense to her: walk away before anything would happen.

“Nosa, calm down.” Adanna’s voice had changed. The usual lightness was gone; now it carried that careful, measured tone she used only when something truly unsettled her. “What exactly happened? Tell me, bit by bit.”

He let out a long, shaky breath and dragged a hand through his damp hair. His eyes kept sweeping the park as if one more desperate scan might suddenly conjure her standing there, phone in hand, smiling the way she always did when she teased him for worrying too much.

“Where are you, Adanna?” His voice was quieter now, almost reluctant. “I don’t think I can say this over the phone.”

There was the briefest pause.

“Tife’s office,” she answered, the words coming quickly, as though she already understood how little time they might have. “Come now.”

“Let’s all stay calm, please.”

Tife’s voice cut through the thick quiet that had settled over the office after Nosa finished speaking. The only sound left was the low hum of the air conditioner, a soft breath that somehow made the silence feel heavier. Adanna sat very still, her gaze fixed somewhere far beyond the walls, as though the story Nosa had just told was only a single thread in a much darker tapestry she already knew by heart. Her shoulders were slightly hunched, her hands clasped tightly in her lap. Everything about her posture whispered that she carried more than she was ready to speak.

A short, fragile sigh slipped from her lips.

Tife’s eyes moved to her at once. “Babe… do you know where she might be?”

Adanna’s shoulders lifted in a helpless half-shrug. “Usually in situations like this, she runs to Nosa’s place. She finds comfort there. But now…” Her voice thinned. “Now she’s running from Nosa. I don’t know where she would go.”

Nosa blinked, the words landing like a small, unexpected blow. He turned fully toward her. “You just said ‘in situations like this.’” His eyes narrowed, suspicion and something more vulnerable flickering behind them. “Has she ever been in a situation like this before?”

The silence that followed was not comfortable.

Adanna’s gaze dropped to the table, then lifted again, flickering between Tife and Nosa, then back to Tife. Something was clearly warring inside her—loyalty, fear, the weight of secrets that had never been hers to keep. Her lips parted, closed, parted again.

“Babe, please,” Tife said, his earlier firmness softened into quiet urgency. “Any information would help right now.”

Adanna nodded once, slowly. Another sigh left her, heavier this time. She turned to Nosa, her voice dropping to something almost tender.

“Nosa,” she began, “you got the entire story wrong.”

She blinked hard, chasing tears that refused to stay hidden. Her lips pressed together for a moment as she fought for control. “There’s so much about Kike that you don’t know. So much pain she’s had to carry. So much shame for things she never did.” She sniffed and tapped the edge of the table. Tife wordlessly passed her his handkerchief. She pressed it to her eyes, dabbing carefully before she continued.

“Everything Lanre told you is true. It happened. But Kike had no part in any of it.”

Nosa’s brow furrowed. Confusion stacked on top of the fear already lodged in his chest. “Adanna…”

“Kikelomo was framed,” she said quietly, “by the person she trusted most.”

The words struck him like cold water.

Framed.

Someone had deliberately woven a lie that cruel around her name. His heart began to race again—harder, louder—against his ribs. The urge to find her, to shield her, to undo every wound she had ever carried, rose so fiercely it almost stole his breath. How much had she endured in silence? How much pain could one person absorb and still choose to love the way Kikelomo loved?

Adanna kept speaking, her voice steady now that the first truth had been released.

“She truly belonged to that fellowship in school. She led the media team with everything she had. But all of it—every single part—was a revenge plot planned by her best friend, Bimbo, to get back at her ex, Jaiye. Kikelomo was just the pawn they moved across the board. And when everything collapsed, she was the one left holding the blame.”

Nosa stared at her, the shock settling deep into his bones.

He knew, in a smaller way, what it felt like to be framed. In middle school a classmate had slipped a teacher’s pen into his bag. He still remembered the helpless confusion, the way every eye in the room had turned to him, the sick certainty that no one would believe him. Only his mother and Tife had stood firm.

“Nosa would never steal,” they had said. “He doesn’t take what isn’t his.”

Tife had gone further—befriending the boy who planted the pen, patiently drawing out the truth until the boy admitted he had done it because the girl he liked had a crush on Nosa. Nosa had eventually been cleared. An announcement had been made. His name had been restored because his mother and Tife chose to fight for him. But those weeks had left a mark: the way people still glanced at him first whenever something went missing, the humiliation that clung long after the truth was known.

At least he had people that were willing to fight for him.

But who had fought for Kike?

Adanna continued, laying out the rest of the story with careful, painful detail. And with every sentence, something inside Nosa fractured a little more. He saw her at sixteen—bright, trusting, unaware of how dark a human heart could become. He saw her welcoming back the friend who had used her. He saw her heartbroken by a man she had loved. He saw her forced to take a year away from school, returning only to write her final exams with a face mask pulled high so no one would recognize the girl whose name had been dragged through the mud.

And now she was out there somewhere, still carrying a story that had never belonged to her.

Adanna’s voice softened, then rose again with quiet finality. “This is the part I’ll stop, Nosa.” Her eyes drifted past them to the calendar resting on Tife’s desk. “There’s still a piece of this story that isn’t mine to tell. But when she does tell you… please remember that none of it was her fault. All she ever did was love. All Kikelomo has ever known how to do is love. And sometimes loving means walking away with scars… just as Jesus did.”

Nosa felt the strength drain from his legs. He gripped the edge of the chair to steady himself. If the truth alone could leave him this hollow, how much heavier must it have been for her to live inside it?

Suddenly the fierce, almost frightening protectiveness he had always felt toward her made sense. He used to wonder why he loved her the way he did, with a kind of fierceness that left him scared. He’d always known it was never his love. It was Jesus’s. It was Jesus who needed to show Kikelomo the definition of what love looked like. So, he’d chosen him exactly for that purpose.

A deeper dread settled over him. This was not simply emotion. Not butterflies or chemistry. The feelings had only been the vehicle. The real destination was the place where love became a decision—deliberate, costly, divine.

Lord. He whispered inwardly, the prayers barely formed. Am I doing well? Am I loving her as you would have me do?

He looked up at the two people watching him. Something thick and aching sat in his throat, but he forced the words past it.

“I need to go find her.”

Adanna nodded quickly, eyes shining. “Please, Nosa. Please find her.”

Tife stood, his voice shifting into the steady, pastoral cadence that always seemed to settle the air around him. “Nosa. God will go with you. Your words will be a balm to her soul.” He closed his eyes briefly. “And wherever she is right now… we pray in the name of Jesus that the Holy Spirit would hold her close. Kikelomo, you will not make any rash decision. You will not be alone…”

He prayed on, the words wrapping around the three of them like a quiet covering, until the sharp edge of fear began to soften into something steadier: peace, fragile but real.

When he finished, Tife stepped forward and pulled Nosa into a firm embrace. “Na man you be, my brother,” he murmured against his shoulder. “Go find your woman.”

The Uber rolled to a stop directly in front of his apartment gate. Nosa stepped out slowly, the evening air cooler than he expected, carrying the faint scent of dust and distant generators. This was only the second time he had returned to this place since coming back to Nigeria. Tife and Adanna had insisted he should live with them, their voices still echoing in his mind as the car pulled away, but tonight some instinct in him pulled him back here, a door he could close without an audience on the other side of it.

The driver barely waited for the door to close before driving off, as if the entire journey had been an inconvenience he was eager to finish, and Nosa stood there a moment, feeling strangely like the last thing left standing on the street.

He pressed the intercom button and waited, his mind still circling the conversation at Tife’s office, Adanna’s words looping without mercy.

The gate clicked open. Chuks peered out, his face lighting up the instant he recognized him.

“Ah, Oga. Welcome o!” The excitement in his voice was almost boyish, completely at odds with the heaviness Nosa carried, and for a second the mismatch between them—Chuks’s easy joy and his own leaden chest—felt almost unbearable.

“Chuks,” Nosa managed, stepping inside. “How are you doi—”

The rest of the greeting died on his tongue.

There, under the soft yellow glow of the compound lights, sat the car he had given Kikelomo. Parked neatly, as if it had simply come home on its own, no driver, no explanation, just the fact of it sitting there in a spot that should have been empty. His brows drew together. His heart, already worn thin by the day, began to race again—harder, sharper, a fist knocking urgently against a door it wasn’t sure it wanted opened.

“Is Kikelomo here?” he asked, turning to Chuks with sudden intensity, the words coming out faster than he meant them to.

Chuks shook his head quickly. “Oga, no o. Na me bring the car come home.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Sister Kike called me, sir.” Chuks’s voice dropped, almost apologetic. “She told me to come and collect the car. I met her at the car wash. She gave me the key… and some other things to give you.”

Worry rose in Nosa’s chest like a tide, cold and immediate, swallowing whatever was left of the evening’s ordinary rhythm.

“Was she looking all right when you saw her?”

Chuks hesitated. “No, Oga. She looked like someone who had cried very well. Her face was very red. I asked her what happened, but she said it’s cold.”

Nosa closed his eyes for a brief second, then opened them again, the compound lights swimming briefly before they settled. “Where are the things she gave you?”

“Oga, give me one second.”

Chuks turned and hurried toward his small lodge. He returned almost at once, holding a modest black bag.

“This is it, sir.”

Nosa took it carefully, as though it might break, as though the bag itself were something with a pulse that needed handling gently. Inside lay the car keys, his black card, and a single note folded with deliberate neatness—too neatly, he thought, the kind of care a person takes with something when their hands need somewhere steady to go. His pulse thudded against his throat as he drew the paper out. He glanced once at Chuks, who still stood waiting, uncertain, sensing weather he couldn’t name.

“Thank you, Chuks. That will be all.”

He walked into the house without another word, the bag hanging loose from his fingers, forgotten already. Every step felt heavier than the last, the floor tilting faintly beneath him though it hadn’t moved at all. He closed the door behind him and leaned against it, the cool wood pressing into his back, grounding him to something solid while everything else in him threatened to come loose. For a moment he simply held the note, unopened, praying—quietly, desperately, his lips barely moving—that whatever words waited inside would not be more than his heart could carry.

Then he unfolded it.

Her handwriting slanted across the page, familiar and heartbreaking, the loops of her k‘s undid something in his chest before he’d even read a full sentence.

Okay. So. Where do I even start?

I’m writing this in a rush, sitting on a bench by the car wash like a mad woman, because I need to get away before you show up. You always have a way of showing up, you know. It’s honestly a little annoying how well you know my movements. Anyway. Explaining myself right to your face is not something I think I have the courage to do. I would probably just look at you, open my mouth, and produce absolutely no sound, like a fish. A very heartbroken, very ugly-crying fish. Nobody needs to see that.

I recognize Lanre, your brother. Only realized who he was after you both walked away. And I’m figuring he has told you everything.

His breath caught. He was right. She knew already. She had known before he’d even finished walking back to the car to find her. The thought landed with a strange, aching tenderness—that even in her fear, her first thought had been to spare him the burden of having to say it.

He’s not lying, Nosa. He’s saying the truth. And maybe that’s exactly what you need to hear. I keep thinking of that verse, “the truth shall set you free” — well, congratulations to you, because you’re about to be very, very free. Ha. Sorry. I don’t know why I’m making jokes right now. My hands are shaking as I write this, if you can’t already tell from my terrible handwriting getting worse by the paragraph.

Maybe I’ve deluded myself into thinking I’m deserving of this after all that has happened. I don’t even know what I’m deserving of anymore. But I figure you need to know the truth.

No, he wanted to say aloud, the word rising in him before he could stop it. No, you are deserving. He wanted to reach through the page and hold the hand that had written those words, to tell her that whatever she believed about her own worth in this moment was a lie dressed up convincingly as truth. But the page could not hear him, and he had no choice but to keep reading, his jaw tightening with every line.

All Lanre told you is true. Everything happened. And I don't think I might be able to bear it if you walked away first. Someone had done so to me in the past, and I almost did not live through it. If you do so now, I might not survive it, Nosa. So please, please let me do the walking away first. I know it doesn't make sense. I know love is supposed to stay and fight. I've heard every sermon about it, trust me, I could probably preach one myself at this point. But I don't have it in me to stand there and watch your face change while you decide whether you still want me. I would rather remember your face the way it looked this morning, before all of this. I want to keep that one. Just that one.

Something in him cracked audibly, or so it felt—a sound only he could hear, deep in the architecture of his chest. He pressed the back of his hand hard against his mouth. She thought he would leave her. After everything—after every time he’d chosen to wait rather than push, after every closed door he’d let stay closed because he trusted she’d open it when she was ready—she still believed, at the bottom of everything, that he was a man who would walk away the moment the truth got difficult to carry. The thought hurt in a way he hadn’t braced for, sharper even than the confession that followed it.

The part he might not have included in the whole story — because of course he doesn’t know it — is this: I cannot have a child, Nosa. I am incapable of carrying a child. I lost my womb about nine years ago due to an unfortunate circumstance. There. I said it. Nine years I have never once written that sentence down, and now it's sitting here on paper in my own handwriting like it's nothing. I had a whole year of practicing how to say this to you and I still don't think I did it right.

Nosa’s hands began to shake. The paper slipped from his fingers and fluttered to the floor, landing face-up, her handwriting staring back at him from the tile. He stared at it for a long second, his chest rising and falling too fast, before bending down, trembling, to pick it up again. He held it now with both hands, as if a single hand could no longer be trusted to keep it steady.

Kikelomo would not be able to bear a child. To carry a child. His mind ran ahead of him, snagging on possibilities he didn't want to name — an accident, an illness, something that had happened to her, or something her own body had done against her. He didn't let himself land on any of them long enough to look. And she had carried this for nine years. Through every laugh he'd loved, every joke she'd told with her mouth, she had been carrying this alone, in a silence he had never once suspected went this deep.

There were many times I wanted to tell you. So many times. Times you probably thought I was just being random, staring at nothing, and I was actually mid-rehearsal in my head, “Nosa, sit down, I have something to tell you,” and then you’d smile at me and I’d lose the whole speech. I had a whole speech, Nosa. I practiced it in the mirror once. It was going terribly even then, so maybe it’s a mercy you’re getting the written version.

I was going to eventually tell you tomorrow at the meeting with Pastor Efua. Tomorrow. Can you imagine? But how would I face you after all that you’ve heard today? How could you be able to look at me the same way again? I’m not curious enough to find out, Nosa. I’ve decided I’d rather wonder for the rest of my life than watch it happen in real time on your face

Tomorrow. She had been going to tell him tomorrow. The word sat in his throat like something swallowed wrong. One more day. One more day and she would have told him herself, in her own voice, with him able to hold her face in his hands the moment the words left her. Instead Lanre’s mouth had gotten there first, and now here he was on the floor of an empty apartment, receiving the most sacred thing she had to give him through folded paper and his house attendant’s careful hands.

So, yeah… that’s it. That’s actually it. I love you, I do. I am absolutely, irrevocably in love with you, in a way that honestly used to embarrass me a little, because I never thought I was the type. I thought I’d be the friend giving everybody advice while quietly dying alone with twelve cats and a suspiciously large Netflix collection. And then you happened. Rude of you, honestly.

But I know you love me too. I know that. And that’s actually the whole problem, if I’m being sincere with you — it would almost be easier if you didn’t. But the odds seem to be stacked against us. What happens when your dad finds out? Or we keep meeting someone who knows about my past, the way we met Lanre today, out of everyone, on today of all days — God has jokes, apparently. What happens if we finally get married and one day, you start desiring children, and I have to watch that desire live in your eyes and know I can never be the one to answer it? What happens when you’re eventually made a King and someone suddenly brings up this story to use as a weapon against you? And how would you tell your family that you have no successor to hand over to because your wife is medically incapable of carrying a child?

Each question landed like a small stone, and with each one Nosa felt something in him rise to meet it, fierce and immediate, though there was no one in the room to hear him argue back. Let them find out, he thought, his throat tight. Let them bring it up. Let them try. He would stand in front of every version of that future she had just described—the father who might object, the whispering mouths, the crown that came with expectations older than either of them—and he would say her name like a shield each time. She was not a liability to be weighed against a title. She was not a defect in a lineage. She was Kikelomo, and if the throne required a woman who could give it heirs the way it required a woman to give it love, then he would rather walk away from a crown than walk away from her. He wanted to write all of this back to her, right now, in whatever hand God would steady enough to hold a pen. But she was gone, and the only place he could say it, for now, was in the small, ruined space of his own chest.

So, I’m walking away first. My heart breaks in little pieces to write this — actual little pieces, I can feel them, is that dramatic? I don’t care, let me be dramatic, I think I’ve earned it today. I love you so much it hurts. Like physically. My chest actually hurts. I didn’t know that was a real thing until about an hour ago.

I’m taking some time away from everyone, everything. I know it’s unwise but I just cannot stand being around anybody right now. Because being around everyone makes me think this might be possible, that maybe I could stay and it would somehow be fine, and I can’t afford to think like that right now, I really can’t. But there’s a world out there, Nosa, a world where people are ready to throw stones at every chance they get. And this is my own way of protecting you from them. Let me have this one act of love. It might be my last one.

Why am I writing you a letter instead of sending a message, by the way? Don’t worry, I’ve thought about this deeply, I have several reasons. One, it feels a little cute and dramatic, and God knows I need the dramatics right now to get through this. Two, you can’t reply to a letter immediately, which means I get a small head start before you find the perfect words to make me change my mind. Three — and this is the real one — you won’t be able to track a letter. Kuye won’t be able to use his tech genius to find out where I am. Tell him I said sorry in advance, he’s going to be so upset that a piece of paper defeated him. I’m safe though. Genuinely. So don’t worry yourself sick, please. Eat something today. I mean it.

A broken, disbelieving sound left him at that—half a laugh, half a sob, the two so tangled together he couldn’t have separated them if he’d tried. Even here. Even now, writing the end of them, she had found a way to be herself, dry and clever and impossible, trying to make him smile in the very letter meant to break his heart. It was such a Kikelomo thing to do that it nearly finished him, and he pressed the paper briefly to his chest, as if the joke could reach him better from there.

This should be the part where I tell you I love you, but then it wouldn’t be a breakup, would it. So I won’t say it again. (I already said it two times above. I counted. I’m not canceling any of them.)

Take care, Nosa. Please. For me.

Kikelomo. (the fish. the very heartbroken, ugly-crying fish.)

He read it once.

Then again.

Then a third time, eyes moving slowly across every line as if the words might rearrange themselves into something funnier if he only looked hard enough, as if enough reading could wear down her resolve the way water wears down stone.

Nothing changed. The words held their shape no matter how many times he searched them for a door he could walk through toward her.

The paper trembled between his fingers—not from any breeze, but from the fine, continuous shaking of his own hands, a tremor that had started somewhere around I cannot have a child and never once let up.

For a long while he simply sat there on the floor, back against the door, the note held carefully in his lap like something both precious and devastating. His eyes traced the sentences again and again, searching for a different meaning, a hidden clause, anything that would soften the finality of what she had written. He found none. There was no hidden clause. There was only a woman who loved him enough to disappear so that he wouldn’t have to be the one to leave.

Something inside his chest tore open—quietly at first, then with a force that stole the air from his lungs entirely, folding him forward over his own knees. So this was heartbreak. Not the distant, literary kind he had read about in novels, not the manageable ache of ordinary disappointment that faded with a good night’s sleep. This was different from the grief of losing his mother, which had at least come with the mercy of finality. Different from the long months of recovery after his own body had nearly failed him, which had at least given him something to fight against with his hands. This felt like a vital piece of him was being carefully, deliberately removed while he remained fully conscious of every second of its leaving.

I’m walking away first.

Those five words carved through every coherent thought he had left. They felt like a blade drawn slowly across the softest part of him, unhurried, almost gentle in how thoroughly it cut. He had never imagined standing on this side of heartbreak—never pictured himself as the one left behind, holding a letter that ended everything while the person who wrote it was already gone, already running from a door he would have held open for her forever if she’d let him.

The first sob rose almost politely, a small, muffled sound from deep in his chest, the kind a man makes when he’s still trying, out of old habit, to be quiet about his own pain. The second came less restrained. Then the dam broke completely. He cried the way grown men are taught not to cry—shoulders shaking violently, breath catching in harsh, uneven gasps, tears streaming unchecked down his face and falling onto the already damp paper, blurring one more of her words into something illegible.

He cried for her.

For every silent year she had carried this alone, smiling through the days with a wound he’d never known to look for.

For the fear that had lived in her smile, tucked behind every laugh he had mistaken for simple joy.

For the pain she was still trying to protect him from, even now, even in her leaving, still thinking of him before herself.

And finally, he cried for himself—for the helplessness of not knowing how to reach her, how to hold her, how to rewrite the ending she had already decided on without him, how to make her believe, from wherever she was hiding, that she had been wrong about the one thing that mattered most: that he would ever, under any circumstance, choose to walk away first.

“Lord Jesus…” The words came out broken, pressed against the heel of his hand as he held his chest, as if physical pressure could keep the rest of his heart from tearing further. “Please… minister to Kikelomo wherever she is…” His voice cracked clean in half on her name. “Comfort her, Lord. Because I can’t. Not right now. Please, You do it. You reach her where I can’t.”

The tears kept falling. He made no attempt to stop them, no longer had the strength to pretend he wanted to.

The house remained quiet around him, offering no judgment. Outside, a distant generator coughed to life and settled into its steady drone. Somewhere in the estate a dog barked once, then again, then fell silent. The lamp in the passageway flickered weakly, the bulb nearing the end of its life, casting his shadow in an unsteady, trembling shape against the wall, but Nosa did not rise to change it. He didn’t have it in him to tend to anything else broken.

He stayed where he was—bent forward, elbows on his knees, the letter now soft and creased in his hands, her name blurred at the bottom under the water his eyes kept giving up—learning, breath by breath, how a heart settles around the shape of someone’s absence. How it begins, slowly and without permission, to carry a new and permanent wound. And somewhere beneath the wreckage of that night, quiet but unmoving, a decision was already taking root in him, one he did not yet have the strength to say out loud: that wherever she had run to, however far she believed she needed to go, he was not done fighting for her.

He had only just begun.

Author’s Note: I know you never envisaged this.

Target: 300 likes, 100 comments, 60 restacks.

Catch Up On Previous Episode Here.

He had volunteered to pack up the moment service ended, the way he always did. Cables coiled tight around his forearm before he set them in their foam nests. Equipment slotted back where it belonged, corner to corner, until the whole rack looked like nobody had ever touched it. His hands knew the routine well enough that they didn't need him — which was usually the problem, because it left the rest of him free to think, and today his thoughts kept sliding sideways, toward someone he wouldn't let himself look at directly.

Timehin was sitting across the unit, phone balanced loosely in her hands, waiting for him with an uncharacteristic stillness that felt almost deliberate. As if she knew that the stillness itself would be the thing that got his attention, and had decided to try it.

He had never seen her this quiet. She existed in motion: always in the middle of something, always a little clumsy, always throwing herself into tasks with the kind of reckless energy that made him wonder, more than once, if she was trying to get herself killed. The other week he had walked into the media booth and found her perched high on a ladder, neck craned toward the ceiling, investigating something no one else had noticed or cared about. While the rest of the team handled cameras and soundboards with careful competence, Timehin performed what could generously be called stunts. There was no other word for it. She simply did not seem to believe that things applied to her the way they applied to other people, including basic laws of gravity and self-preservation.

He glanced at her once, briefly, and something in his chest did a small, involuntary thing — a tightening, quick and unbidden, gone before he could name it. He put it down to the general fatigue of a long Sunday and looked away.

Then, he stacked the remaining cases and carried them toward the storeroom, moving with more purpose than the task required.

Sleep was waiting for him after a Sunday like this — deep, earned, the kind that came from giving a full day to something beyond yourself. The thought of it was the only clean thing in his mind right now. The storeroom door stood open. Inside, Joshua, their Assistant Unit Head, was rearranging cables into a box, breath coming heavy as he shoved a crate back against the wall.

“Kuye, thank you o.” Joshua straightened, wiping his palms on his trousers. “I had to come rearrange this table because I learnt that the security team wants to keep some things in our store.”

“Oh.” Kuye set the cases down in the cleared space. That explained the disturbed order — he’d noticed it without registering why. “What are they keeping?”

Joshua shrugged. “I don’t know, but they pleaded with us. And we have to walk in love.”

A small smile tugged at the corner of Kuye’s mouth despite himself. “I see what you just did there.”

Joshua’s laugh filled the small room. Then, without any change in pitch, like the two thoughts belonged in the same breath: “I saw Timehin sitting in our unit. What was she doing there?”

Kuye’s stomach dropped a little. He’d genuinely forgotten he’d left her out there. “My sister asked me to drop her off.” He busied himself squaring a case against the wall so he wouldn’t have to add that she’d be staying the whole week, or examine why that fact sat in him like a stone he hadn’t asked to swallow.

Kike liked her. That was enough. He had no say.

Joshua absorbed the information, a private smile playing at his lips.

“What’s up with the smile?” He asked, sliding the last case into place. Together they pushed the heavy screen to the far end of the store.

“I think she’s cute,” Joshua said, almost to himself. A shy smile bloomed and he bent quickly to gather the extension boxes scattered on the floor, as if the motion could hide his face. “She’s a pleasant person to be around.”

Kuye grimaced. He had never looked at Timehin and thought the word cute.

He had thought: careless. Chronically incapable of completing a task without creating a secondary disaster in the process. He had thought: the girl who wandered their house in Kike’s abandoned gowns — faded, shapeless things that hung off her shoulders like she had put them on in the dark and hadn’t checked a mirror since. The girl who came in from tending to Iya Kuti’s garden looking thoroughly excavated, soil under her nails, hair escaping in approximately seven directions from whatever she had done to it that morning. He had once walked into Kike’s room and found her sitting before the vanity mirror with a pair of scissors, hacking her own braid extension off at the root because she didn't have the patience to unravel it properly, hair falling on the tabletop in fistfuls while she muttered at it like it had personally offended her. There was nothing he thought was carefully pretty about her. She was simply just Timehin.

“I see.” He cleared his throat against a tightness he couldn’t place. “Have you spoken to her?”

Joshua straightened, dusting his palms. “Not really.” He wasn’t fighting the smile anymore. “We sat together once during Brothers and Sisters forum. She was very kind. Pleasant, too.” He looked at Kuye square on. “Can you put in a word for me? I’d really love to be her friend.”

Kuye felt a sharp, sudden constriction in his chest and blinked against the unexpected pressure. Why did Joshua’s words land like that? He kept his voice carefully flat, almost bored. “I don’t know, man. We barely talk.” Then he stepped back. “I have to go check on my things.”

And he walked away quickly before Joshua could reply.

His heart was knocking against his ribs as he returned to the unit. He didn’t understand why. His steps had picked up pace without his permission, and now here he was, breathing a little too fast for a walk across a foyer.

Why did the idea of Joshua and Timehin becoming friends sit so poorly with him?

He had watched the smile bloom on Joshua’s face as he admitted to wanting to be friends with her, and his jaw had gone tight watching it. If he could have reached across and wiped that smile clean off, he would have done it without a second thought. The realization of exactly how badly he’d wanted to do that startled him enough that he stopped walking for a second, right there in the aisle, frowning at nothing.

Strange, he thought. He had no quarrel with Joshua. Joshua was his Assistant HOD, a decent man who had never done him wrong a day in his life. There was no reasonable inventory of grievances he could draw up against him — not one. And yet something in him had wanted, briefly and completely, to make that smile disappear. He turned the feeling over once, twice, looking for the shape of it, and found nothing he recognized. He shook the thought off and kept moving, unconvinced by his own dismissal of it.

He found her still seated, already deep in conversation with a familiar sister — someone he’d seen around often enough, though of course Timehin knew her; Timehin knew everyone in this building, knew everyone in this city, apparently. He moved to the table and picked up his Bible, turning it over in his hands for something to do. She had not noticed him yet.

She was mid-laugh with the sister, hand resting easy on the woman’s arm, head tipped back, completely unguarded. He watched her be that open, that warm, that unhurried, and felt the small, familiar sting of contrast rise in him — because he already knew, with the certainty of someone who had watched it happen too many times to call it a coincidence, exactly what would happen the moment she noticed him standing there.

Her shoulders would come in an inch. Her voice would drop half a register. Her eyes would find the table, the floor, the sister’s shoulder — anywhere that wasn’t his face. He had once overheard her tell Kike, low and matter-of-fact, that she knew he didn’t like her. Those words, said so plainly they hadn’t even sounded like an accusation. He could still hear the exact flatness of them. The sentence had lodged itself somewhere behind his chest weeks ago and had not, since then, agreed to leave, and he genuinely did not know why a comment that small should have stuck the way it had — should still be sitting there, working at him, when far larger things had come and gone in the same stretch of weeks without leaving a mark.

“Timehin.” The name came out quieter than he intended, almost swallowed before it left him.

She looked up. Her eyes found his, and for a fraction of a second, he took her in fully. The media-team black she always wore, made stylish today by a fitted T-shirt and jorts. A short bob wig sitting classy against her face. White sneakers bright against the dark carpet. And across the bridge of her nose and the high planes of her cheeks, a scatter of freckles he had never registered before — faint constellations against skin the colour of rich earth, catching the foyer light in a way that made him blink and look again.

He had never noticed them. Or maybe he had simply never looked long enough to. The distinction bothered him more than it should have. There was a difference between something being new and something having always been there, waiting on him to finally pay attention, and he did not like which one this was starting to feel like.

He put the observation away as nothing and looked back down at the table.

“I’ll be in the car,” he said. “You can come meet me once you finish your conversation.”

He nodded briefly at the sister and walked off before Timehin could answer.

Soft footsteps followed almost immediately — quicker than he expected, like she hadn’t wanted to be left standing there either. The faint, familiar scent of her perfume reached him first, something light and clean that he had, somehow, without ever deciding to, learned to register. Practically living with them now, this scent. His mother seemed to delight in it. Timehin was always in the kitchen these days, cooking or laughing with Iya Kuti over something on the cooker. Last week she had even gone to Idumota Market to mind the shops while Iya Kuti travelled to Ogun for a family meeting. Her presence had settled into the house permanently, without him ever quite noticing the moment it stopped being new — and that, too, was starting to feel less like an observation and more like a question he hadn’t let himself ask yet.

It annoyed him. That was the word he reached for, the one that fit best in his hand.

The hall was emptying around him, clusters of lingering conversation dotting the space, but most people were already gone. He crossed the lot and slid into the driver’s seat the moment he reached the car.

Through the windshield he watched her approach. She walked toward the car with a reluctance that was almost visible in the set of her shoulders, in the unhurried drag of her feet, as if the short journey home would cost her more than she wanted to give. Kike’s warning from earlier flickered through his mind — find a way to be courteous — and he rearranged his face into something careful and neutral, the way he always did before she got in. Civility. That was all this required. He repeated it to himself like a man reciting a rule he suspected he was about to break.

They did not have to talk. He would drive her home. That would be the end of it.

Yet as she drew closer and reached for the door handle, her face caught the afternoon light again through the glass, and something in his chest did the same small, unfamiliar thing it had been doing all afternoon — a tightness with no clear cause, a static he couldn’t tune to any station he recognized. He frowned faintly, tucked it under the same place he tucked everything else about her lately, and reached over to unlock the door.

“Bro, this is not the way to Tife’s office.”

Nosa said it lightly, more observation than complaint, watching the path Lanre was leading them down. Sunlight had thinned to a slow gold; it lay along the leaves and the dust without urgency, stretching the shadows into soft, unhurried shapes that made the afternoon look quieter than it actually was. They had been walking for almost five minutes, the muffled sound of children’s voices drifting through the auditorium walls beside them, and Lanre had been talking the whole time. France. The cold that still surprised him every winter despite the years. The new faces he had gathered around himself and the old habits that had followed him across the ocean and made themselves at home regardless.

Nosa listened. Barely interrupted. Let the familiar cadence of his friend’s voice do what it had always done — settle something in him, some quiet place that had missed this specific frequency of company. There were people you could go years without seeing and pick up with in five minutes, and Lanre had always been one of them. He was grateful for it. He had not realized, until this moment, exactly how grateful.

Then they curved the corner of the children’s auditorium, and something in the air shifted.

He couldn’t have said what it was. Maybe it was the way Lanre’s voice thinned out mid-sentence. Maybe it was the pause before he spoke again, a beat too long, like a man choosing his next word off a narrow ledge.

Lanre nodded, eyes scanning the empty stretch of concrete ahead, and said, “Bro. We go see Tife later joor.” His voice dropped, suddenly low, almost careful. “I wan follow you yarn something. Make we go the back.”

Nosa’s brow furrowed. A small unease uncurled in his stomach. “With the way you’re suddenly looking serious. I hope you’ve not gotten into trouble, Lanre.”

A short laugh escaped Lanre as they trudged together toward the shadowed rear of the building. “If I ever enter trouble, just know say na for righteousness’ sake.”

Nosa smiled despite himself, the sound of that laugh hitting him harder than he expected. God, he’d missed it. Three plastic chairs sat abandoned against the wall—probably dragged out by restless children—and he made a quiet mental note to return them once they were done here. Lanre pulled two closer, the cheap plastic scraping faintly against the ground, a small, ordinary sound that Nosa would remember for a long time after.

“Make we sit now.”

Nosa settled into the chair, the slight give of the seat familiar and unremarkable. But his eyes stayed fixed on Lanre’s face, and it was there that the unease sharpened into something else. The usual mischief was gone. In its place was something tight, almost strained, a jaw working itself before it dared to open. Strange. Lanre was the one who spent most of his time laughing through everything, who had once made a whole vigil crack up mid-prayer-point. This version of him, quiet and searching for footing, didn’t fit.

“Bro, what’s up? You’re making me worried.” Nosa shifted, adjusting his weight, the chair creaking under him. He tried to keep his tone light, but even he could hear the thread of caution running through it now.

Silence stretched between them—thick, heavy, almost two full minutes long. The distant chatter of children faded, swallowed by the wall between the auditorium and the back lot. Even the air seemed to hold its breath, and Nosa found himself holding his too, though he couldn’t say what he was bracing for.

Then Lanre turned fully toward him, eyes locking onto Nosa’s with deliberate weight.

“Nosa, I hope you know I respect you a lot.”

“Yes, and I respect you too, brother.” Nosa answered carefully, already sensing the conversation tilting somewhere he didn’t want it to go. Somewhere in the back of his mind, Kike sat waiting in the car, probably scrolling her phone, probably glancing at the time, probably wondering what was keeping him. He hated keeping her waiting. He hated it more than he understood.

“This thing I want to say,” Lanre continued, voice lower now, “I would have waited for a better time. But you know I’m travelling back to France tomorrow. And I don’t know when we will meet again. It might be the next three years. Who knows?” He laughed—thin, brittle, a sound with no joy hiding inside it. Nosa wondered, for the first time, what could possibly be funny about any of this.

He stayed quiet. Listening. His pulse had begun, without his permission, to pick up its pace.

“Again, I’m saying this because I don’t want you to get hurt.” Lanre managed a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “You’ve saved me many times, brother. It’s only right that I pay back.”

A soft sigh escaped Nosa, though it did little to loosen the knot forming beneath his ribs. “Lanre, just speak on. You’ve been going around cir—”

“It’s about Kikelomo.”

The name landed between the two of them.

Nosa felt something cold and sudden drop straight through the center of his chest, a free fall with no floor beneath it. The air in his lungs stalled. For one absurd second he almost laughed—almost said oh, is that who you wanted to talk about?—because surely nothing that started with her name could be a thing to fear.

“My woman?”

Lanre nodded once. Slow. Certain.

“Yes. I know her. I know her quite well.” An exhale left him, heavy, like something he’d been carrying a long distance and was finally setting down. “And she knows me too. She was just pretending not to.”

Something sharp and electric passed through Nosa’s heart—something that tasted like fear, metallic and immediate, coating the back of his throat. He had always known Kikelomo hadn’t told him everything. There were closed doors in her past, soft silences that settled between them in the middle of conversations, when her eyes would flicker and her mouth would open and then close again, swallowing whatever had almost come out. He had noticed. Every single time. And he had chosen patience. He had told himself, over and over that when the time was right, she would speak. He was a patient man. He could wait. He had built his love for her, brick by careful brick, on the promise of that waiting.

But now Lanre was looking at him, weighing him, measuring how much truth his brother could carry before it broke something.

Nosa breathed in. Out. Controlled, or trying to be. “Okay. I appreciate you letting me know. But I’d rather hear the rest of whatever this is from Kikelomo.”

Then, without thinking twice, he rose to his feet. The chair scraped harshly behind him, the sound too loud in the quiet, like something tearing.

“She won’t tell you, Nosa. That’s what she does. She hides herself in the midst of God’s people to do evil.” He breathed deeply, a hand running over his face, as though the words cost him something to release. “I know many brothers, many guys that fell into sin because of her.”

Nosa’s face tightened. His eyes ran over Lanre, trying to ascertain whether this was some kind of joke, some strange test of loyalty he hadn’t been warned about. But Lanre looked serious. Sincere, even. And that sincerity was somehow worse than if he’d been lying.

“She’s a scammer, Nosa. She scammed men for money. Used to send them her pictures, promise them more if they sent her money.” He continued, taking Nosa’s silence for permission. “I knew her from my Uni days. We attended the same fellowship for over three years.”

Nosa felt his heart stop short, a held breath turning to stone in his chest.

Kikelomo had mentioned attending a fellowship to him, once, briefly, before leaving because someone hurt her. Church hurt, that was what she told him, the words coming out small and clipped, like she was handing him a wound wrapped in tissue paper, hoping he wouldn’t unwrap it further. He’d asked questions, gently. But whenever she tried to speak about it, he would see her struggle, her hands finding something to hold—a cup, the hem of her sleeve, his fingers—almost as though the pain were physical, and he was asking that old wounds be reopened with his bare hands. So he had stopped asking. He had kept waiting, telling himself she would speak when she could finally muster the courage, that love meant giving her that room.

“Lanre,” he began slowly, his voice a thin wire pulled taut. “You have no right to call my woman a scammer.”

“Bro!” Lanre answered, almost exasperated. A long breath left him. “This was the same way she jazzed Jaiye. We had to show him evidences before he finally believed she was not who he thought she was.”

Nosa stared hard at Lanre.

The world around him drowned out—every sound, every distant child’s laugh, every rustle of leaves—swallowed whole into a single ringing silence. For one suspended second there was only the thunder of his own blood in his ears, loud enough that he almost missed the rest of the sentence. He took a step back slowly. Deliberately. Every muscle in his body locked tight, as though bracing for a blow he could see coming but not avoid.

“Who is Jaiye?” he asked, barely able to hold his breath together.

“Jaiye was the President of our fellowship. Usually, that’s how she does her thing. Going after guys with money or power. Jaiye had both. He was in love with her, bro. Man was head over heels.” He sighed as though the memory made him sad, genuinely sad, and that, too, unsettled Nosa more than anger would have. “She broke my guy. Broke him. Shattered him. He left the country and I never heard from him again.”

Jaiye.

That name.

He was the man Kikelomo barely ever spoke about—the ex she had once described in careful, clipped sentences as the one who had hurt her so deeply that even mentioning him made her voice tighten and her eyes go distant. The same man he’d seen over a month ago at that restaurant, trying to leave her birthday gifts that felt less like apology and more like a quiet claim.

But if Kikelomo had been the one who inflicted the damage, why had Jaiye looked so thoroughly guilty the day their paths crossed? Shoulders drawn in, gaze dropping the moment their eyes met, as if he’d been caught in the middle of something he had no right to be doing. And why was he trying to win her back if Lanre’s version of the story was the truth?

Nosa drew in a deep breath that didn’t seem to reach anywhere. He didn’t want to hear any longer. He wanted to reach into the air and pull each word back out of it, unsay it, unhear it. The woman Lanre was talking about was not his Kikelomo. His Kikelomo was a dove; she would never hurt anyone intentionally. His Kikelomo was the girl who got excited over the smallest things—a colorful bird landing on the balcony rail, the chance to rewatch her favorite movie and then gist him about it scene by scene as though he hadn’t sat right beside her through the whole thing. His Kikelomo loved Jesus, sincerely, with a whole and open heart, the kind of love that made her obey Him even when no one was watching. The woman Lanre was describing could never have been Kikelomo. Could not. He would not let the two women share a name in his mind.

He shifted his foot and looked into the distance, past the wall, past the parked cars, to where he knew she was sitting, probably tapping her phone screen absently, probably humming, waiting for him. And here was Lanre, saying all of this. Lanre, who had no reason to lie. Lanre, who had traveled across an ocean of years and habits and was leaving again tomorrow, who stood to gain nothing from inventing a story this cruel.

He felt a hand rest on his shoulder. It was Lanre’s. “My guy, I know it’s hurting you. But I don’t want us to have another Jaiye’s story. We lost Jaiye because of Kike. His ministry, everything… it just went down the drain once she showed up.” A sad sigh escaped him. “I love you, man; I don’t want that to happen to you too. Especially considering the fact that say the stakes are higher here.”

Nosa stopped listening. His mind had gone somewhere else entirely, somewhere further back than this concrete lot and these three plastic chairs. He was thinking of the day he’d bumped into her—and the way he could see, even then, the visible pain she carried, tucked behind her eyes like something folded small to fit inside her. Those eyes had told him things words didn’t need to say. He thought of her innocence, the way she grew shy when he looked at her with an intensity that told her exactly what he was thinking, the way her fingers would find something else to do so she wouldn’t have to hold his gaze too long. He thought about the day she told him she’d finally returned to God, her voice trembling with something raw and holy, the Sunday she’d experienced an encounter he could tell, without needing to be told twice, was God’s own hand resting on her.

Lanre was still talking, his voice a distant hum now, but Nosa’s mind had drifted to the night he’d walked with Iya Kuti, back when he’d visited Kike while she was ill, long before they started dating. Iya Kuti had walked him to the car, her steps slow and deliberate, and said, in that voice she used only for things that mattered:

“Kikelomo is like an egg, Nosa. You must be ready to handle her delicately.”

He’d thought nothing of it at the time. Just a mother looking after her daughter, he’d assumed, the kind of thing older women said about the girls they loved. But standing here now, with Lanre’s words still hanging heavy in the air between them, he understood it. He understood all of it—why Adanna had insisted, more than once, that he must be ready to love Kike when he saw her ugly part, the part she kept behind locked doors even from herself.

This was it. This was the past she’d been hiding, the shape of the thing he’d only ever felt the outline of. He felt the pain erupt in his heart like something breaking loose from where it had been dammed—was this why she never wanted to return to church? Because she feared people would judge her for something that had happened to her, something she had done, long before he ever knew her? Was this why she never collected anything from him, not even small things, not even when he insisted—because somewhere inside her lived the fear of being called that word again? His heart broke into small, quiet pieces, one after another, and he pursed his lips to keep the pieces from spilling out where Lanre could see. And then, slowly, he turned to face his friend.

“Bro.” He started, his voice steadier than he felt, steadier than he had any right to sound with his chest caving in the way it was. “Thank you for looking out for me.” A small, sad smile found its way to his lips.

Lanre’s shoulders shifted. Reading the words as agreement, the way people do when they have been bracing for argument and receive acknowledgment instead.

“But I need you to listen.”

Something in Lanre’s posture realigned.

“You knew Kikelomo years ago.” Nosa held his gaze. Steady. Unhurried. The gaze of a man standing on solid ground. “But I want to ask you something, and I want you to really hear the question.”

He paused.

“Is the grace of God real or is it not? Does transformation happen or doesn’t it? Because the whole gospel — everything we have built our lives around, everything we preach and sing and believe — is built on the fact that a person is not the sum of the worst thing they have ever done.” His voice was quiet but it had weight behind it, the weight of a man who meant every syllable from somewhere deep and unperformable. “If we do not believe that, we have nothing to offer anyone.”

“Bro—”

“I allowed you to speak,” he said, and this time his voice held firm, unmovable, a door closing gently but completely. “Please listen to me.”

He cleared his throat, and when he spoke again, something old and steady rose up in him, something that had been shaped over years of quiet mornings with an open Bible. “Love speaks no evil, Lanre.” His gaze settled on his friend, unwavering. “If you were truly concerned about me, you would have texted Pastor Emmanuel about this. He is both our spiritual father. You would have told Tife, or someone else who could help carry this the right way.” He drew a breath, and it shook only slightly. “But you brought the words to me. You saw my joy, and you decided to add pain to it.”

“I love her, Lanre.” The words came out plain, unguarded, the truest thing he had said all afternoon. “That woman you saw in the hall—I am in love with her.” An exhale, long and trembling at its edges. “And she did not jazz me. It was Jesus who put the love there. I have so much love in my heart for Kikelomo. So much that this—” he gestured vaguely, helplessly, at the space between them, at the story still hanging in the air, “—this cannot move it.”

He took a step back, putting distance between himself and everything Lanre had just handed him. “Thank you for your words, though. I appreciate it, brother.”

And then he walked away to find her, his footsteps steady even as everything inside him was not, carrying a story he did not yet know how to hold, toward the one person he was determined to hold anyway.

Author’s Note: 👀

Target: 300 likes, 100 comments, 60 restacks.

Catch Up On Previous Episode Here.

Those weren’t my words.

They were written in 1964 by Tai Solarin. One of Nigeria’s foremost social critics and educationists.

And despite how they sound, it is one of the most inspiring essays you’ll ever read.

Over the past few months, I have spent time turning this phrase over in my hands: “May your road be rough.” The first time I heard it, I was eight. Barely in tune with the world’s rhythm. Full of wonder, of possibility, of a kind of pure, untested excitement for the road that lay ahead of me.

My mom was the one who first spoke of the essay, and only in passing. She told me she’d read it in secondary school, and that the first time someone read it aloud, the whole class shouted “God forbid” in one breath. But as they moved through the essay, something in the room began to loosen. Sentence by sentence, they started to understand why a road might need to be rough at all. And by the very end, they were the ones wishing it upon themselves — may our roads be rough.

When I was seventeen, I listened to a lot of Sia. She had a song then called Unstoppable, one of my favorites off the album. The lyrics went something like this: “I’m unstoppable, I’m a Porsche with no brakes, I’m invincible, yeah I win every single race.”

But one ordinary afternoon, I sang it aloud beside one of my favorite elder brothers, Bro Joel, and I watched his expression tighten. “Please,” he said, “you’re not a Porsche without brakes. A Porsche without brakes would end up crashing.”

Those were his exact words. And the next time the song came on, I quietly skipped the Porsche-without-brakes part.

I remember how, in that moment, my mind reached back on its own and connected the song to the phrase — may your road be rough. My mother, while walking me through the essay years before I would ever read it myself, had said something I’ve never quite put down since: a person moving too smoothly, without any obstacle in her way, most often ends up crashing, and crashing suddenly. Then she looked at me, plainly, and said: it is good to have a rough road, Demilade.

I have wrestled with that for a long time, even though I’ve had my own fair share of rough roads by now. If you ask me, I would tell you: I am a soft-life ambassador. I am the girl who runs back to her father’s house at the slightest inconvenience. The girl who chose to school in Lagos precisely so she would always have somewhere close to run to if things ever grew too hectic. And yet, no matter how many times I reaffirm the soft-life mantra to myself, hard life sits patiently in the far corner, watching, and says, without raising its voice: don’t worry, you’ll come back here to meet me.

Tai Solarin’s central argument was this: a life without struggle is a life without growth. His provocative blessing — may your road be rough — was, underneath it, a wish that people encounter the kind of challenge that forces them to develop. He went further still, arguing that society itself only ever progresses because people are made to confront their problems. Necessity, he believed, challenge, even discomfort — these are the silent engines behind invention, discovery, and reform.

One of my closest friends, Duchess, often returns to this same idea whenever we fall into one of our long arguments about the roots of civilization. She points, again and again, to the fact that Africa’s lack of great technological invention traces back to comfort — that our lands were thoroughly blessed, that trees grew on their own, that the water and the food were simply there, waiting, offering us the basic things a person needs to live well. Why invent anything, she asks, when you can live comfortably, and die comfortably, without ever having to?

I usually push back against her, reminding her that what civilization came to mean for Africa was never quite what it meant for the rest of the world. But that is a story for another day. Right now, we are still speaking of rough roads.

I want to draw a single thread through everyone I’ve quoted so far, because one thing runs consistent through all of them: they each believe hardship is necessary to forge a person, or a people, into something. And this has proven true, again and again, over time — a man met by enough rough road is eventually forced either to change his situation, or to change himself, simply in order to keep moving.

We live now in a world where almost no one wants to do the hard thing. Everyone wants a smooth sail. And if you try to argue otherwise, I’ll remind you that when you read the excerpt I opened this essay with, some part of you resisted saying Amen to it. You didn’t say it. Because the words were hard — too hard to sit comfortably in the mouth. Nobody wants a hard time, not really. We live in an age where there is an easy way around everything now, including the basic, ancient art of thinking. We don’t want the friction of it, so we hand it over, quietly, to a technological invention that is slowly sapping the very intellect it claims to serve: our beloved artificial intelligence.

But as I move further into life, I have begun, slowly, to understand the need for a rough road. For hardship, for challenge, for a life with obstacles set here and there along its length. I didn’t always understand this. Nearly eight years ago, I asked my elder sister why life seemed so hard on me. And recently, again, I asked my friend Joseph the same question in a different shape. Why do I always have to face things like this?

My questions, it turns out, had been answered long before I ever arrived to ask them.

Rough roads produce strong people. I posted once that our generation is weak, and someone in the comments accused me of rage-baiting. I wasn’t. So much has been made easy for us that when we bring our struggles to the generation before us, our problems often look small in their eyes — because so many of them were forged by hardship, by obstacle, by failure, by circumstances that offered no soft place to land.

Adversity is a teacher. I have come to see it, slowly, as exactly that. I’ve spent more time now sitting with what my own rough roads are trying to teach me. What sort of person am I becoming, at the far end of this particular road? Have I gathered enough along the way to carry into the next one? Or am I still sitting back somewhere on the shoulder, lamenting the woe of it, instead of listening to what it has to say or teach?

And I have arrived, finally, at this: I am not ashamed of my rough roads. In a world where everyone else seems to be moving so smoothly, it is alright that I carry a little setback of my own. It is alright that my vehicle tumbles sometimes over the asphalt. It is alright that I meet a bump here, or a deep pothole there. It is even alright that some days, the vehicle simply grows too tired to move at all. They are all part of what the rough road offers. And it is here — on this exact, uneven stretch — that the true shaping of a life happens.

So I drive slowly. I gain speed sometimes. I meet a bump, and I slow down again. And, mile by mile, I learn how to carefully, deliberately navigate around the potholes I cannot avoid. Because in the end:

Life, if it is going to be abundant, must have plenty of hills and vales. It must have plenty of sunshine and rough weather. It must be rich in obfuscation and perspicacity. It must be packed with days of danger and of apprehension.

So, as I journey on, I wish myself plenty of tears and of laughter, plenty of happiness and unhappiness, plenty of failures and successes. Plenty of abuse and of praise. It is impossible, in the end, to win, without a rich measure of all of it stirred together. Life would be worthless — far worthless — without the lot.

— Tai Solarin, 1964

Tunmise’s voice floats across the open-plan office as she rounds the edge of my table, the soft click of her heels against the polished concrete cutting through the low hum of keyboards and muted phone calls. She leans a hip against the corner of my desk, arms folded loosely, waiting.

I don’t look up right away. My eyes stay on the glowing demo of our PAYOG product, the clean interface sliding through mock transactions under my fingertips. A sigh gathers in my chest and sits there, heavy. Three weeks of this. Three weeks of Khalid stepping back from every decision, of him saying plainly in the last stand-up that we were capable of locking a launch date ourselves, of not understanding why we kept going in circles. And meanwhile I have been spending late nights mapping the patterns of consumer behaviour — the way wallets tighten after mid-year, the way conversations about housing spike when the harmattan begins to sharpen. I have told him more than once that the second half of the year gives us room. Room to seed the market properly, to let the promotions breathe, so that by December, when rents start expiring and people start making decisions, the product already feels familiar. Inevitable.

“Tunmise.” Her name leaves my mouth on a soft exhale. I lift my eyes. “If we want this product to scale the way we keep saying it will, we can’t launch it yet.”

Her brows pull together. “Is this about your second-half proposal again?” She pulls out the chair beside mine and sits, voice dropping to something urgent but not sharp. “Kike, we’re gaining real momentum right now. Look at the market share we already hold. What happens if some startup appears tomorrow and builds a standalone version of this exact thing? You know we’re integrating it with everything else we offer — that advantage disappears the moment someone else moves first.”

“I know.” I shift in my seat. Usually these conversations have three voices — Tunmise, Maryam, me — circling the same table long after everyone else has left. But Maryam is gone. Last week we walked in and found her desk stripped bare, chair pushed in as though she had never sat there. HR’s investigation had ended, the way those things end when the evidence is clear and there is nothing left to dispute.

She packed over a weekend and disappeared.

I am still not sure what I felt when I first saw the empty space.

Relief, mostly. The particular relief of no longer having to wonder whether the person sharing your air is quietly working against you.

“You’re scared,” I say, turning fully toward Tunmise. “Scared that one of those companies that keep poaching Khalid’s people will find Maryam, and she’ll hand them everything.”

Tunmise’s shoulders lift in a small shrug. “I mean… the startup space is brutal. Dog-eat-dog.”

I hold her gaze. “Even if they try, they don’t have the reputation we do. They don’t have the community we’ve spent years building.” I pause, let the silence do some work. “Do you know how many families we’ve already helped off the streets with the house-plan package alone?”

She nods. Slow and thoughtful, the fight draining out of her posture.

“So let’s hold. We pull more traction if we wait for the second half.”

A grin breaks across her face. “So we’re telling Khalid we’re pausing everything?”

“Exactly.”

She shakes her head, the admiration soft in her eyes. “This babe. You too good.”

“It’s just studying people,” I murmur. “Knowing when their attention is open, and what will pull it toward you, and using that timing for the work.”

“I should be taking notes.” She laughs under her breath. “No wonder Khalid wants his hands completely off this. He really believes in us.”

“And we’ll deliver.” I reach for my phone.

The screen lights up with a message from Pastor Efua.

Kikelomo my dear, let’s meet next week Monday by 6pm. I’ve sent a text to Nosa too.

The words land like a stone dropped into still water.

My heart begins to climb. Each beat louder than the last, each one carrying the full weight of what Monday means. Monday is the day I finally tell Nosa everything I have been holding since the moment he walked back through my mother’s door. Monday is the day the table gets laid with the full truth and we find out whether what we have built is strong enough to hold it.

It has been a full month since he landed. Thirty days. And those thirty days have been some of the most beautiful I can remember — the first week we saw each other almost every single day, visits that turned into long walks, conversations stretching past midnight without either of us noticing the time going. Then he had travelled to Edo to see his father, and the King had kept him at the palace for a full week. I had understood. Nearly a year had passed since the two of them had been in the same room.

I had spoken to the King myself for the first time, on a video call that still replays in my mind with startling clarity. I was on a call with Nosa, and suddenly there was his father looking at me, and I had five full seconds of complete silence before I remembered how to breathe, how to greet properly, how to be a person. We spoke for almost seven minutes. His father asked careful, unhurried questions about my work and my family, and he was nothing like the distant public figure I had read about. He spoke gently of their customs and then asked, straightforwardly, whether my parents were comfortable with their daughter marrying a man from Edo. When the phone finally returned to Nosa, that man was blushing. Genuinely blushing. His father’s approval had lit him from the inside and he had been unable to hide it and had not tried.

After that week he came back, and since then we have spent most of our free hours at Adanna and Tife’s place. Those evenings have become some of the brightest things in my recent life. I watch the easy current of their friendship, the way they move around each other without friction, the way Nosa lifts Oreoluwa into his arms and settles him against his chest as though he has always known how. An ache rises in me at those moments — a longing that the Holy Ghost has been patiently teaching me how to carry without letting it curdle into something else.

Kikelomo, He had said, two nights ago, when I lingered too long on the image of Adanna and Tife with their son. There is a thin line between desire and envy.

So I have been choosing joy on purpose. Spending longer hours in fellowship. Trusting that when the full truth finally comes into the light, He will steady Nosa’s heart the same way He has been steadying mine.

But Pastor Efua’s message is sitting on my screen now like a living thing, and something sharp and familiar has begun to move through my chest — something that knows exactly what it is even though I don’t want to name it.

Fear.

I press my palm flat against my chest. As if I can keep whatever is rising from reaching my face.

“Babe.” Tunmise’s voice cuts through. Her eyes have narrowed with real worry. “Are you alright?”

I force a nod. “I’m fine, Tunmise.”

She doesn’t look convinced. “Do you need water?”

“No.” It comes out tighter than I intend. I stand — too quickly, the chair rolling back — and gather myself. “Please excuse me.”

And then I am moving. Across the open floor, past the glass partitions, straight to the restroom, where the only One who understands the full weight of what is coming is already waiting to listen.

The air conditioning hums a soft, steady note beneath the low gospel playlist drifting from the speakers — something gentle about grace and morning mercies. Outside, Lagos is only just waking up, the streets still half-empty, sunlight spilling gold across the bonnet of the car as we move through the quiet. I sit angled toward Nosa, one leg crossed over the other, watching the way the embroidered collar of his navy trad settles against his throat every time he turns the wheel.

The fabric looks expensive under the light, the kind of deep blue that makes his skin glow. His beard is trimmed close, the edges sharp, and I catch myself leaning a little closer just to catch the faint scent of his cologne mixed with the clean starch of his top. My fingers twitch against my thigh. I want to reach across and trace the line of his jaw, feel the soft scrape, but I remember the last time — how his breath hitched and the car drifted half a lane before he laughed and told me it was “highly distracting.” So I keep my hands still, content to simply look.

He notices anyway.

Without taking his eyes from the road, the corner of his mouth curves. “You’re staring again.”

“I’m allowed,” I say, and this time I do reach over — not to his face, but to smooth a small crease near his elbow. My knuckles brush the warm skin of his forearm. “You look… expensive today.”

A low chuckle rolls out of him. His free hand leaves the steering wheel, finds mine, and laces our fingers together over the centre console like it is the most natural thing in the world. His thumb begins that slow, absent circle across my knuckles, the same rhythm he always uses when he is content. He lifts our joined hands and presses a quiet kiss to the back of mine, lips lingering just long enough for me to feel the heat of his breath.

“You look like someone I want to keep forever,” he murmurs, eyes flicking to me for a second, soft and open.

Something warm unfurls low in my chest. The music swells a little — soft piano, a woman’s voice singing about steadfast love — and for a few heartbeats the world narrows to the weight of his hand in mine, the steady hum of the engine, the way the morning light catches on the silver of his wristwatch. I let my head rest against the seat, smiling at nothing, at everything.

Then the question that has been sitting at the edge of my mind all week surfaces.

“Babe.” I keep my voice light. “When are you going to collect your car from me?”

He blinks. Glances at me. “Is the car complaining?”

“No.” I match his tone. “But those Agbero guys are always trying to extort me when they see a woman in this kind of car. It’s getting exhausting.”

He nods, fingers tightening around mine in that quiet, instinctive way. “If they try anything, just call me.”

“But what about you?” I turn a little more toward him, genuine worry slipping in. “I don’t like that you’re moving about in Ubers.”

A slow smile curves his lips, the shy one that always makes him look younger. “I’m getting a new one this week.”

“What?” I sit up straighter, the seatbelt tugging lightly across my chest. “And you say it so casually like that?” I shift fully to face him. “Exactly how rich are you?”

He smiles again, eyes dropping for a second as if the praise embarrasses him. “It’s the blessings of God, babe.”

Then, almost in the same breath, his voice lowers, grows steadier.

“You can have this one, Kikelomo. I’ve actually been meaning to tell you that it’s no longer mine. It’s now yours.”

The words settle between us like a sudden drop in temperature.

I stare at the side of his face, searching for the familiar glint that means he is joking, for the teasing lift at the corner of his mouth. There is none. His expression is calm, completely serious, the same look he wears when he has already decided something and simply needs me to catch up.

My fingers slip free of his without my meaning to. The loss of his warmth is immediate.

“Are you playing with me?” My voice comes out smaller than I expect.

“Why would I?”

Something cold and heavy begins to press against my ribs. The warm haze of the last few minutes thins, then vanishes. I look down at my lap, at the way my hands have gone still against the fabric of my dress, and feel the familiar tightness that has been living under my sternum all week begin to coil tighter. Accepting this car — letting him place something so large and permanent into my hands — feels like it would push the weight past the point I can still breathe around it.

I swallow. “I… I can’t take it, Nosa.”

He frowns, the easy line of his shoulders shifting. “Why not?”

I keep my eyes on the dashboard, on the soft glow of the radio display. “It just feels wrong.”

Silence stretches for a few seconds, filled only by the gospel track and the low rush of tires on asphalt. I can feel him glancing at me even as he keeps driving.

His voice comes quieter, edged with something unhappy. “I’ve already ordered the new one, Kike. It’s coming this week. So what exactly do you expect me to do with this one?”

“Sell it,” I say, the words out before I can soften them.

He lets out a short breath through his nose, almost a disbelieving laugh. “Sell it.” His hands flex once on the steering wheel. “I don’t understand why you keep refusing to accept things from me since I came back this past month.”

The air inside the car changes. The earlier softness drains away, leaving something thinner, more fragile. I watch the way his jaw tightens, the small muscle jumping near his ear.

“You made an excuse when I asked that we go on a date last week,” he continues, voice careful but no longer light. “And that card I left for you — you haven’t spent a single naira on it.”

My throat closes a little. I can still see the black card sitting untouched in the drawer of my bedside table, the same place it has been since he left. “I couldn’t take your car and still take your money, Nosa.”

“I don’t understand a relationship where we cannot take from each other.” He says it evenly, but there is real frustration underneath. “That’s what partners do.”

I turn toward the window for a second, watching a roadside seller arrange her pure-water sachets, anything to avoid the weight of his eyes. “You’re being unfair. I take some things from you.”

He glances at me fully this time, just long enough for me to see the darkening in his expression. “Yes. Things that do not involve monetary value.”

The words land with a quiet force. I feel heat climb the back of my neck.

“That isn’t true,” I say, quieter now. “I accepted the flowers you brought for me. And the—”

“Kikelomo, that’s just an excuse.” His voice stays low, controlled, but each sentence comes sharper than the last. “You’ve been pulling away from everything that costs me something. Why?”

I open my mouth, close it. The words press harder against my ribs. Outside, a danfo horn blares once, distant. Inside the car the gospel singer’s voice rises, soft and earnest, completely at odds with the tight space between us.

“I’m not pulling away,” I manage. “I just… I don’t want you to feel like you have to keep giving.”

“I’m not keeping score.” He shakes his head once, eyes fixed on the road again. “I want to give. That’s the point. But every time I try, you find a reason. What’s really going on?”

My fingers curl into the fabric of my dress. I can feel my pulse in my wrists. “Nothing is going on. I just can’t take it.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have right now.”

He exhales slowly, the sound heavy. “Kike—”

“We shouldn’t fight on our way to church,” I say, the words tumbling out too fast, too thin.

Nosa’s hands still on the wheel for a fraction of a second. When he speaks again his voice is quieter, stripped of the earlier edge. “I’m not fighting. I’m just trying to understand you.”

I have nothing left to say to that.

I turn fully toward the window, watching the familiar church gates appear ahead, the compound already dotted with people in their Sunday best. The music from the main building floats faintly through the glass — drums, clapping, a distant choir. Nosa drives the rest of the way in silence, the gospel track still playing, the earlier warmth between us gone cold. He finds a space near the side entrance, eases the car in, and switches off the engine.

For a moment neither of us moves. The sudden quiet feels louder than the music had been.

Then he turns fully toward me, one hand still resting on the steering wheel, the other loose in his lap. His expression is calm, but the intensity in his eyes makes it clear the conversation has only been paused, not finished.

“Babe,” he says softly, “we need to come back to this.”

The final prayer ended nearly thirty minutes ago but the auditorium is still alive with people — slow currents moving across the wide carpeted aisles, small clusters forming and dissolving near the glass walls that look out onto the courtyard, the automatic doors at the exits sighing open and shut. The stage lights have gone dark but the LED strips along the ceiling still glow their muted gold, catching the haze that always lingers after a full service.

I stand with Timehin near the back, just off the main walkway where the media team’s portable carts are parked. She pulled me here the moment the benediction finished, fingers still loosely hooked around my wrist, and she has been talking since.

“—so the woman just stood up from her seat o, Aunty Kike.” Her voice is low, almost confidential, but the energy behind it is the energy of someone who has been holding this story in all morning and is finally, finally releasing it. “The whole office went quiet. And she slapped him — pah — right across the face. Even me, I was surprised. I nearly dropped the attendance sheet.”

I nod. The movement is small. My eyes track a group of young people laughing near the coffee station at the far side of the foyer, the stainless-steel machines still releasing thin threads of steam. Timehin keeps talking, pausing every few sentences to greet someone who passes — and each person answers her by name, smiling like they have been waiting all week just to exchange those few words. I watch the way her face lights up with every recognition, the easy, unself-conscious way she carries other people with her.

My own mind refuses to stay here.

It keeps circling back to Nosa.

I had gone straight to the media unit the moment we stepped through the glass doors this morning, because the media unit gave me somewhere to put my hands, something to focus on that wasn’t the conversation we had left unfinished in the car park. Three times during the service our eyes had met across the wide auditorium while I adjusted the camera on its tripod. Each time his gaze was steady. Unreadable. And each time something cold settled under my ribs and stayed there.

He isn’t happy with me. That much is clear.

But tomorrow evening, after the conversation with Pastor Efua, he will understand. He will see why accepting the things he offers feels impossible when I still don’t know where the ground between us will stand once he knows everything. When I still don’t know if there will be ground at all.

“Aunty Kike.” Timehin’s voice cuts through. She has stopped mid-sentence. “You’re not paying attention.”

I blink and look at her properly. Her brows are drawn together, the playful spark that usually lives in her eyes dimmed with something closer to concern.

“I’m sorry,” I say, the words coming out softer than I intend. “Can we pick up this gist later?”

She studies my face for a long moment. Whatever she finds there makes her lips press together. She doesn’t push. She only nods, slow and careful, the nod of someone who has decided that asking is not what the moment needs.

“Did you come with your car?” she asks after a beat. “I was thinking to stay over at your place this week. My landlord is giving me too much stress.”

“Yes,” I answer, “but I may be leaving a little late.”

My gaze drifts past her shoulder, almost against my will.

Nosa stands near the main entrance, one hand clasped in another man’s in a firm, familiar shake. The other man’s face pulls at something in my memory — something I can almost reach but not quite name. They are smiling the way old friends smile, shoulders angled toward each other, heads tilted in the easy posture of people who have known each other long enough to drop their performance completely.

I pull my attention back to Timehin.

“Kuye came with his car,” I say. “Why don’t you go with him?”

She makes a small, irritated sound in her throat. “I don’t want to go with Kuye.”

I look at her. She looks back at me with the careful, neutral expression of someone who is not going to elaborate and is waiting to see if I will push.

“You know what?” The exasperation finally spills over, quiet but definite. “Today I’m finding out what exactly is happening between you two.”

Before she can protest I close my fingers around her wrist and start walking. She resists — short, half-hearted tugs, the resistance of someone who wants to bolt but won’t actually make me drag her — and I keep moving, weaving us through the thinning crowd toward the projection unit at the far side of the hall. The air there smells faintly of warm electronics and the lemon-scented cleaner the ushers used that morning.

Kuye is bent over a crate of cables, carefully coiling them into neat loops with the focused concentration of a man who has decided the cables require his complete and undivided attention. He glances up when our shadows fall across him. His expression flattens the moment he registers me — then goes carefully, deliberately blank when he sees Timehin standing half a step behind.

“What’s up?” His voice is almost nonchalant. Almost. He doesn’t look at her.

“Happy Sunday, my dearest brother.” I layer every syllable with deliberate sweetness. “I’m sure you were blessed by today’s teaching on love.”

His eyes flick from my face to the equipment in his hands. “What’s your deal?”

“You know…” I begin, still holding Timehin’s hand even though she looks ready to dissolve into the carpet. “Timehin is right here with me. You can greet her.”

A muscle jumps in his jaw. I watch the internal eye-roll happen behind the carefully neutral mask — the entire battle fought and concluded in approximately half a second. He is twenty-five. I am his elder sister. There is only so much he can get away with.

His gaze drags slowly, reluctantly, toward her. He lifts his chin in the smallest possible acknowledgement that can still technically be called a greeting. “What’s up, Timehin.”

Not a question. Barely a sentence.

“Hi, Kuye.” Her voice comes out barely above a whisper. And something in the smallness of it, in the way she says his name — like it costs her something, like she has been practicing not saying it and said it anyway — makes me feel suddenly like I have walked into the middle of something that has been happening for much longer than I realized.

I make a mental note of it.

“Good,” I say, cheerfully, in the voice I use when I have made a decision and am not interested in debate. “Now that you’ve both spoken — Timehin is staying over this week, and she needs someone to carpool with. You’re taking her.”

A frown carves itself between Kuye’s brows. “You have a car.”

“Yes. And she won’t be coming in it. She’ll be coming with you.” I look at him steadily. “Find a way to be courteous. Both of you. I can’t bear this nonsense anymore.” I point once, the gesture sharp and final. “If you give Timehin any trouble, I will not take it easy with you.”

Then I turn and walk away before either of them can say anything, leaving them standing in the particular quality of silence that only exists between two people who have too much to say and are saying none of it.

I have almost reached the main doors when fingers close gently around my hand.

I look up.

Nosa.

He is smiling. As though the tension of this morning never existed, or exists somewhere he has set aside for now, for me, because this is the kind of man he is. The residual stage lights catch the curve of his cheekbone, the faint sheen at his temple where the air conditioning hasn’t quite reached.

I frown up at him. “I thought you were mad at me.”

He shrugs, slow and deliberate, the corner of his mouth lifting in the way that has always undone me a little despite everything I do to prevent it. “First — I’m not mad at you. I’m just trying to understand you.” His thumb brushes once across my knuckles. “And second—” his eyes hold mine— “it’s hard to stay distant from someone who takes up the whole space in my head.”

A smile finds my mouth before I can stop it. “This man. Do you have to flirt with me everywhere?”

He winks.

It is, objectively, the most attractive thing I have seen all morning, and I am not going to tell him that.

“Come on,” he says, already drawing me gently into the flow of people still lingering near the exit. “I want you to meet someone.”

“Who?”

“An old friend. We met at The Gospel Church in the US about five years ago. He was there for two years, then left. Very cool dude.”

Something twists low in my stomach at the words. A small, formless thing. I can’t name it. I push it down as we approach the man standing with Sister Junia near the notice board.

He turns as we draw close.

Sister Junia smiles warmly and waves. I return the wave, but my attention is already fixed on the stranger’s face.

Broad forehead. A small birthmark near the left eyebrow. Features that don’t surface a name but pull at something. The fine hairs on my arms rise before my brain has caught up with why.

His eyes find mine.

For a fraction of a second — brief, almost imperceptible, there and gone before I can be certain I saw it — recognition flashes in them. Sharp and quick, like light catching glass. Then it extinguishes, cleanly, and he turns back to Nosa with an easy smile.

“Bro.” Then, smoothly, turning the smile toward me: “Is this the woman you wouldn’t stop talking about?”

Something in the tone brushes against my nerves. Almost teasing, almost too polished — the words sitting just slightly wrong in the mouth of a man meeting someone for the first time. I tell myself I am imagining it.

“Yes,” Nosa says, and the pride in his voice is quiet and entirely genuine. “Larry, meet Kikelomo. Kikelomo, meet Larry.”

The man extends his hand. I take it. His grip is firm, dry, and it lasts a second longer than it needs to.

“It’s actually Lanre,” he corrects, the smile staying easy. “Nosa just likes calling me Larry.”

Lanre.

The name settles on my tongue and sits there strangely. I turn it over while I release his hand, while I say my name and offer nothing more, while some part of my mind that is still running quietly underneath the surface of this conversation begins pulling at threads I can’t quite see the ends of yet.

“I hope you’re treating my guy well,” he says, reaching over to clap Nosa lightly on the shoulder. The gesture is warm. Easy.

“I try,” I answer softly.

“That’s good.” He nods, then turns back to Nosa. “I’m taking the flight back to France tomorrow. It was just a short visit. I didn’t even plan to branch The Gospel Church today.” He laughs, the sound bright and practiced. “But anytime I’m in Naija, I’ll call you.”

His gaze returns to me one last time. Something passes through his eyes — quick, complex, and disappears before I can read it properly.

“Kikelomo. It was pleasant seeing you. I have to take my leave.”

I manage a smile that doesn’t reach anything below my cheekbones. “Safe travels.”

“Thank you.” He mutters.

“Bro,” he says to Nosa, already shifting his weight toward the door. “Show face. Make we go see Tiffs.”

Nosa’s fingers squeeze mine once. He leans close enough that only I can hear him. “Wait for me in the car, babe. I’ll be back.”

“Bye Kikelomo.”

“Bye.” I answer.

Then they are moving away — Nosa and this man whose name I am still turning over, weaving through the last clusters of people still lingering near the exit. I stand where they left me and watch their retreating figures. The easy swing of Nosa’s shoulders. The way Lanre’s head tilts as he speaks, a particular angle, a particular quality of attention.

And then the memory clicks into place.

Not slowly. Not gradually. The way a key turns in a lock — one clean movement, and then the door is open, and behind it is everything you were not prepared to find.

He had been a member of the Concord Brother Team.

The realization lands in my chest like something dropped from a height.

My heart drops with it.

Author’s Note: We are rising above the upside down. 🤭

Target: 300 likes, 100 comments, 60 restacks.

Read Previous Episode Here.

She was watching him.

He could feel it before he even looked — that particular weight of a stare he had once known so well, the kind that used to make him feel exposed even when he had done nothing wrong, even when he was a teenager and uncertain of his innocence and discovering, for the first time, that uncertainty was not a protection. He let his eyes travel anywhere but her face for a moment — the drip stand beside her bed, the peeling paint on the wall above her head, the woman two beds down staring at something only she could see. It was an old habit, this looking away. A way of buying himself a few seconds to gather what was scattering inside him before he had to speak.

He made himself look at her.

She was watching him, and the sneer she had greeted him with at the door had eased into something else now — something looser, almost amused, the expression of someone who had already decided how this conversation was going to go and was simply waiting for him to catch up. He did not know what to do with that expression on a face this thin. She had always been striking, even in her worst moods — but the illness had taken something from the striking and left behind only the sharpness. The bones. The eyes, which had lost nothing.

He spoke, because the silence had stretched long enough that someone had to break it and it was clearly not going to be her.

“I got your mail five months ago, Bimbo.”

She lifted her eyes toward the ceiling, slow and theatrical, as though she were genuinely searching her memory. As though a full written confession and five months of silence could simply slip a person’s mind like a mislaid appointment.

“The mail you sent me,” he said again, and this time something firmer moved into his voice. He knew her. Whatever eight years and a hospital bed had taken from her body, they had clearly not touched this part — this instinct to stall, to make him work for every inch of the conversation, to position him as the one demanding something, as though the demand itself were the problem and not the thing that had made it necessary.

She shifted against the pillow instead of answering and pointed toward the small table by her bed. “Pass me that water.”

Her voice was completely even. Measured. Not one thread of a woman sitting across from the person she had finally confessed her sins to.

Jaiye drew a slow, deliberate breath. Lord Jesus, help me. The prayer arrived out of pure necessity. He stood, unhurried, picked up the bottle, and handed it to her without a word.

She opened it. Drank. Set it down beside her with the unbothered ease of someone continuing a pleasant conversation about nothing important.

“I remember the mail.” She said it finally, casually, the way a person retells something mildly interesting that happened to an acquaintance of theirs. “I sent it when I thought I was going to die.” She resettled herself against the pillow, adjusting the fabric of her hospital gown. “At that time my life was in turmoil. I just wanted to clear everyone’s mind before I left. To let you all know I wasn’t offended with you anymore.”

Jaiye felt his face fold before he could stop it.

Offended.

The word sat wrong everywhere — wrong in the air between them, wrong against the years he had carried what she had done, wrong against the version of himself that had existed before she opened her mouth at secondary school and decided, for reasons he still did not fully understand, to burn his name to the ground. He had been the one holding the accusation. The silence. The particular way he looked at himself afterward. She had built all of that and he had lived in it, and now she was sitting here talking about her offense. As though the wound had always been hers. As though his only role in the story had been to cause it.

“Don’t worry,” she continued, unbothered by whatever had moved across his face, “it wasn’t only you. I sent it to everyone who offended me in the past.” A small, private smile settled at the corner of her mouth, almost proud of the efficiency of it. “But as you can see, I’m getting better.”

He looked at her. At the sunken corners of her face, at the way the drip line disappeared into the crook of her elbow, at the way her collarbones pressed against the thin fabric of the gown. She did not look better. He did not know the full extent of what the illness had taken, could not measure it from where he was sitting, but better was not a word that arrived naturally when he looked at her.

He chose his next words the way a man tests ice before putting his full weight on it.

“Bimbo.” He kept his voice slow, controlled. “Do you understand the gravity of what you sent me? I could charge you to court.”

“Then charge me now.”

The answer came back sharp and immediate, no hesitation at all, as though she had been waiting for exactly this and had her response already loaded.

“Charge this frail-looking, husband-deserted, father-disowned, sick and depressed young woman to court.” Her eyes turned glossy without warning — fast, the way it happened with her, without buildup — and her lips trembled once before she pressed them together, hard, forcing it back. When she spoke again her voice had reassembled itself into something colder, more composed. “Charge me. Add to all the misery that has already befallen me. Go ahead.”

Jaiye stared at her for a long moment.

He felt something give way in his chest — not sympathy exactly, not yet, but something adjacent to it. Recognition, maybe. The particular recognition of someone watching a performance they have seen before and understanding now, for the first time, that the performer knows they are performing and does not care. She had always been able to do this — pivot from aggressor to victim so cleanly and so fast that you found yourself wondering, for one disorienting second, if you had misread the whole thing. If somehow you were the one who had caused this.

He let out a short, disbelieving breath — not quite a laugh, not quite a scoff. Something in between.

“Bimbo.” He said her name almost gently, almost the way you’d say the name of something familiar that has surprised you by still existing. “You haven’t changed. Not one bit.” He held her gaze, and he worked to keep the calm because losing it was exactly what she wanted and he was not going to give her that. “This is what you do. You emotionally manipulate people until they feel responsible for what you did to yourself.”

Her eyes sharpened. “This is no way to speak to a sick woman, Jaiye.” The snap was back, clean and practiced. “Fine. I sent the mail because I didn’t know what to do with my life at that point. But I’m better now.”

“Good.” He nodded once, slow. “Get better. Get healed. So you can face the court of law.”

She huffed — the sound halfway between disgust and amusement, the sound of someone who has just been told something they consider beneath a response but are going to respond to anyway. “Nobody will take you seriously.” The smirk that followed was the one he remembered best — the one that said she had already looked at the board and seen moves he hadn’t even considered yet. “What would you even say? That a teenager made a false claim out of immaturity, and you held onto it for years?” She reached for the water bottle again, slow and deliberate, taking her time, making him watch her take it. “In this Nigeria, where no one pays attention to men falsely accused?” A short, humorless laugh. “Don’t embarrass yourself.”

He looked at her for a long time after that.

At how the sharpness had hardened over the years into something denser, something that the illness had not softened but had somehow concentrated — as though the stripping away of everything else had left only this, only the core of her, and the core was this. He had known she could be manipulative. Conniving. Exhausting in that particular way that exhausted you without you ever being able to name what it was taking from you. But he had not understood, until he was sitting here watching the drip line sway beside her, how deep the thing actually went. How far down it had always gone.

“Bimbo.” His voice came quieter this time. Genuinely quiet. The anger still there but underneath it now, pressed down by something sadder. “Who hurt you?”

She went still.

Her eyes drifted somewhere he couldn’t follow, somewhere behind him and further than the wall, some interior place the question had reached without her permission. He watched it happen, that unguarded second, that small involuntary opening, and he leaned toward it without moving, waiting.

Then, as quickly as it had come, the armor slid back into place.

“I can’t believe you’re asking me that.” Her voice hardened. “Weren’t you the one who left me? Who fell in love with Kikelomo? Who went and found someone else and left me behind like I was nothing?”

“I’m not the one who ended up getting married.”

She paused. Her eyes dropped to his left hand — briefly, involuntarily — then came back up to his face. She shifted against the pillow and crossed her arms tight over her chest, a small, defensive closing of herself. “Fine. I got married. So what?” Her gaze moved past him toward the empty bed across the ward. “I needed the money. He had money.”

“Where is he now?”

The question came before he had fully decided to ask it, pulled out of him by the sight of her — by how thin she had become, by the way the flesh had retreated from the bones of her face, by something that moved through him despite everything, unwelcome and impossible to suppress, something that had his father’s voice in it: Jaiye, a little compassion never bankrupted anyone.

“He left.” Her voice dropped for the first time. Thinned. “Said he couldn’t deal with a woman going through a serious illness.” She swallowed, and what moved through her eyes in that moment was the closest thing to honesty she had offered since he’d sat down — raw, just for a second, just enough for him to see it. “But he gave me money before he left. At least half of what’s needed for the transplant.”

“And the rest?”

She looked past him again, at the middle distance. “There is a church. Something Gospel Church. They’ve partnered with the hospital to sponsor two transplants. I am one of the beneficiaries.”

“When is the surgery?”

She shrugged, the gesture so practiced it looked almost bored. “I’m still on the waiting list for a donor. There’s a long line.”

He nodded slowly. He watched her as she said it — watched the sharp retorts holding her upright like scaffolding around something that had been worn down to almost nothing, the illness having stripped away whatever thin outer layers she used to carry and left only the machinery underneath, grinding away, keeping her in motion out of sheer stubbornness. He found himself praying for her without deciding to. Just a quiet, unbidden thing rising from somewhere underneath his anger.

Lord, whatever is still reachable in her. Whatever is still left.

“Bimbo.” He said it plainly. “You need Jesus. This is an opportunity — what you’re going through right now, this is an opportunity to come back to Him.”

“Abeg.” Her hand lifted slightly, physically pushing the words away. “I have Jesus. I’m a born-again Christian. Don’t come here and preach at me like you’re better than me. You’re not.”

Jaiye nodded and got up. The chair scraped again behind him. He looked down at her — at this woman who had rearranged the first decade of his adult life with a lie and was now lying in a hospital bed defending the lie and defending herself and defending every choice she had ever made, all the way to this room, all the way to this drip line, all the way to the end of whatever road she was on — and he felt, strangely, not rage anymore but something closer to grief.

“I hope your surgery goes well, Bimbo.” He meant it. He was not entirely sure how he meant it and his own person at the same time, but he meant it. “I hope you find peace.”

She looked up at him. Evenly. Without a trace of anything that resembled gratitude or reception. “Even if you don’t hope, it will still go well.” A small, flat smile. “And as for peace — do I look like someone who is troubled?”

He shook his head slowly, not at her but at himself, at the hundred versions of this conversation he had rehearsed on the drive down and how not one of them had looked like this. A woman dying by degrees who had still not found a single ounce of regret in herself. Who had looked at her life and had still found a way to position herself as the injured party. As the one who had been wronged.

He turned to leave.

“Have you heard from her?”

Her voice caught him just before he cleared the end of the bed. He turned back slowly.

“Who?”

“Kikelomo.” She said the name the way she always had — like something she was putting down with more force than necessary, like the syllables themselves required a particular kind of handling. Her face did something complicated when she said it, some small involuntary movement across the features, there and gone.

“Why are you asking?” His jaw tightened. The anger came back fast, faster than he wanted it to.

“Nothing.” She picked up the water bottle and turned the cap slowly between her fingers. “Is it wrong to ask after my friend?”

“Your friend.” The words came through his teeth.

“Ehn now.” She took a slow sip, watching him over the rim. “Is she not my friend? Can’t I ask about a friend?”

“No.” His voice went very quiet now. “You can’t. You lost that right after everything you did to her.”

She nodded at that. Slowly. Thoughtfully. And for one strange, disorienting moment she looked exactly like the Bimbo he had known years ago — sharp and self-possessed and entirely sure of herself, the Bimbo who had always known exactly what she was doing and had done it anyway.

“We do stupid things for love,” she said, and her eyes came up to meet his. “I did stupid things because I was in love with you.”

“Stupid things.” He said it quietly. Almost to himself. Then he exhaled — a long, slow, exhausted sound. “Bimbo. What you did were not stupid things. Stupid things are forgetting someone’s birthday. Saying the wrong thing at the wrong moment.” He looked at her, and his voice when it came back was not angry anymore, just tired in a way that went all the way down. “What you did were not stupid things. They were psychopath-level kind of things.”

She held his gaze without flinching. Then the smile returned. “Well then.” She leaned back against the pillow. “Behold the monster you made.”

Jaiye let out a long breath, something between a sigh and surrender. This was Bimbo. Bimbo who would never once take responsibility for what she'd done. Bimbo who could turn every accusation back on him, who would rather die holding onto her pride than admit, even once, that she'd been wrong. This was her, clutching the last thing that still felt like hers. There was nothing left to say that would make her see the weight of what she'd done — nothing he could offer that would crack that particular armor. He reached into his pocket. Pulled out the envelope he had carried in with him and set it gently on the small table beside her bed, beside the water bottle she had used as a prop for the last twenty minutes of her performance.

“It’s a cheque.” His voice was quiet. Worn smooth. “I hope it helps.”

He did not wait to see her face change or not change. He did not wait to find out if she would say thank you or say nothing or say something that would require him to respond. He turned and he walked down the length of the ward, past the woman still staring at nothing, past the drip stands and the peeling paint and the low institutional sounds of a building full of people waiting, and he did not look back.

He stepped through the door.

Outside, the corridor was bright and smelled of antiseptic and somewhere a trolley was being wheeled somewhere and the ordinary world was continuing exactly as it always did, indifferent to what had just happened in that ward between two people who had once, in another life, believed they knew each other.

He stood there for a moment with his back against the wall and his eyes closed, and he breathed.

Just breathed.

And prayed, quietly, for the woman in the bed. For the surgery. For whatever was still reachable in her. For himself, too — for the anger he was still carrying out of that room despite everything, for the grief underneath the anger, for the boy he had been when this started and the man he was still, seventeen years later, trying to become.

Lord. Just that. Just the word, offered up like an open hand. Lord.

Then he pushed off the wall and walked toward the exit and the afternoon light and whatever came next.

I stare at Nosa.

My heart is doing something I have no name for—neither racing nor stopping, but caught in the space between, unable to decide what to do with what he has just placed in my hands. The garden is exactly as it was five minutes ago. Timehin’s voice drifts through the window, half-singing something familiar to herself. Somewhere down the street a woman’s voice calls, a car horn answers, the ordinary evening sounds of a city that has no idea what has just been said on this bench. None of it makes sense against the weight of his words.

He is watching me. His eyes are asking me to speak.

I know I am supposed to say something.

I cannot find a single word.

The tears arrive at the backs of my eyes before I have decided to cry. I press them back, hard, jaw locked, because I am not ready yet. I need the anger first. If I let myself feel the full weight of what he has told me—the weeks of captivity, the lung, the shoulder, the teammates he lost, all of it sitting inside him for months while I was here—I will lose every shape I have.

“Kikelomo,” he murmurs.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier.” His voice is low, almost a whisper. “I didn’t want you to panic.”

I raise my eyes to him.

The tears I have been holding fall anyway.

“Really, Nosa.” It does not come out as a question. It comes out flatter, more tired, already having looked at the answer and found it wanting. “Really. You didn’t want me to panic.” I swallow against the sob pressing at the back of my throat. “That’s your excuse.”

He presses his lips together and runs a hand over his face. “It made sense at the time.”

“What if you had died?”

The words leave me barely above a breath. I had meant them louder, sharper, with the force they deserved. Instead they arrive small and broken, which is somehow worse.

“What if you had died, Nosa?” I say it again, softer, as if I need to hear the shape of the sentence to understand why it terrifies me so completely. “What if you had died and I had no idea? What if I was here, living my life, not knowing, and you were—” I stop. I cannot finish it. The image on the other side of that sentence is one I have kept at arm’s length since he began speaking, and I will not let it come any closer.

He shifts toward me. His hand reaches for mine.

I pull mine away.

“Kikelomo, I didn’t die.” His voice is gentle, careful—the voice of a man who knows he is in the wrong and is not trying to argue his way out of it, only trying to reach me. “God kept me. For you. For everyone.”

“Okay.” I nod once, slowly, assembling the words before I use them. “And when God kept you—when you were alive and breathing and able to hold a phone—you didn’t think it was reasonable to call me? Immediately? At all?” The pain presses sharp and persistent against the inside of my chest, the particular ache of someone who has just discovered exactly where they sit in a hierarchy they thought they understood. “You didn’t think I was a priority?”

His eyes find mine, hold them for a moment, then look away.

That look away does something to me.

“Wow.” The word leaves me quietly. My lips are trembling and I make no effort to stop them. “You could speak to Adanna and Tife for a whole month. Thirty days. You could call them, update them, let them hear your voice, let them know you were alive and healing—while I was here. While I was here, Nosa, wondering. Going about my life not knowing that the person I love had been shot and held and was recovering somewhere without me.” My voice breaks cleanly in the middle of the sentence, splits right down the centre, and I let it. “And then you made them promise not to tell me.”

He says nothing.

“Is that how little I mean to you?”

“You know that’s not true.” He says it at once, quietly, his eyes coming back to mine with something desperate in them—something that has moved past careful into raw. “Kikelomo. You know that is not true.”

“Then what is true?” My voice has gone soft. Not calm—soft is different from calm. Soft is what a voice becomes when the fight has started to cost more than it has left to give. “What is true, Nosa?”

I stand. I need to move. I cannot sit beside him while I feel this; sitting beside him makes it complicated, and this deserves to be uncomplicated for at least another minute. I walk toward the flowers at the edge of the garden. Iya Kuti planted them three months ago. They are full and bright and completely indifferent to what is happening behind them. I stand in front of them and breathe.

“I am your woman,” I say, to the flowers, to the evening, to whatever part of the universe is listening. “And somehow I am the last person to hear about my man almost dying.”

Behind me the bench shifts slightly. Then his voice.

“I didn’t want you to see me weak, Kikelomo.”

I turn around.

The man sitting there—hands clasped between his knees, eyes on the ground, shoulders carrying something invisible and enormous—is not the Nosa who walked through my front door two hours ago. That Nosa had been warm and easy and present in the way he always was. This one is stripped of all of that. This one is simply a man sitting in a garden at dusk, having finally set down something he has been carrying alone for a very long time.

“I didn’t want you to see how hurt I’d gotten,” he continues. His voice is low and unhurried, but each sentence costs him something; I can hear it. “How broken. How—” He stops. Swallows. “I made a promise to you before I left. I said I was going to come back to you whole. And I intended to keep it.” He looks up at me then, and his eyes are open in a way I have never seen them before—not like this, not this completely. “So I waited. Until I was whole enough to come back.”

Something in my chest breaks.

Not the sharp, angry break of a few minutes ago. Something quieter. Something that breaks the way things break when you have been furious at someone and then, suddenly, you understand them—not excuse them, not yet, but understand them, which is its own particular undoing.

I think about what he has actually told me. The captivity. The weeks of it. The lung. The shoulder, the whole catalogue of damage this man has sustained and considered ordinary. The teammates he lost. The evaluation period, recovering under assessment, being watched while broken, not being allowed simply to be broken in peace. Alone. He had done all of it alone.

My man.

My Nosa.

My legs move before I decide to move them.

I cross the garden and stop in front of him, and he looks up at me — just looks, quietly, with those open eyes — and I look down at him, and for a moment we just exist in that, the looking, the being looked at, before either of us speaks. The evening is doing something golden to the light. It catches the side of his face and I feel something in my chest tilt sideways.

“How’s your shoulder?” I ask. Softly.

A small smile finds his mouth. “It’s healed. It’s not my first time being shot in the shoulder.”

I frown at how simply he says it. How matter-of-fact. Like a man recounting a minor inconvenience, like being shot in the shoulder is a thing that simply happens sometimes and then you move on from it. “Don’t say it like that,” I tell him, and my voice comes out thicker than I mean it to.

“Like what?”

“Like it’s nothing.” My eyes are filling again. I am not going to win this battle. “Like it didn’t happen to you. Like it shouldn’t matter that it happened to you.”

He says nothing. He just looks at me.

“What about your lung?”

“I’m breathing fine, babe.”

“Are you?”

“Yeah.” The smile is soft. Small. The kind that lives in the eyes before it reaches the mouth. “I’m breathing fine. Come and check, if you don’t believe me.”

I narrow my eyes at him even as the corner of my mouth betrays me. “Nosa.”

“I’m serious. Put your ear here.” He taps his chest, right over his heart, and there is nothing remotely medical about the way he says it, and we both know it.

“You are not well,” I say, but I am already closer than I was a second ago, close enough to smell him — the same cologne, faint now, layered under something warmer — and my body seems to have made a decision my mind hasn’t caught up with yet.

I can feel the fight leaving me. All of it. Draining out through my feet into Iya Kuti’s soil.

I don’t try to hold it.

“I’m still mad at you,” I mutter, in the voice of someone who is very clearly not mad at all anymore, and I step closer, closing the distance until I am standing directly in front of him, until his knees brush my legs and his hands find my waist like they’ve been waiting all evening for permission. When his arms come around me and his head comes to rest against my stomach, it feels less like a choice and more like something returning to where it belongs — like the last piece finally pressed into a puzzle that has been sitting unfinished on a table for eleven months.

I feel the warmth of him through my blouse. The weight of his head. The slow exhale he lets out, long and complete, like he has been holding it since before he even sat down on this bench tonight. My fingers find their way into his hair without my permission, and he leans into the touch, and something in my throat goes tight and sweet at the same time.

“You look cute when you’re angry,” he murmurs, and I feel the words more than hear them, feel them vibrate somewhere against my stomach.

“Nosa. There is nothing even slightly funny about this situation.”

He shifts his head and I feel the absence of the warmth immediately. He tilts his face up to find mine, and from this angle, with him looking up at me like that, I have to remind myself to keep breathing.

“I know.” And the smile is gone now, and what is underneath it is everything he has been keeping underneath it. “I am sorry, Kikelomo. For making a decision that made you feel like an afterthought. For making you feel small.” He holds my gaze. Steady. His thumb moves once, slowly, against my waist, like he needs the contact to say the rest. “You are not small. You are the most important person to me. And if anything I did made you feel otherwise, even for a second — I am genuinely, sincerely sorry.”

I look at him for a long moment, and then roll my eyes playfully, mostly to have somewhere to put the feeling that is climbing up my chest. “You’re forgiven.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” I reach down and pull his cheeks between my fingers, gently. “But I am worried about you. Should you actually be moving around like this? Should you be driving? Should you be—”

“Babe.” He catches my hands in his and presses a kiss into the center of one palm. My whole arm goes warm. “I am fine. I was trained for situations like that.”

“Are you trying to form hard guy for me again?” My voice comes out breathless in a way I did not authorize.

“No, miss.” The smile that arrives is different from the earlier ones — warmer, more private. “I want to be vulnerable with you.”

The blush comes before I can stop it, climbing up from my neck, and it does not matter. He has already seen it.

“Nosa.” I say it seriously, as seriously as I can with my cheeks doing what they are doing and his thumb still tracing slow half-circles against my waist. “I love every version of you. The strong one and the one who needs to sit down. The certain one and the one who doesn’t know yet. The one who walks into a room and commands it and the one sitting on a garden bench telling me hard things.” I hold his gaze, and my voice drops without my meaning it to. “Full package. Every part of it. Please don’t hide from me.”

Something moves across his face. Something that receives the words and does something quiet with them — his jaw works once, like he’s swallowing more than air.

“I won’t,” he says. “Not anymore.”

“Good.” I breathe. Then, softer: “I love you.”

He shifts forward and stands, slow and deliberate, and for a second I step back. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing.” He looks at me with that particular expression — the one that is trying not to show too much and showing everything anyway, the one that makes the evening feel like it is holding its breath along with me. “I just want to hold you.”

“I thought you were doing hard guy not vulnerability.”

“I thought we agreed those were the same thing tonight.”

He reaches for my hands and draws me in — slowly, unhurried, the way he does everything, like he is savoring the two feet of distance closing between us — and I let him, and when his arms come fully around me and I tuck into his chest, my ear finding the exact spot where I can hear his heart, steady and alive and his, I feel him exhale again, slow and complete, and I close my eyes and let myself just be held.

“Iya Kuti will catch us,” I murmur into his chest, not moving an inch to prevent it.

“Your mother will understand,” he says, low and warm against my hair, his lips brushing my temple in a way that sends a small shiver clean down my spine, “that I have been away from you for eleven months and I am owed approximately eleven months of this.”

I laugh. Quietly. Into the fabric of his shirt, my hands fisting slightly at his back, holding on like letting go might undo the last ten minutes.

“I love you, Kikelomo,” he says. Simple and unhurried. “Thank you for understanding me.”

I press closer instead of answering for a moment, memorizing the shape of him against me, the warmth, the proof of him breathing. Then: “Men are scarce in this Lagos, o. I couldn’t afford to stay mad.”

His chest shakes with the laugh he is trying to keep quiet, and I feel it rumble under my cheek, and something about that small vibration of joy against my ear undoes the last of whatever was left standing guard in my chest.

The garden holds us. The evening settles, gold sliding into blue. Timehin is still singing something inside, and the street is still doing what streets do, and the flowers Iya Kuti planted are still standing there, bright and unconcerned, and none of it has changed.

But something between us has — has softened, has settled, has come home.

And for the first time all evening, I let myself simply feel it: his arms, his heartbeat, his breath in my hair, and the quiet, stubborn certainty that whatever else has happened, this — the two of us, standing here, holding on — is exactly where I am supposed to be.

Authors Note: First issue resolved, one more to go. Meanwhile, look forward to Bimbo and Kike meeting. It’s going to happen.

Target: 300 likes, 100 comments, 60 restacks.

Read Previous Episode Here.

Twelve steps.

The restroom door swings shut behind me. The lock clicks.

That click is the only thing that lets my shoulders come down.

I stand there with my back against the door. Eyes closed. The fluorescent light humming above me. My own breathing the loudest thing in the room. Then I cross to the sink, and my hands find the edge of it and grip until my knuckles pale. I look at myself in the mirror — at this woman in her work blouse, birthday just behind her, her man just returned, and still, still, after all of it, the past finding new mouths to speak through. New hands to come at her with. New backyard conversations engineered to drag her back into rooms she has been clawing her way out of for years.

The burn stays behind my eyes. I hold it there.

I breathe. In through the nose, slow, the way I have learned to breathe when what I am feeling is too large for the space it is being asked to occupy.

When some small sliver of the tightness across my ribs loosens, I speak. Quietly.

“Jesus.” My voice comes out low. Almost scraped. “Why do You allow them to do this to me?”

The restroom is quiet.

And then, not loudly, I hear the quiet voice in my spirit.

Call Pastor Efua.

I look at myself in the mirror.

“Holy Ghost.” I mutter, under my breath, the way I talk to Him when it’s just the two of us. “You want me to call her again? And disturb her with my issues — again?”

The response comes back the same way. Gentle. Firm. Utterly unbothered by my hesitation.

She was a provision from Me for you. You are not disturbing her. I have given you shepherds after Mine own heart, who will lead you with knowledge and understanding.

I stand there with my hands still gripping the edge of the sink and the conversations come back — all the sessions with Pastor Efua and Pastor Dimeji, all the hours I sat across from them or held a phone to my ear and slowly, haltingly, told them things I had never said out loud in sequence before. The past. The full shape of it. Everything that came with it and everything it left behind. The voice that always sat in the corner of every session saying: you are disturbing these people. You are too much. You are Kike, the sister who cannot get over her past. Kike, the sister who is easily moved by small things. Kike, the sister who keeps coming back with the same issues and the same fears and the same questions.

And then I think about how I stood before Maryam today.

The way my voice stayed level. The way my hands had stopped shaking. The way I looked her in the eye and smiled and meant it — not because I wasn’t hurt, but because I have been learning, slowly, conversation by conversation, session by session, what it means to be hurt without being destroyed by it. I think about Adanna telling me again and again — in her direct, uncomplicated way — that I am not defined by any of the things that happened to me. I think about Pastor Efua saying the same thing in her own way, from a different angle, reaching the same truth from different directions until it had no choice but to settle somewhere inside me and take root.

I would not have stood the way I stood today if those conversations had never happened.

I pick up my phone and dial before the other voice can say anything else.

She answers on the second ring.

“Kike my darling.” Warm. Immediate. Like she had been in the middle of something and set it down without hesitation. “How are you doing?”

The tightness across my ribs eases at the sound of it.

I clear my throat. Pull my mouth into a smile out of old reflex — perform fine, start with fine, let the truth arrive sideways. “Pastor Efua. I’m fine. How are you doing, ma?”

A beat.

“I’m fine, my dear.” I hear rustling on her end, the distant sound of Tega’s voice, something being set down. She says something to her someone — quiet and brief, the murmur of a woman who has gently moved her life aside to make room — and then she comes back fully. Fully, with no part of her attention elsewhere. “Thank you for checking on me.” A pause. “Hope you enjoyed your birthday yesterday?”

And here is the thing about what these past months have done to me. There are things I have been learning — slowly, and sometimes against my own instincts — and one of them is this: the discipline of saying things as they actually are. Adanna does it without effort, without performance, without softening the edges into something more comfortable. If she did not enjoy something she will tell you so, kindly, directly, without fanfare. If she loved something she will tell you that too. Whenever I have asked her about it she laughs and says: Kike, let your yea be yea and your nay be nay.

So I do what Adanna does.

I open my mouth and I say it. All of it. The way the day fractured from the moment I saw Jaiye. The cold shock of Nosa appearing and Jaiye right behind me in the same space, the frantic mental arithmetic of how that looked and what Nosa might think. The relief — enormous, almost embarrassing in its size — when Nosa handled it the way only Nosa handles things. The backyard. Maryam. Every word of it, in sequence, including the ones that landed and the one that tore something open in my chest and the smile I held on my face anyway while the tearing happened.

By the time I finish I am breathing hard and my cheeks are wet and I have stopped pretending the sobs are not there. They press at the edges of my words, small and persistent, and I stop fighting them.

Pastor Efua is quiet for a while.

“Kike.” Her voice, when it comes, is terribly calm. “I love how you handled Maryam today.”

I say nothing. I am listening.

“What you did in that backyard,” she continues, “is not something the Kike I met almost a year ago could have done. It is not even something the Kike I was speaking with six months ago could have done.” A breath. “You stood your ground. You held yourself. You did not perform your way through it and you did not collapse under it. That—” a pause— “that is the fruit of the work. I want you to know that I see it. And I am proud of you, my darling.”

I press my lips together tight. “Thank you, ma.” Shaky. But I receive it. I am learning to receive things.

“Now.” Her tone shifts. The warmth stays but something firmer moves into it, the way a river has both warmth and current. “Report this to HR. Everything. What she did yesterday with Jaiye and what she said today in that backyard. All of it.”

“But ma—”

“Kike.” Just my name.

I close my mouth.

“The reason Bimbo was able to get away with everything she did,” she says, “is because you did not pursue it through the right authorities. You absorbed it and you carried it and you told yourself it was grace.” A pause. “Being a Christian does not mean you become a place where people deposit their cruelty without consequence. Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is pursue justice and trust God to move while you do. Report Maryam. Everything — yesterday, today, the slur, all of it. Do not leave anything out.”

“Okay ma.” I sniff. Wipe my face with the back of my hand. “I’ll do it.”

“Good.” Immediate. Like she had never doubted it. “Now.” Another shift — smaller this time, more careful, the way you move when you are approaching something delicate. “We need to talk about Nosa.”

My fingers tighten around the phone until the edges bite into my palm.

“Okay, ma.” Barely above a whisper.

“You know,” she says, and I can hear in her voice that she is not scolding me, just naming what is true between us. “This was always something that needed to be laid bare before him. Before things went further. You know this.”

“I was scared.” I admit it simply. No dressing. No explanation. Just the plain fact of it.

“I know you were scared.” A breath. “Are you still scared?”

I almost laugh. “Yes ma.”

“Of course you are.” And there is something in her voice then — not dismissal, not impatience, just the particular tenderness of someone who loves you enough to tell you the truth. “Fear does not dissolve on its own, Kike. You walk through it. You have been doing that all year. Today was evidence of that.” She pauses. “Now this is what we will do.”

I bring the phone closer to my ear.

“I will organize a meeting. Myself, Daddy Dimeji, Pastor Emmanuel and Pastor Sharon — Nosa’s parents in the Lord. We will bring you both in together and we will speak with him. We will lay everything before him, carefully, with wisdom, with the kind of context that a matter like this deserves. And we will counsel you both on how to move forward, whatever that looks like, in the light of what he receives and how he receives it.”

How he receives it.

The words settle. I can already see the meeting room — Nosa across from me, his shoulders pulling back the way they do when something lands wrong, his eyes going careful instead of warm. The quiet that would follow, the one that used to mean he was thinking but might now mean something else entirely. My free hand curls into a fist at my side before I catch myself and force it open again.

“Kike?”

“Ma.”

“I can hear you thinking and it’s not good thoughts.” Her voice is gentle but it does not move. “Stop.”

I almost smile. “Yes ma.”

“I want you to hear me clearly.” The deeper rhythm is back — the one that arrives when she is about to say something she needs me to actually keep. “The bible has instructed you on what to think about this matter.”

She goes quiet for a while and then continues. “Finally, Kikelomo whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report — if there be any virtue, if there be any praise, think on these things.” A breath. “There is no virtue and there is no praise in the place your mind just went. None.”

I press my lips together and nod, even though she cannot see me.

“If Nosa could see you standing next to Jaiye and think the best of you in that moment — without you asking him to, without you explaining yourself — how much more will he extend to you when you come to him honestly, with your shepherds present, with the full truth?” Her voice softens, just at the edges. “You are assuming the worst about a man who has given you every reason to assume otherwise. Charity thinketh no evil, my dear. Extend to him what he has already extended to you.”

The band across my ribs eases. Not everything. But something.

“Think the best,” she continues. “Pray in faith. Thank God for the outcome before you see it. The God who brought Nosa to you is not confused about how to keep him.”

“Yes ma.” And I mean it this time. Not just the compliance of someone who wants the conversation to move forward, but something that has actually shifted, some small reorientation of where I am standing inside myself.

“Good.” I hear the smile in her voice. “I’ll text you the date and time. And I will reach out to Nosa as well.”

I exhale. Long and slow. “Thank you, ma. I love you. Extend my greetings to Daddy Dimeji.”

“I will. I love you too, my darling.”

The call ends.

I stand in the restroom for a moment longer, phone pressed against my chest, the fluorescent light still humming above me, the lock still clicked shut against the rest of the building and everything happening in it.

Then I look at myself in the mirror one more time.

Same woman. Same blouse. Same eyes still slightly red at the edges.

But something has settled. Not resolved — there is too much still waiting to be resolved for that word to be accurate. But settled. The way ground settles after something has moved beneath it. The way you feel after you have said the true thing out loud to someone who was capable of holding it.

I unlock the door and step back into the building.

I close my laptop and the soft click seems to echo in the emptying office. I let out a long, slow breath and feel my shoulders finally drop away from my ears. The tight knot that has been living behind my chest all afternoon loosens, one thread at a time, and for the first time in hours I can feel the air moving properly in my lungs. Khalid’s nod from across the table still sits warm in my chest — that small, satisfied look that says we have done good work without him needing to say the words out loud. The launch date is still a mess of conflicting calendars, but that can wait. Right now my body is already leaning toward the one thing it wants.

Nosa.

My phone has been lighting up gently all day with his messages. Nothing heavy. Just little pieces of him finding their way to me between meetings, small and unhurried, like he knows exactly how much room he is allowed to take up in my head and uses every bit of it anyway. I read every one twice — sometimes three times — smiling at my screen like a secret I am not ready to share yet, my thumb hovering over his name for longer than it needs to.

The phone dings again.

Nosa: Hey babe ❤️ Done with work?

I stare at the screen for a long second, warmth already creeping up my neck, slow as spilled tea.

Me: Why? You miss me that much?

Nosa: You have no idea.

Heat rushes to my face so fast I press my palm against my cheek, just to feel how hot it has gotten. I glance around the office quickly, half-guilty, but no one is paying attention to me. Still, I bite my lip hard — hard enough to almost hurt — just to keep the smile from taking over my whole face. It doesn’t work. I can feel it winning anyway, pulling at the corners of my mouth like it has a mind of its own.

Me: You’re going to get me in trouble smiling at my phone like this.

Nosa: Good. No one else should make you smile like I do.

I read that one twice too. And my chest, without my permission, swells.

The three dots appear again.

Nosa: How was your day really?

Me: Long. But better now. Yours?

Nosa: Much better now that I’m talking to you.

I let out a small breath through my nose — half a laugh — and type before I can stop myself.

Me: I know, I’m the light in your life.

I sit there grinning at my own audacity, waiting. The dots take longer this time and I find myself staring up at the ceiling, my leg bouncing lightly under the desk, my whole body humming with a kind of ridiculous, giddy patience.

Nosa: Of course. Only reason I need a dose of your face per day.

Me: Will you come over to my place?

There is barely a pause.

Nosa: You don’t have to ask twice, miss. Drive safe babe.

I have to look away from the screen for a moment because the blush is burning all the way to my ears now, hot enough that I press the back of my hand against one and laugh quietly at myself. I press my lips together, trying to school my face into something professional, something appropriate for an office at closing time, but the smile keeps winning — small and stubborn and entirely out of my control.

I slip my phone into my bag, still smiling down at nothing, and stand up.

“Ah babe.” Tunmise’s voice comes from a few feet away. She is already halfway through packing her own bag but her eyes are locked on me with that familiar, gentle curiosity. “Are you fighting with me too?”

I look up, still feeling the heat on my face. “What? No. I’m not fighting with anybody.”

She pauses, one eyebrow raised. “Then why didn’t you offer to drop me off today? You’ve been glued to that phone since morning with this look on your face like—” she gestures vaguely in my direction— “like someone just told you the best news of your life.”

I try to laugh it off but it comes out softer than I mean it to. “Sorry. I got carried away.”

Tunmise stops what she is doing completely and studies me. The teasing in her eyes softens into something warmer. “Nosa’s back, isn’t he?”

My cheeks flame again. I can feel it. There is no hiding it this time. “How did you know?”

“Nobody had to tell me,” she says, a slow smile spreading across her face. “You’ve been blushing at your screen every ten minutes. You didn’t even notice when Maryam walked past earlier giving you the full dagger eyes. You were too busy smiling like that.”

I open my mouth. Close it. The blush deepens until I have to look down at my bag to compose myself.

Tunmise lets out a small, delighted laugh. “Girl. You have that glow. The kind that says someone is loving you exactly the way you deserve.”

I lift my eyes to hers and can’t stop the shy smile that pulls at my mouth. “Yeah,” I say quietly. “He’s back.”

She claps her hands together and leans forward slightly, like she is sharing in a secret. “I knew it. I said it to myself this morning — you were walking around like a woman who is being taken care of by a man who knows what he is doing. And I was correct.”

There is no teasing left in her voice now. Just genuine, uncomplicated warmth. “I’m really happy for you, Kike.”

Then, without any transition whatsoever, she picks up her bag and tilts her head. “So you’re still dropping me off, yeah?”

I laugh — light and easy. “Of course. Let’s go.”

Timehin is in the house when I get back. She has cleaned with the particular thoroughness of someone who needed somewhere to put her hands. The floor catches the evening light and sparkles. Every surface is clear. Even the corner by the television—the one that somehow gathers things no one remembers placing there—has been dealt with.

“Aunty Kike, welcome.” She looks up from her laptop, smiling with her whole mouth.

“Timehin.” I set my bag down and take in the living room. “Thank you. I’m genuinely grateful.”

“You’re welcome.” Then, almost as an afterthought, with complete seriousness: “Honestly, someone annoyed me earlier. I needed somewhere to put the energy.”

“And you chose cleaning.”

“It’s therapeutic.” She nods, already turning back to her screen. “You should try it sometime.”

I smile and start toward my room, then pause. “Where’s Kuye?”

She shrugs. “Haven’t seen him since I got back.”

I look at her a second longer than necessary before stepping inside.

My room is clean too. The relief that moves through me is immediate and almost embarrassing in its intensity. After the day I’ve had, coming home to order feels like mercy.

My Jesus, bless this Timehin girl for me.

I spend the next hour showering and getting ready, trying very hard not to think about Nosa coming. The thing is, I have never been particularly self-conscious around him. From the beginning there has been an ease between us—the kind you have with someone when you’re not constantly monitoring how you appear. But something has shifted. The way his eyes move when he sees me now, slow and warm and unguarded, has made me aware of myself in a way I wasn’t before. He looks at me like I am something worth looking at. Something worth taking time over.

Yesterday, in my mother’s living room, those same eyes had—I stop myself.

“Blood of Jesus,” I say to my reflection, genuinely. “I purify my mind in Jesus’ name.”

My reflection does not look particularly purified. She looks like a woman who has just been caught thinking something she shouldn’t, even though the only witnesses are me and the Holy Ghost.

“You are a woman of God,” I tell her. “Behave.”

It doesn’t work. So I start to sing, quietly at first, then with more intention.

Create in me a clean heart, O God
And renew a right spirit within me…

I shake my head as though the motion could dislodge the thoughts, but they stay exactly where they are. Thoughts, it turns out, do not respond to headshaking the way hair does.

It was easier when I knew he was going back to the States. Easier to love him from a safe distance, to miss him cleanly. Missing someone lives in the chest and stays there. But he is here now—physically here, in the same city, coming to this house in—she checks the time on her phone—less than twenty minutes. And my thoughts have apparently motioned for independence.

“Lord.” I set the phone face down on the dresser. “Help me. I love this man. I love him genuinely, and I want to do this right. I want to honor You in what I feel for him. Please help me honor You.”

I pray in the Spirit for a few minutes while I finish getting ready, then make a mental note to call Adanna later. She’ll understand. She’ll tell me the truth without making me feel ashamed for being human.

One last time, I look at myself in the mirror.

Oversized purple top—the soft, worn kind. Jean shorts. A messy bun that took more effort than it pretends to. Bare face. The bare face is deliberate. It says I am not performing. This is what I look like when I am comfortable.

And then, a gentle knock sounds at the door. Timehin’s voice follows. “Aunty Kike. Brother Nosa is here.”

My heart drops, then surges forward like it has been waiting by the door this entire time and has only now been given permission to move.

I am a grown woman. I am composed. I have sat through board meetings and difficult conversations and a bathroom floor’s worth of tears today, and I held myself through all of it. I can walk out of this room and act normal.

This is the pep talk I give myself. I want it noted that it is a very good one.

I open the door and step out.

Nosa looks up the moment I appear.

And everything I just prayed in the last hour makes a very discreet and temporary exit, without so much as a farewell.

Yesterday was so much — so full of emotion and reunion and Iya Kuti’s songs and the accumulated weight of eleven months finally releasing all at once — that I had not properly registered him. Not the way I am registering him now, standing in my mother’s living room on a quiet evening with no occasion to rush the observation. His chest has gotten broader. The t-shirt he is wearing does nothing to conceal this fact and is not trying to. His cut is fresh — a day or two old at most, the kind of precision that means he prepared for coming back.

He holds himself the same way he always has: with the particular stillness that has always made the room around him feel slightly calmer — but something in it is different now, fuller somehow, like the eleven months have added weight to the stillness in a way that is not heaviness but depth.

I am staring. Openly. Un-Christianly.

“Take a picture,” Nosa says, the corner of his mouth lifting. “It’ll last longer.”

I catch myself and cross my arms, trying to look unimpressed. “It’s not my fault you look this good on a random evening.”

Something shifts in his face. Surprise, maybe. Or pleasure. He stands and walks toward me. When he stops, close enough that I have to tilt my head back to meet his eyes, he looks down at me with that same warm, unhurried attention that always makes everything else in the room fade.

“You say things like that,” he says quietly, “then act like they don’t mean anything.”

I feel the heat rising in my face and turn away before it can settle. I walk past him toward the sitting area, needing the distance. “I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true. You’re a good-looking man. That’s just a fact.”

“Thank you, miss.”

“Don’t let it go to your head.”

“Too late.”

Behind us, Timehin is very focused on her laptop. Suspiciously focused. The small curve at the corner of her mouth is betraying everything her neutral expression is trying to hide.

“Do you want to go outside?” I ask, turning back to Nosa.

“Please,” he says, with the relief of a man who has also noticed Timehin.

“Let’s go then.”

The drive to UCH Ibadan gave Jaiye enough time to think, and thinking, these days, had become its own kind of punishment.

He’d met with the council of elders that morning, at his father’s church — Faithful Witnesses Gospel Church — where the process of appointing a new overseer was already underway, exactly as his father had instructed before he died.

Jaiye, don’t go after ministry, Revd Richard Ola had said, near the end, his voice gone thin as paper. Go back to where you started from. Submit yourself to Elder Anifowose.

So this morning, after a war between his mind and his spirit that he’d lost before it started, he’d finally gone to see the man.

The elder was nothing like he remembered. Old now — late seventies, maybe — with a mouth that had been sharpened, it seemed, for this exact occasion. The first thing he did was look at Jaiye’s neck.

“Remove that thing from your neck before you speak with me.”

Jaiye had removed his necklacle. Slowly. His fingers had fumbled with the clasp longer than they needed to, and he’d felt the elder watching him fumble, and he’d let himself be watched, because there was nothing else to do. He sat through the correction after that — every word of it, about pride, about wandering, about coming to him only now, months too late to matter. He said yes sir in the places where yes sir was required. The elder told him to return the following week, and that was the end of it. No warmth. No welcome. Just an old man’s eyes assessing him like a debt not yet settled.

Jaiye walked to his car slowly. He sat in the driver’s seat for a full minute before he put the key in the ignition, staring at nothing, wondering — not for the first time that week — whether he wanted anything to do with the Elder at all.

Stay under him.

The voice came quiet, arriving from somewhere behind his ribs. He let out a breath through his nose, long and slow, the way he used to when he was trying not to argue with his father.

There was nothing glamorous about staying under Elder Anifowose. Nothing that would make anyone say his name again in the rooms that used to fill for him. And he knew what was in him — he knew there was a grace on his life, a weight he hadn’t imagined into being, a thing that used to move through him and out into a crowd like electricity finding ground. But the Lord was asking him to sit under a man who looked at him like he was nobody. Like the years — all of them — had counted for nothing.

He started the engine but didn’t move yet.

“Lord.” The word came out strange in the quiet of the car, cracked in a way he didn’t expect. “Is this my punishment?”

Nothing answered. Just the low hum of the radio, some gospel highlife station playing under the idle of the engine, indifferent to him entirely.

He gripped the wheel. Loosened his grip. Gripped it again.

“Okay, Lord.” A long breath out. “Elder Anifowose it is.”

He pulled out of the compound slowly, and it was only once he’d merged onto the main road that the thought he’d been avoiding all morning finally caught up with him, the way a person catches up with their own shadow at the exact moment the sun shifts overhead.

He was alone.

That was the plain truth sitting underneath every other truth he’d been managing since he came back. Everyone he used to know had moved into other seasons — married, settled, building lives with no room left over for him in them. There were more serious things now than the ministry of PJay and whatever grace used to rest visibly on his shoulders, back when a room would still itself the moment he walked in. He remembered the peak of it with a clarity that hurt — how his name alone used to move a crowd of students, how he used to stand backstage before a crusade and feel the air itself waiting on him. That felt like a photograph now. A face he used to borrow.

He’d given up a good life in Silicon Valley for this — structure, money, a version of peace that had taken years to build — to come back and make things right, whatever that phrase had actually meant in his head at the time he packed his bags. His father was dead. He barely knew a soul left in that church. Nobody looked at him twice anymore, let alone the way they used to.

He drove past Berger without really seeing it.

“Lord.” He tried again, and this time his voice came out smaller. “I’m at a fix.”

He paused, testing the words before he let them all the way out. “I don’t know anybody again. Khalid can hardly look at me since he found out I hurt Kikelomo.” Saying her name did something to his chest he wasn’t prepared for, and he had to stop, swallow, start the sentence over. “I have nothing left to hold onto, Lord. I am alone.”

Are you?

The question came like a hand closing around something he’d been hiding in a clenched fist, prying the fingers back one at a time.

He didn’t answer right away. He let the silence sit there between the question and whatever he was about to say, because some part of him — some old, defensive part — wanted to argue, wanted to insist, wanted God to simply agree with him for once instead of turning every confession into an interrogation.

“Yes, Lord.” It came out almost wounded. Almost accusing, as if God owed him something better than this. “I am. Look at me.” His voice cracked open a little wider on that last word. “I’m bare. Stripped of everything that used to make people look twice at me. Nobody cares whether I live or die out here.”

He took the next curve too sharply and had to correct the wheel.

“They’re not acting like my father’s death isn’t even a year old yet.” He sniffed hard, and before he could stop it, the memory rose whole and uninvited — his father’s hand in the hospital bed, thin and cold, gripping his with a strength that had surprised him, the machine beside the bed counting down something Jaiye had refused, at the time, to let himself hear counting. He blinked fast. “I am grieving, Lord. I am a man alone. It is a hard way to live.”

Jaiyeola.

His full name.

What are you, when everything is stripped away?

He flinched, actually flinched, his shoulders drawing up toward his ears like he’d been struck from somewhere behind.

He had never once asked himself that question. Not really. Not underneath the noise of altar calls and testimonies and the particular drug of a thousand eyes fixed on him at once, a drug he hadn’t even known he was addicted to until it was taken from him completely.

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t. He kept driving, his eyes on the road, his mind somewhere else entirely, waiting — almost against his will — for whatever was coming next.

What lives beneath the name, Jaiye?

Beneath the glory, the crowd, the people who surrounded you because of what your presence could give them? Is it a man worthy of My calling — or is it something else, wearing that man’s skin?

The road blurred. He blinked hard, telling himself it was the glare, the heat coming up off the tarmac, anything at all except what it actually was. He was approaching Ibadan now, the traffic starting to thicken and knot around him, horns somewhere behind him, the ordinary world going on exactly as it always did, entirely unaware that something in the car ahead of it was quietly coming apart.

What if I needed you to see it? The voice was patient. Unbearably patient, the way a father is patient with a child who still doesn’t understand why the thing they’re holding is dangerous. What if I stripped it all away on purpose — the ministry, the platform, the people — because I wanted you to finally see what you’re made of?

He still didn’t answer. His chest had gone tight in a way that frightened him a little, a tightness with pressure behind it, like something was being pried open with a tool it had no business touching.

Because he knew. God help him, he knew exactly what was underneath.

He let the thought come slowly this time, didn’t rush past it the way he wanted to.

When he was in the world, he’d covered himself in noise — parties, girls, alcohol, nights he could barely account for even to himself, all through secondary school and past it, a boy building walls out of anything loud enough to keep a particular silence out. He hadn’t known, back then, that it was a silence he was running from. He only knew he couldn’t sit still in it.

And when he found the Lord — when he really believed he had — he’d simply built new walls with holier material. Ministry. Souls won and counted. Crusades. The particular, private satisfaction of a crowd calling his name for Jesus’s sake instead of for a bottle. Different bricks. Same wall. Same terrified boy behind it, still making absolutely sure nobody ever got close enough to see him with nothing on.

But stripped of every covering, the voice pressed on, unhurried, what substance are you made of, Jaiyeola? Could you be tried by fire and not be found ash?

His hands had started to shake against the wheel. He noticed it distantly, the way you notice something happening to someone else.

Could you stand in front of Me and see anything of Myself reflected back?

He didn’t decide to pull over. His body simply did it for him — some instinct older than thought steering the car toward the fueling station on his right, gravel crackling under the tires as he came to a stop at an odd angle, too close to the pump, not that it mattered. He left the engine running. He sat there for a moment with both hands still on the wheel, breathing hard through his nose, trying — uselessly — to hold himself together for a few seconds longer.

It didn’t work.

His forehead dropped forward onto the steering wheel, slowly. And something in his chest broke loose that he had no name for — not sadness exactly, not grief exactly, something older and rawer than either, something that had been packed down tight for years and was only now finding the door.

For a moment he didn’t cry. He just sat there, forehead against the leather, shaking, breath coming in short uneven pulls, his whole body caught in that strange suspended second before the dam actually goes.

Then it went.

“I have been covering myself.” His voice came out cracked, barely his own.

“I have been covering myself, Lord.” He dragged his hands over his face.

“I have covered myself with vanity. With wanting to be seen.” A breath, ragged. “With fame — with wanting my name to mean something — I have covered myself with things that don’t last past this life, Lord.” His shoulders had started to shake in earnest now. “I have built my whole self out of things that will burn.”

The first sob came up from somewhere below his ribs, somewhere he hadn’t known he had room for.

“Purify my desires.” Broken. Guttural. Nothing like the smooth, sure voice that used to hold auditoriums still. “Purge me. Make me whole — because I don’t know what’s left of me if You take out the rot, but take it out anyway. Please.”

He was crying properly now, the kind of crying that has no shape to it, no dignity left in it, his shoulders heaving, his hands gripping the wheel like it was the only solid thing left in the world. There was no one close enough at the fueling station to see a grown man falling apart in his car, and even if there had been, he no longer had the strength to care.

“Woe is me, Lord. Woe is me, for I am undone.” The cry came from somewhere ancient, borrowed from every broken man who had ever stood in front of a holy God and finally understood what that actually meant. “I am a man of unclean lips. I have lived my whole life dressed up as something clean.” His voice dropped, and dropped again, until it was barely above a whisper. “Purify my heart. Purify my heart. I don’t want to build another wall. I don’t want to survive on the applause of people who’ll forget my name in a year.” A long pause, his breath hitching. “I want to be real, Lord. Even if real means nobody ever claps for me again.”

He stayed there a long time. Long enough for the sun to shift slightly through the windscreen. Long enough for the radio to move on to a different song without him noticing. Long enough for the crying to slow, then stop, then start again in smaller waves, the way grief does when it isn’t finished with a person yet.

And underneath it all, the voice didn’t say anything else. It didn’t need to. It simply stayed with him — patient, present, unmoved by how long the undoing was taking — the way a father stays in the room with a child who is finally, finally, learning how to come back home.

“Move, move, make way!”

A trolley clipped past, close enough that Jaiye had to step back sharply to keep it from catching his foot, and for a second he just stood there in the doorway of the Medical Ward, letting his heart settle from the near miss.

The contrast hit him before anything else did — before he even found her bed. His father had died in a hospital in Canada, all soft lighting and quiet machines and nurses who spoke in the hushed, apologetic tones of people trained to manage grief. This was nothing like that. This was noise and heat and the particular smell of a public ward — antiseptic layered over something warmer and more human underneath it, bodies and sweat and old paint. He’d driven into UCH almost two hours after leaving the fueling station, after he’d finally lifted his head from the steering wheel and wiped his face with the back of his hand and sat, hollowed out, until he trusted himself to drive again. A kind woman at the reception desk had pointed him toward the Female Medical Ward.

And now he was standing at the entrance for a moment longer than he needed to.

The paint on the walls of the hospital was peeling in long strips near the ceiling, the kind of peeling that had been there for years and would likely be there for years more. The floor was clean — someone clearly mopped it, and often — but it had the tiredness of a floor that had been mopped too many times without ever really being renewed. The nurses moved between beds with the brisk, flattened efficiency of people who had long since run out of patience for one more visitor asking one more question. He understood that. He didn’t take it personally.

He made himself walk toward the nurses’ station.

“Uncle, who are you here to see?” The nurse behind the table didn’t look up right away. She was short, seated low in her chair, chewing gum with a wet, careless rhythm that he tried not to let irritate him. He waited a second before answering, letting the sound pass.

“I’m here to see Abimbola Akintunde.”

“Bed 016.” She said it without lifting her eyes from her phone, already finished with him.

He nodded, though she wasn’t looking, and turned toward the ward.

The walk to the far edge felt longer than it should have. He passed bed after bed — a woman asleep with an oxygen tube taped under her nose, another staring blankly at the ceiling, a visitor fanning a patient with a folded newspaper because the ward’s ceiling fans turned too slowly to matter. He kept his eyes mostly forward, but every few beds his mind dragged him backward instead — to all the ways he’d imagined this moment over the years, in the version of it that lived only in his head. He’d rehearsed what he might say to her more times than he could count. He’d imagined arriving cold, unaffected, a man fully recovered from whatever she had done to him. He’d imagined arriving angry, finally saying the things he’d swallowed for years. He had never once imagined arriving like this — hollowed out from his own morning, still faintly raw around the edges from crying in a car two hours ago, uncertain what he even wanted to feel.

Because when her email had come — when he’d opened it expecting nothing and found instead her confession, her admission, the words I have kidney damage sitting plainly among sentences that trembled with something he almost didn’t recognize in her — he hadn’t known what to do with any of it. He still didn’t. He’d come anyway. Not for closure exactly, though maybe that was part of it. He’d come to see her face when she said the things she’d written. He’d come to know whether the confession was born out of real change, or only out of fear that her body was failing and eternity had gotten suddenly, urgently close.

He reached bed 016 and stopped.

She was lying with her back to him, and for a moment he simply looked at her — really looked, the way you look at something you’re not sure is what you think it is. She was thinner than he remembered. Much thinner. The woman he remembered had carried herself with a fullness, a presence that filled a room before she even opened her mouth. This woman looked small under the thin hospital sheet, her shoulder blades visible through the fabric of her gown, her frame folded in on itself like something that had been slowly emptied out.

He hadn’t expected the compassion that moved through him before he’d even seen her face. He stood there a second, almost unsettled by it — how easily it came, how little his years of anger seemed to weigh against the sight of her like this.

He reached out and tapped gently on the metal frame of the bed.

“Bimbo.”

She stirred slowly, the movement of someone surfacing from somewhere deep and unfamiliar. For a moment, as she turned, her eyes were unfocused, disoriented, searching the space near him without quite landing on him. Then they found his face.

And something in her sharpened.

It happened fast — the disorientation clearing all at once, recognition arriving like a light switched on in a dark room. She pushed herself upright against the pillow, slow and effortful, one hand braced against the mattress, and let her eyes rest fully on him for the first time in years.

The silence between them stretched a beat too long. Long enough that a nurse walked past behind him without either of them looking away from the other.

“Jaiyeola.” She said his name the way someone unwraps something they’ve been saving, dragging it out with a sneer that didn’t quite match the frailty of her body. Her voice was sharper than she looked — sharper than anything else about her. “Finally. You’ve come to see the woman you left to rot in Nigeria, abi?”

Author’s Note: Bimbo is back!

Read Previous Episode Here.

I have known this my entire life. I was raised by this woman. I have watched her pause a movie to cry over a character she has known for eleven minutes. I have watched her conduct a full praise session in the middle of a supermarket because they had her brand of tomato paste back in stock. I thought I was prepared for any version of her.

I was not prepared for this.

The moment her eyes landed on Nosa standing in the doorway of our living room, her entire body went still. It was not the gradual kind of stilling, where a person slows and registers and adjusts. The sudden one. Like someone had found a remote control and pressed pause directly on her. Her mouth opened slightly, then closed. One hand rose slowly to her chest, just the involuntary movement of a woman checking whether her heart was still operating at the correct speed.

For a long, suspended second, nobody moved.

Then she took one shaky step backward and lowered herself, slowly and deliberately, onto her knees right in front of the centre table.

“Jesu oshe oh…” The word came out barely above a breath. “Thank you, my Jesus Christ.”

And then she started singing.

Dramatically.

A song I recognized from childhood. Her voice was trembling slightly, just at the edges. I stood there for a moment, clutching my phone like it had some protective function, before my body made a decision independent of my brain and I folded myself down onto the floor beside her. The tiles were cold through my dress. I registered this and tucked it away for later suffering.

Nosa went down without a word too. Joining Iya Kuti in her spontaneous worship session.

I caught his eye during the fourth song and nearly came apart. He had that look — the one that said I’m back to this dramatic woman’s house again — but then he closed his eyes and sang along like the words were his own, like he meant every syllable, and I had to look away before something happened to my face.

The worship went on.

And on.

And on.

My knees began their formal complaints against the tiles. The smell of jollof rice drifted in from the kitchen — and the standing fan in the corner kept doing its best. Every time her voice cracked with emotion; I bit the inside of my cheek so hard I’m surprised I don’t have a permanent mark. Nosa’s shoulder brushed mine once, warm and solid and there, and I stared fixedly at the floor and did not look at him again because I knew what looking at him would do to my composure and I was barely holding it together as it was.

When she finally whispered “Amen,” my legs had gone to sleep from the knee down. I considered this a small price.

Iya Kuti rose slowly, wiped her face with the edge of her top with the dignity of a queen, and then pulled Nosa into the kind of hug that makes you briefly concerned about another person’s structural integrity. She held him with both arms, fully committed, her hands patting his back in a steady rhythm while she muttered prayers in a mix of Yoruba and English.

I quietly lifted my phone and recorded several seconds of it.

Because the sight of my tall, broad-shouldered man bent slightly at the waist to accommodate this woman who barely reaches his chest — his eyes closed, receiving her prayers with the patience and sincerity of a man who was genuinely raised to honor his elders — did something to my chest that I am not going to examine in public.

I saved the video. I will be watching it later. Possibly multiple times.

When she finally released him, she held his face in both hands and looked at him for a long moment.

“Welcome back, oko mi,” she said, voice thick with everything she wasn’t bothering to translate. “Welcome back to us.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Nosa said. Simply. Meaning it.

I wiped my face quickly before anyone could see, pretended I was checking my phone, and declared myself completely fine.

The house filled not long after. People arrived in that organic way they do at Iya Kuti’s — not planned, not announced, simply materializing because word travels and her door has never been the kind that makes you feel unwelcome. Voices layered over voices. The kitchen produced food with the regularity of a catering operation. I was standing near the centre table when Adanna and Tife walked through the door.

The moment I saw them, I excused myself and made my way over.

“You two,” I said, reaching them, “are actually sly. Like you seriously planned this and left me out?”

Adanna attempted an expression of remorse. She got about forty percent of the way there before the smile betrayed her completely. Tife didn’t even try. He just stood there looking like a man who had committed a crime and was already expecting a medal for it.

Before either of them could speak, Oreoluwa launched himself toward me like a tiny, determined missile. I caught him just in time. He immediately grabbed my necklace with both hands and started yanking like he was trying to start a lawnmower.

“Nosa asked us not to say anything,” Adanna said, still losing the war with her face.

“The remorse isn’t landing, Pastor Mrs.,” I told her. “Your smile is doing the Macarena. Just let it go.”

She cracked completely — laughing so hard she had to grab Tife’s arm to steady herself. He grinned beside her with the particular satisfaction of a man who had pulled off something excellent and was now thoroughly enjoying the aftermath.

“But didn’t you enjoy seeing him though?” Tife asked, eyes bright with amusement and zero guilt.

“Enjoy seeing who?”

Nosa’s voice came from directly behind my left shoulder.

I turned. He was strolling over with a small white plate of small chops, completely relaxed, like a man who had not been away for eleven months but had perhaps stepped out briefly to get groceries and was now returning to his regularly scheduled life. He looked unbearably good. I filed this away and said nothing about it.

Tife reached over without a single apology and stole the small fork directly off his plate. “Iya Kuti must really like you. She personally served you small chops?”

“I helped her unpack some things in the kitchen,” Nosa said, calmly watching Tife eat his food. “This is payment for my labor. She also said I have ‘good home training.’”

“Shioor,” Adanna said, snatching the fork from Tife and stabbing a puff-puff like she was claiming territory. “You’re just campaigning for best son-in-law position. We all see the vision.”

“He doesn’t even have to campaign,” I said, trying to pry Oreoluwa’s fingers off my necklace before he could use it as dental floss. “The moment Iya Kuti heard he was in the Navy SEALs, she started calling him oko mi. The campaign was over before it started.”

Tife sucked his teeth. “Should’ve joined the Navy when I had the chance.”

Nosa patted his shoulder with fake solemnity. “You were busy with ministry, brother. Some of us served the country. Some of us served God. Both are honorable callings… but only one of us is enamoring a woman in her sixties.”

Tife looked genuinely wounded for half a second before trying to steal another piece of puff-puff with his bare hands.

“Meanwhile—” Nosa glanced between them, something warm and genuine underneath the ease, “—thank you. Both of you. My lady was properly surprised. Exactly what I wanted.”

My lady.

Just those two words, said simply, like they were the most natural arrangement of syllables in the English language. They hit me so cleanly I almost forgot how to hold a baby.

“Anything for our women,” Tife declared, chest expanding with the energy of a man who had just solved something significant.

Adanna and I turned to him at the exact same moment, in perfect unintentional synchrony, with identical expressions.

“We are standing directly in front of you, Pastor Tife.”

He raised both hands immediately, already laughing. “Our very present, very wonderful, extraordinarily beautiful women who are absolutely within earshot and whom I cherish completely. I am simply a humble servant of — “

“Stop,” Adanna said.

“Stopping,” Tife agreed.

Just then, the front door opened.

Timehin arrived the way Timehin usually arrives — fully committed, slightly chaotic, and already in the middle of a situation that had clearly escaped her control. She was wrestling a cardboard box that was easily twice her size, her face half-hidden behind it as she tried to angle herself through the doorway by sheer willpower and questionable spatial judgment.

Several people immediately started moving to help.

Kuye walked out of the storeroom at that exact moment. He glanced at the box, then at Timehin, then back at the box. For half a second, something unreadable flickered across his face. Then he simply adjusted the cuff of his shirt and kept walking, not breaking stride, not offering a hand, not even slowing down. The space between them felt strangely loud for how little was said.

I watched the whole thing quietly.

Nosa leaned in close to me, his voice low and warm against my ear. “Do you want some small chops? I’ll go get you a plate.”

I turned to look at him. He was already watching me with that quiet, focused attention that always made the rest of the room blur at the edges. Eleven months hadn't dulled it even slightly. If anything it had sharpened, like something that had been tested and had held.

Before I could answer, he lifted Oreoluwa from my arms with an ease that suggested this was completely unremarkable, like he had done it a hundred times, like babies were simply a thing he knew how to carry. Oreoluwa stared up at him with large, assessing eyes. Then he reached out and fisted a handful of Nosa’s shirt and held on, the way babies do when they have decided, without consultation, that they are staying.

Nosa didn’t flinch. He just settled him against his chest, looked back at me, and the corner of his mouth lifted.

“She won’t give you another plate,” I said, aiming for normal, aiming for the version of myself that was not currently being undone by a man holding a baby. “Don’t push your luck with Iya Kuti.”

“She will,” he replied, calm and certain. “She already told me these are my welcome-back snacks.”

Tife snorted from beside us and plucked the last samosa off the plate. “She didn’t even know you were coming this afternoon.”

“Jealousy doesn’t suit you, bro.”

“Not jealous,” Tife said, already turning toward the kitchen. “Just a man who needs to go remind his favourite unofficial church member that he still exists before she starts adopting a long lost man from the Navy SEALs.”

Adanna’s eyes followed him as he walked away, soft and unguarded for a moment — the way she sometimes looked at him when she forgot anyone else was around. Then she seemed to catch herself. She leaned in quickly, kissed Oreoluwa’s cheek, and murmured, “I should go say hi to Iya Kuti too,” before slipping off after her husband.

Nosa glanced down at the baby now comfortably settled against him, then back at me. His free hand brushed lightly against my waist as he shifted closer, the touch brief but deliberate.

“Are you good?” he asked quietly, just for me.

I nodded, even though my stomach was still doing that stupid, helpless flip it always did around him. Oreoluwa made a small, contented sound and tugged on his shirt again, like he was already deciding this new person was acceptable.

Nosa’s eyes softened as he looked at the baby, then at me again. The corner of his mouth curved, slow and private.

“He’s got good taste,” he said, voice low. “Already knows who to hold on to.”

Timehin finally reached us.

She was slightly out of breath, the box now on the floor beside her, a few strands of hair escaping from where she’d tucked them. She straightened up — and then her eyes landed on Nosa standing beside me with Oreoluwa comfortably settled against his chest. She stopped completely.

Her brain visibly buffering.

She turned to me and stage-whispered loud enough that Nosa could hear every word, “Is this Brother Nosa?”

I closed my eyes for one long second. “Timehin. He can hear you.”

“I know,” she said, which meant she had already decided it didn’t matter.

Nosa’s mouth curved, that quiet, amused smile he got when something genuinely surprised him. He shifted Oreoluwa to his other arm and extended his free hand. “Hi. I’m Nosa.”

Timehin shook it a little too quickly. “I’m Timehin. Aunty Kike’s adopted younger sister. Self-appointed. She didn’t get a vote.”

Nosa glanced at me, eyes glinting. “A lot has changed since I left. You have a younger sister now.”

“She acquired herself,” I said. “I came in one morning and she was already in the media unit, in my space, knowing all my business. By the time I realised what was happening, it was too late.”

Timehin nodded solemnly. “That’s accurate.”

“Can’t wait to hear more,” Nosa said, and the way he said it — like he actually meant it — made something warm settle in my chest. He looked down at Oreoluwa, then back at me. That small, wordless check-in we’d developed privately. You good?

I gave him the tiniest nod. Yes.

He seemed satisfied, but he didn’t move right away. Instead, he let his eyes linger on mine for a second longer than necessary, like he was still getting used to the fact that I was actually standing in front of him again. Then, with his free hand, he reached for my waist and gave it a gentle, deliberate squeeze — just once, quick and private.

Lowering his voice so only I could hear, he said, “I need to call Pastor Sharon. I’ll come back.” The last part was soft, a silent promise tucked inside an ordinary sentence.

He walked toward the front, Oreoluwa still content in his arms. I watched him go, my eyes following the easy way he moved through the room with the baby on his chest. Something in me loosened and tightened at the same time. Eleven months of missing him had taught me how to live without this feeling, but it hadn’t prepared me for how strong it would hit now that he was back.

The baby looked over Nosa’s shoulder at me with an expression far too smug for someone who couldn’t even walk yet.

I turned back to Timehin.

She was staring at the door like she’d just witnessed a plot twist in real time. Slowly, she turned to me, a smile spreading across her face with the patience of someone who had been waiting for this exact moment.

“So this is how you are when you’re in love.”

I moved to sit on the sofa. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She followed immediately, sitting close enough that our knees touched. “Your eyes, Aunty Kike. They go all soft. And your face does this… dreamy thing. It’s actually slightly disturbing. You look like a different person.”

“I look exactly like myself.”

“You look like yourself but someone turned the brightness up and the volume down. It’s strange. I’m not used to it.” She paused, then clasped her hands together like she was about to deliver a sermon. “Omo, I was starstruck. He’s also finer in person, by the way.”

I felt the heat rise in my cheeks before I could stop it. “I’m aware.”

She stared at me with so much unfiltered happiness that I briefly considered getting up again. “Aunty Kike. I’m so happy for you. I’ve been praying that God would bring you a good man. And He had already been keeping Brother Nosa for you the whole time. Before I even knew you existed.”

Something in my chest loosened.

Before I could reply, she leaned in and hugged me — head against my chest, arms wrapped tight, the way people hug when they haven’t yet learned to hold back. I let her stay there. It was awkward and warm and exactly what I needed.

After a moment she pulled back.

“Ouch.”

I stilled. “What?”

“My hair,” she said, voice shifting into mild panic. “It’s hooked on your shirt.”

“How has it—” I looked down. A section of her hair was thoroughly tangled around one of my buttons. “Hold on. Don’t move.”

She immediately moved.

“Timehin—”

“Sorry, sorry—”

The more we tried to fix it, the worse it got. We were both bent toward each other, my fingers working at the knot while she kept apologizing and shifting, and I started laughing — the quiet, helpless kind that comes when something is too ridiculous to stay serious about.

Kuye stepped out of his bedroom.

He stopped.

I was too occupied to greet him properly, but I felt him there — the way his eyes moved from me to Timehin bent close against me, to the tangle at my collar. Something in his expression shifted, just slightly. Not quite a frown. Just… tighter.

Timehin, still focused on the crisis at my chest, kept talking. “This is probably why your brother can’t stand me. I’m always doing something like this. I’m genuinely clumsy.”

Kuye’s jaw tightened. Barely. Just enough for someone who knew what to look for.

I finally worked her hair free. Timehin lifted her head with the triumph of someone who had survived minor warfare — and froze.

Her eyes widened just a fraction when she realised Kuye was standing there, watching us. She hadn’t known he was in the room. The realisation hit her visibly; her shoulders pulled back a little too quickly, like she’d been caught saying something she shouldn’t have.

“Oh—” A small, startled beat. “Hi, Kuye.”

He gave a short, precise look. Then walked past without another word, the door to the storeroom closing behind him a few seconds later.

I watch her eyes follow him for a second longer than necessary before she quickly looked away.

I called after him. “That was rude, Kuye.”

No response came.

Timehin’s smile flickered — just for a second, a small, involuntary dimming — before she rebuilt it quickly, the way someone does when they’ve had practice. “I’m not new to being ignored,” she said lightly. Too lightly.

I turned to look at her properly.

“That’s not an ordinary thing to say, Timehin.”

“Aunty Kike—” She waved a hand, already steering away from it. “I’m being dramatic. You know how I can be. Anyway—” She reached for her bag and pulled out her phone. “I made a playlist. Songs you like, songs Iya Kuti might like. Background music for when dinner starts getting loud. I’ll connect it to the speaker.”

She was already scrolling, head bent over her phone like the conversation had never happened.

I watched her for a moment, then let it go.

There was something there — something quiet and carefully protected. I had seen the flicker in her eyes before she covered it, and I recognized it for what it was. The same way I used to do it.

But I also knew you couldn’t take something from someone before they were ready to hand it over.

So I let her connect the playlist. I let the first song start playing softly through the speaker. And I let the subject change.

For now.

I stepped into the office with my head still banging from yesterday.

There is no party quite like an Iya Kuti party.

My mother had taken complete and total possession of the evening from approximately the second hour, at which point it stopped being my birthday party and became a revival with cake. She danced with her whole body and with the specific energy of someone who has decided joy is not a spectator sport and would like everyone else to understand the same. She broke into songs mid-conversation. She received emotional speeches on my behalf from people who had clearly been storing them up for exactly this kind of opportunity. At some point I stopped trying to keep track of what was happening and simply surrendered to the evening. Let it move through me. Let Iya Kuti be Iya Kuti, which is the only reasonable response to Iya Kuti.

The party didn’t wind down until well past nine. By the time the last guest left and the door finally closed and the house exhaled, all I wanted in the world was to lie down on my bed.

I didn’t make it there immediately.

Because Nosa called just as I was arranging myself to fall over.

I saw his name on the screen and picked up before the second ring. I didn’t even think about it. My hand just moved, the way it always did now when it was him — quick and certain, no deliberation involved. Which tells you everything you need to know about where my priorities have reorganized themselves since he came back.

We stayed on video call until almost two in the morning.

He was in a different t-shirt — dark, soft-looking, the kind that made it very difficult to remember what I had been planning to say. He was sitting on the edge of his bed with one hand behind his head, completely relaxed, and I want it on record that the screen light catching the line of his jaw at that hour should come with some kind of warning. There was tiredness in his eyes but he was smiling. That small smile — the one that never seemed to be for anyone else, the one I had spent eleven months replaying from memory and somehow still managed to underestimate every time I saw it in person, or on a screen, or anywhere at all.

We talked about nothing important and I was completely happy. He told me about the terrible traffic on their way back, and how Adanna had already begun rearranging their guest room with the confidence of someone who had decided he was moving in permanently. I told him about work, about the last few months, about the version of myself I had been becoming while he was away. He listened the way he always listened — fully, without interruption, his eyes steady on mine like what I was saying was the thing he most wanted to hear.

At some point the conversation slowed. Went quiet in that particular way it sometimes did between us, where neither of us was scrambling to fill the silence because the silence itself felt like something. He was just looking at me through the phone — that open, unhurried gaze that had always made my stomach do things I was not going to describe out loud — and then he said, softly, “I still can’t believe I get to see you like this again.”

I felt it land somewhere in the centre of my chest and spread outward.

I looked away for a second, smiling at absolutely nothing, at the wall beside my bed, at the air, at whatever happened to be in the direction that was not his face while I collected myself. When I looked back he was still watching me. The corner of his mouth had lifted, slow and knowing, like he was fully aware of what he had just done to me and had zero regrets about it.

I fell asleep on the call.

I woke up this morning to a dead phone, a crick in my neck from the angle I had drifted off at, Timehin breathing on the other pillow, and the particular brand of tired that only comes from staying up too late with someone you spent eleven months missing.

I lay there for a moment before getting up, phone dead in my hand, and thought about the way he had looked at me through the screen. The way he had said my name toward the end of the call, when I was already half-asleep. The way I had smiled into my pillow about it even then, barely conscious, helpless about it.

I am so far gone. I want that noted somewhere.

Timehin had slept over — Iya Kuti had issued a ruling on the matter sometime past ten o’clock and Timehin, who has learned what all sensible people eventually learn, did not argue. She had CDS this morning but promised to return for cleanup afterward, which I appreciated because the state of the living room was not something I was emotionally prepared to face alone.

When I was leaving for work, I asked Kuye to drop her off on his way out.

This boy looked me in the eye and told me he was not planning to leave the house today.

I stared at him.

He stared back at me with the completely neutral expression of a man who has made a decision and is waiting for me to arrive at the conclusion that there is nothing I can do about it.

I was too tired. I genuinely did not have the architecture for the conversation his face was inviting me to have. I took Nosa’s car, left Timehin with a promise to book her a ride when she was ready, and told my brain we would return to the Kuye question later.

It is later now and I still don’t have the energy. But I have filed it.

I walk into the office carrying cake in one hand and the last of my patience in the other.

Tunmise accosts me at the entrance.

“Happy Birthday, Babeeee!” She lifts me completely off the ground with a strength that has absolutely no business existing in that body.

“Put me downnn!” I whisper-shriek, genuinely alarmed. “Where did you learn to carry people like that?”

She sets me down, laughing, unbothered. “I’ve been going to the gym.”

“Show off.” I roll my eyes and move past her. “Anyways, I brought you cake,” I tell her, moving past her into the office.

“This womannnn.” She follows me inside. “I love you.”

“I love you too. Sit down.”

I settle at my desk and I am reaching into my bag when Maryam walks in.

“Good morning everyone.”

She sees me and her face does nothing. Absolutely nothing — no acknowledgment, no flicker of anything, the smooth untroubled expression of a woman who has not spent any portion of yesterday arranging an ambush on a colleague’s birthday. She walks to her table, sets her bag down, and drifts casually back toward mine like she is simply following the smell of the morning.

“What are we sharing?”

Tunmise smiles. “You came at the right time. Kike was just about to bring out her birthday cake.”

“Birthday party she didn’t invite us to,” Maryam says, with a small, wounded little smile that doesn’t reach her eyes.

I let the words sit for a second. Then I look at her properly.

“Actually, Maryam,” I say, keeping my voice even. “Can we talk?”

She tilts her head. “Talk about what?”

“Just a few minutes. Outside.”

She studies me, clearly trying to decide if she wants to play along. “This one you’re looking all serious. Kiloshele?”

“Please,” I say. The smile on my face is polite but tight. “Now.”

Tunmise’s eyes flick between us, worry already settling on her face. “Guys… are you okay?”

“Me, I’m fine oh,” Maryam replies lightly, already turning toward the door. “As for Kike, I don’t know.”

“Kike,” Tunmise says, lowering her voice. “Whatever it is, take it easy.”

“I intend to.”

Maryam lets out a soft, almost amused breath. “We’ll be back.”

She walks out first.

As I pass Tunmise, she gives me that look — the one that says what is going on? — and I don’t give her anything back. I just follow Maryam out of the office.

We step out into the backyard.

The concrete was still wet in patches, dark where the rain had pooled and refused to dry. The smell rose thick and mineral — Lagos earth after water, heavy, almost metallic, like something that had been waiting underground and was now breathing out. A generator coughed behind the fence and settled into its low, endless drone. Ordinary. Unaware.

I turned to face her.

Maryam was already watching me, arms hanging loose, face arranged in that careful, expensive kind of boredom she wore when she wanted people to know she was being gracious by even standing here. Like this conversation was a tax she was paying. I noticed she had repainted her nails since Monday. Nude, this time. Deliberate. As if she had planned to look unbothered before she knew what today would require of her.

“See Kike,” she started, before I could open my mouth, “if this is about yesterday—”

“It is exactly about yesterday.”

She nodded, slow, like she was humouring a child. “Okay. I’m sorry.”

The words landed flat. Rehearsed. I let them sit in the air between us for a second longer than was comfortable, just to see if she would notice how little they weighed.

“Really, Maryam?”

Something flickered across her face. Annoyance, quickly masked. “What? I already said sorry. What else do you want?”

“You can start by looking like you mean it.”

She exhaled through her nose — long, put-upon, the sound of someone who had already decided this was beneath her. “I mean it. I’m sorry. Happy?”

I took one step closer. The wet concrete shifted under my shoe and for a second I focused on that instead — the small, manageable discomfort of it — because it was easier than focusing on the thing climbing up my chest.

“Maryam. You used your access to me to set up a private meeting with someone I explicitly did not want to see. On my birthday. Outside of work. Without asking me. Without telling me. You made that decision for me.”

She rolled her eyes. Actually rolled them, slowly, like she wanted to make sure I caught the full rotation.

“Babe, I was just trying to help you. He asked nicely. He seemed genuine. I didn’t think it was that deep.”

“You didn’t think.” My voice came out quiet. Calmer than I was. “That’s the part that’s annoying me.”

Her jaw tightened.

“Abeg. That’s not what annoying you.” she said, her voice shifting, taking on something sharper and more deliberate underneath the boredom, “What’s annoying you is that you’re so used to everyone treating you like glass that when someone does something normal, you act like they’ve stabbed you.”

She tilted her head.

“People tiptoe around you, Kike. Khalid. Tunmise. Your friends. Everyone handles you like you might break. Maybe I just didn’t feel like doing that.” A pause. “Maybe that’s what’s actually bothering you. Not what I did. Just that someone finally didn’t bow.”

Something hot climbed up the back of my throat.

“Maryam, you made a decision for me that wasn’t yours to make.”

“I’ve heard you, Aunty.” She smiled — small, sharp, the smile of someone who had decided the conversation was over because she had decided it. “Shey you’ll rest now?”

I felt my hands curl at my sides before I willed them still, nails finding the soft meat of my palm.

“Please,” I said, very carefully, each word placed like something breakable, “do not ever do anything like that again. The only reason I’m standing here instead of in HR is because I still had some respect for you.”

She looked at me for a moment — really looked, like she was taking measurements. Then something shifted in her face. A decision, made quickly.

“Is there anything else?” Clipped. Already done. Already bored.

“Is there something you want to say to me, Maryam?”

She laughed — short, surprised out of her. “What makes you think that?”

“Because you look like you’re choking on it.”

The laugh died.

And then, like a door kicked open from the inside, her face changed completely.

“Actually,” she said, her voice suddenly thicker, “yeah. I have something to say. Since we’re here.”

“So say it. What’s with the passive agressiveness?”

The backyard felt smaller suddenly. The fence closer. The generator louder, like even it was leaning in.

“You piss me off, Kike.” The words came out raw, like she had been keeping them at the back of her throat for months and was only now spitting them out. “Genuinely. A lot of times.”

I didn’t move.

“You show up here and in one year everyone is calling you the media sweetheart. I have been here longer. I do the work — I do it well, I do it consistently — and it is always just fine. Adequate. Then you walk in and Khalid is talking about co-founders and putting you in front of every big pitch and Tunmise acts like you personally invented breathing.”

Her voice had taken on a tight, rising quality, like a wire being pulled taut. “Do you know what that feels like? To watch someone come and just — take up all the air in a room you’ve been in for years?”

She stopped. Breathed once, sharp.

“You piss me off. So bad. You have no idea.”

“Maryam—”

“Abeg.” The wave of her hand cut me off, sharp and practiced, the gesture of someone who had rehearsed this in their head so many times they knew exactly which hand movement they wanted. “Shebi you said you wanted to hear it. There it is.”

I looked at her and I saw, for the first time, how small the resentment had made her. How it had been sitting inside her, all this time, pressing on everything until it found its shape in this backyard, in this conversation, in the particular ugliness now sitting across her face.

I felt something old and habitual in me — the reflex toward softness, toward smoothing, toward making people comfortable at my own expense — stir briefly. Then I let it go.

“If you’re pissed that I’m doing my work so well, then maybe you just need to learn how to do your work better.” I draw in a breath. “Work on your insecurity Maryam and stop projecting it on me.”

An ugly laugh escapes her. Then: “Omo, I don suffer for this life.”

“I know you, oh,” she said, and now there was something sly and satisfied underneath the anger, like she had been waiting to get here and had finally arrived. “Kikelomo. I actually know you. I’m the only person in that office you haven’t managed to wrap around your fingers. I’m sure that must frustrate you.”

I turned back.

“Maryam. What did you just call me.”

She looked me up and down. Slowly. The way you look at something you have already decided the value of and found wanting. Then she smiled — not the sharp papercut smile from earlier, something uglier than that, something that had clearly been living behind her face for a long time and had finally found its way out.

“I said ashewo.“ A beat. Chin up. “What are you going to do about it?”

The generator hummed. Everything else had gone silent, the whole backyard holding itself very still, the way air holds itself before something falls.

She didn’t wait to see what I would do. She didn’t care. The door was open now and she was walking through it and she had been waiting for this — I could see it, the particular energy of someone who has been storing something for months and has finally, finally been given permission to put it down.

“Do you think I don’t know your story?” She said it almost conversationally, like she was asking if I’d seen the weather. “Kikelomo of TWC Media. Girl.” She laughed, a short ugly sound. “I know you. I have always known you.” She took a step toward me, which surprised me enough that I registered it.

“Which hard work? Which talent? You brought your nonsense behavior here and that is why Khalid follows you around like a puppy and you know it and you stand there and let it happen because that is what you do. That is all you have ever done.”

My stomach dropped. Then my chest. In that order.

I felt it — the old, familiar tightening behind my ribs, the one that used to arrive right before I smiled too brightly or laughed too loudly to paper over whatever was collapsing underneath. My hands stayed at my sides but my fingers were curling in, nails finding the soft center of my palms, pressing. I said nothing. My body was still catching up to the fact that the past had just walked into this backyard wearing Maryam’s face and was now standing three feet away from me, breathing hard, eyes bright with the specific excitement of someone who has decided they have nothing left to lose.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” Her voice had gone high and tight, stretched thin over something that was close to glee. “Like what I’m saying is strange to you? Like you don’t know exactly what I’m talking about?” She shook her head, and there was something almost sorrowful in it, the performance of someone grieving a disappointment they always knew was coming.

“I was one year behind you in school, Kike. One year. I know everything. Every single story. Every single thing people were saying.” She paused for effect, and I hated that it landed, hated that my pulse was doing what it was doing. “I said nothing when you came here because I thought — okay. Okay. Maybe she has changed. Maybe.”

The sorrow dropped. What replaced it was colder. “But this babe. You are evil.“

The word sat in the air between us.

“When I saw Jaiye at that party—” Her voice cracked slightly, not with feeling but with the effort of containing how much she was enjoying this. “When I saw how that man was still looking at you. After everything. After all of it.” She shook her head again, slowly, the way people shake their heads over things they find genuinely tragic. “You ruined him. Not just his reputation. Not just his ministry. You ruined that man. And you walked away and packaged yourself and came here and everyone acted like you were some kind of prize.”

“Maryam—” My voice came out scraped. Low. Not mine.

“The truth hurts, abi?”

“You don’t know anything.”

“I know enough.” She said it simply. Flatly. Like a door closing. “You haven’t changed. You still go after men with profiles. You still use your face to open doors your work can’t open. You still—”

“Stop.”

It came out sharp. Louder than I meant. I didn’t take it back.

My heart was beating so hard I could feel it in my teeth.

She stopped. But only for a second. Only to reload.

“That your boyfriend.” She said it quietly now, which was worse somehow than the shouting, the sudden drop in volume, the almost-gentleness of it. “Nosa.” She let the name sit there between us. “Does he know? About your history? About who you actually are?” A pause so deliberate it felt surgical. “Or is that why he left and hasn’t come back yet — because someone finally told him?”

Something inside my chest tore open.

Not loudly. Just a clean, quiet rip, the kind you don’t hear so much as feel, a seam giving way somewhere you didn’t know you’d been holding together. I felt the sudden absence where something had been keeping me upright. The floor felt farther away than it had a second ago, the whole yard tilting very slightly, the way a room tilts right before you understand you’re about to cry, or fall, or both.

I did not do either.

And yet.

Despite the tearing, something else arrived, moving in underneath the pain. I could see the shape of her accusation clearly now, laid out in front of me like something on a table. The old shame. The version of me she was so certain she knew, the girl she’d built out of rumor and speculation and whatever people had said in my department and fellowship. I could hold it. I understood, with something like surprise, that I could actually hold it, turn it over, look at every side of it, without it undoing me the way it would have a year ago.

My breathing evened, slow degree by slow degree. My hands relaxed at my sides, the crescents in my palms finally releasing. The heat in my face cooled.

I looked at her.

My lips curved into a small, cold smile.

She blinked.

I took one step closer. She didn’t step back, but something in her posture shifted.

I look at her for a long moment.

At this girl. This loud, clueless, long-simmering girl who thinks she has found a wound and has pressed her thumb directly into it and is waiting for me to bleed where she can see it.

Her eyes flicker. My reaction is nothing she’d expected.

“What a clueless girl you are, Maryam,” I say. My voice is very calm. Calmer than I feel, calmer than I have any right to be, and I watch her try to figure out what to do with that. “You thought you did something just now.”

She opens her mouth.

I raise one hand. Just that. She closes it.

“You had a full year to say this to me.” I keep the smile. I keep the voice level. Each word arrives separately, placed rather than thrown.

“You had a year to observe me, to form your opinions, to decide what you thought of me. And this—” I pause. Let it sit. “This is what you came up with?”

Something shifts behind her eyes. The gleeful thing is gone. Something more uncertain has taken its place.

“I am not going to go back and forth with you,” I continue, “because you are not worth the energy that would require. But I will say two things and then I am done.”

I take one step closer. She does not step back, but something in her posture reorganizes itself.

“First. Do not ever involve yourself in my personal life again. Not through Jaiye, not through anyone. The next time you make a decision that concerns me without my knowledge, you will find out what happens when people do not take my words seriously. And I mean that, Maryam. Completely.”

I hold her gaze. She held mine, though it clearly cost her something now.

"Second." I tilted my head the other way, just slightly, almost conversational. "If you want Khalid, go and get him. We have all watched you watch him for months. Stop using me as your reason to feel righteous about yourself." I paused. "It is not a good look. And you are smarter than that. At least I thought you were."

She made a small sound in her throat but didn’t speak. I watched something in her deflate, the fight going out of her all at once.

I held her gaze a moment longer, long enough to make sure she understood I meant it.

“You can have Jaiye as well,” I said. “Since you seem very invested in his story.”

Then I turned and walked away without looking back.

Author’s Note: Proud of the woman Kike is becoming. 🫣

Target: 300 likes, 100 comments and 60 restacks.

Catch up on previous episode here.

His eyes stayed locked on her face like she might vanish if he blinked too long. His heart was doing that wild, uncontrollable thing again — thumping hard and uneven against his ribs, the same reckless rhythm it always fell into whenever she was this close. He’d spent months trying to keep it steady, trying to stay calm and collected like the man he was supposed to be. But right now, with Kikelomo standing in front of him, eyes glassy and lips trembling, every wall he’d built felt useless.

She hadn’t moved yet. Neither had he. He could see her chest rising too fast. He could see the exact second her composure gave out.

“I missed you,” he muttered, the words coming out low and rough, almost like he was afraid to say them too loud. “I missed you so much, Kikelomo.”

A soft, shaky laugh slipped out of her, tangled with the tears still clinging to her lashes. She reached up without hesitation, both hands cupping his face like she needed to feel him to believe any of this was real. Her thumbs brushed over his cheekbones, slow and careful, mapping him — as if her hands had to relearn what her eyes already knew. He let her. He stood still and let her look at him for as long as she needed to.

“Nosa,” she whispered.

The sound of it made something in his chest loosen and tighten all at once.

Before he could say anything else, she stepped forward and crushed herself against him, arms winding tightly around his waist. Nosa let out a long, shaky breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding since the moment she turned that corner. His arms came around her instantly, one hand sliding up her back while the other held her close at the waist. He pulled her in until there was nothing between them, burying his face in her hair and just breathing her in.

She still used the same shampoo. That small, stupid detail undid him more than he expected it to.

God, he’d wanted this. From the second he saw her silhouette, from the second their eyes met — this was all he’d wanted. To hold her like this. To feel her heart racing against his. To know she’d missed him just as badly.

He tightened his arms, rocking them gently from side to side. One of his hands moved up to cradle the back of her head, fingers threading lightly through her hair. She clung to him just as fiercely, her fingers fisting the back of his shirt like she was scared to let go. For a long moment, neither of them spoke. They just held each other, breathing together, letting the months of distance slowly dissolve in the warmth of the embrace.

A car pulled into the lot somewhere behind them, headlights sweeping briefly across the both of them, then gone. Neither of them looked up. Somewhere further off, a security man’s radio crackled with static. None of it mattered enough to break the hold.

When they finally pulled apart, it was slow. Reluctant. His hands stayed on her, thumbs stroking small, soothing circles over the soft fabric of her dress. The space between them stayed small — close enough that he could still feel the warmth of her body. The flowers he’d brought were now resting forgotten on the hood of the car behind him, one stem already slipping loose from the wrapping.

That’s when he noticed the fresh tears slipping down her cheeks.

“Hey…” His voice dropped even softer. “Please don’t cry, Kikelomo.”

She shook her head and pressed her face right back into his chest, another quiet sob escaping her. Nosa didn’t push. He just held her there, one hand rubbing slow, comforting lines up and down her spine while the other stayed at the nape of her neck. He could feel each breath she took even out, one at a time, like she was talking herself down from something.

“I’ve got you,” he murmured against her hair, pressing a gentle kiss to the top of her head. “I’m right here.”

After a while, her breathing started to settle. She pulled back just enough to look up at him, eyes still shiny, and for a second she just studied his face — his jaw, the shadow under his eyes, the small scar near his eyebrow — like she was taking inventory of everything the months had or hadn’t changed.

“I’ve been looking forward to seeing you again for so long,” she said softly. “I had everything planned out in my head. How it would feel when you finally came back. But it didn’t happen the way I imagined… and that’s why I’m crying.”

Nosa smiled, slow and fond. He reached up and gently wiped a tear from her cheek with his thumb, letting his hand linger there.

“What did you plan in your head?”

She let out a small, embarrassed laugh and kept her hands resting on his chest as she spoke, her fingers absently smoothing a crease in his shirt that wasn’t really there.

“I was going to drive to the airport with Tife and Adanna,” she began. “We’d wait together near the exit. And the second I saw you walking out, I was going to run straight to you. Like, really run. You’d catch me and lift me up, and we’d just stay like that — holding each other, not letting go. We’d probably stand there forever until one of them started complaining and told us to wrap it up already.”

As she spoke, Nosa’s smile grew, widening slowly at each detail, like he was watching the whole imagined scene play out just behind her words. He listened without interrupting, his thumbs still moving in slow circles at her. Every so often a quiet, amused sound left him.

“You were really going to sprint in heels?” he teased gently, eyes sparkling.

She gave him a playful look, pulling back just enough to fold her arms, mock-offended. “I wouldn’t have worn heels to the airport.”

“That’s very practical of you.”

“I’m a practical person.”

He laughed — low and genuine — and she smiled, and for a moment they just looked at each other, and he thought: this. This is what I came back for. This exact thing, this exact face, this specific smile with the humor in it and the tears still drying on her cheeks.

“We can do it,” he said.

She blinked. “What?”

“The scene. We can do it now.” He nodded toward the far end of the valet, unhurried, like the idea was only just settling into shape in his own head. “You go back around that corner. Act like you’re seeing me for the first time.”

Her eyes lit up instantly, excitement flashing across her face. “We can?”

“Yeah.” He nodded, smiling, watching the excitement build in her before she’d even moved.

She bit her lip, suddenly shy again, but there was a spark of mischief in her eyes too.

“I’m going to be so shy,” she warned him, already starting to smile.

Nosa laughed under his breath. “You don’t even know how much I’m enjoying this.”

That seemed to settle it. She gave him one last look — lingering, like she was reluctant to actually put the distance between them again — then turned and walked back toward the corner, her heels clicking softly against the pavement, each step a little slower than the last. Nosa stayed where he was, watching her with his hands in his pockets, heart still doing that ridiculous fluttering thing in his chest.

He counted the seconds without meaning to.

When she reappeared, she tried to act like she hadn’t noticed him yet — glancing around, taking a few slow steps forward, her expression arranged into something carefully neutral. Then she looked up and “saw” him.

Her eyes widened.

She tried to hold the shocked expression — held it, held it — but it only lasted two seconds before she burst out laughing, covering her mouth with both hands as her shoulders shook.

Nosa’s laugh joined hers immediately, deep and full, carrying across the empty car park.

“I’m such a bad actress,” she said between giggles, walking back toward him, unhurried now, like she had nowhere else in the world to be.

“You were doing alright,” he teased, reaching for her hand the second she was close enough. “For the first few seconds, at least.”

She laced her fingers with his, still smiling, her thumb brushing once over his knuckles.

“Will you do it again?”

She shook her head, stepping closer until she was right in front of him again, close enough that he had to tilt his chin down to keep looking at her.

“No… I don’t want to be away from you.”

Something in Nosa’s chest pulled tight at those words. His grip on her hand tightened gently.

“Come here, Kikelomo.”

She stepped into him without hesitation. He bent, hands finding her waist, and lifted her clean off the ground like she weighed nothing at all. Her arms looped around his neck, until their faces were level and there was nowhere left to look but at each other.

“Like this?” he asked, voice dropping a little rough, eyes searching hers.

Her cheeks flushed deep, but she was laughing — that bright, unguarded sound he’d missed more than he’d ever admitted, even to himself.

“Yeah,” she said shyly, tightening her arms around his neck.

He shifted his footing, adjusting to her weight, and for a moment neither of them said anything. He just held her there, feeling her pulse where her wrist crossed behind his neck, feeling the small shift of her breathing against his chest.

“I love seeing you up there,” he murmured, shifting his hold so one arm took her full weight, freeing the other to rest against the small of her back.

“I love being up here,” she said, soft and pleased. “Makes me feel tall. I can actually see your hair properly for once.”

“How does it look?”

“Beautiful,” she said immediately, grinning down at him. “Growing old sha. I can see white strands starting.” Her fingers found his hair, combing through it lightly, unhurried.

“That’s exactly why I came back.” A slow smile pulled at his mouth. “I need to marry you before I get too old to enjoy it.”

“Better o. Better.”

He smiled at that, then slowly — slower than before — lowered her back down until her feet touched the ground again. But he didn’t let go. He looked at her — really looked at her — and saw the pure excitement still sparkling in her eyes. It hit him all over again how much he’d missed this version of her. How much he’d missed her.

“I missed you so much, it hurt,” she said quietly, the words slipping out like she couldn’t hold them in anymore.

Nosa’s hands slid up to cradle her face, his thumbs brushing over her cheeks with aching tenderness.

“I missed you too, Kikelomo,” he whispered, voice thick. He leaned down and pressed a slow, lingering kiss to her forehead, then another just beside her temple, unhurried, like each one needed its own moment before the next.

She tilted her head back to look up at him, eyes shining.

“Happy Birthday, the love of my life,” he said quietly.

Kikelomo’s lips curved into a small, teasing smile. She tilted her head slightly, looking up at him through her lashes.

“I’m the love of somebody’s life,” she muttered playfully. “I think that’s enough of a birthday gift already.”

Nosa let out a low laugh. He shook his head, his hands giving her a gentle squeeze.

“This was supposed to be a romantic moment,” he whispered, though the smile on his face betrayed how amused he was.

Her eyes widened a little, playful panic flickering across her face.

“Did I jinx it?”

“No,” he answered, voice softer now. A slow smile tugged at his lips as he looked at her. “No… you just made it better.”

Her expression shifted. The teasing faded, replaced by something quieter and more sincere. She reached up and rested her palms lightly against his chest, feeling the steady beat of his heart beneath her hands. She kept them there, still, like she wanted to feel that steady rhythm for a while longer.

“Thank you, Nosa,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. “For being the best birthday gift ever. My day just got significantly better.”

He lifted one hand and gently tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, his fingers lingering against her cheek. His eyes stayed on hers, warm and steady, and the quiet between them stretched, unbothered, neither of them in any rush to fill it.

“I enjoy being your birthday gift.”

They stayed like that for a long moment, neither of them making any move to pull away. The world around them felt distant and unimportant. Nosa’s hands remained at her waist, and hers stayed resting on his chest. Their eyes found each other again and again, soft smiles playing on their lips even in the quiet.

He could feel the tension he’d been carrying for months slowly loosening in his chest, one knot at a time. The long nights, the heavy silence, the ache of missing her — it all felt a little lighter just standing here with her like this. He didn’t need anything else right now. Just her. Just this.

Kikelomo let out a small, content sigh and leaned forward, resting her forehead lightly against his chest. Nosa wrapped his arms around her again, holding her close, and pressed a gentle kiss to the top of her head.

Neither of them spoke anymore.

They didn’t need to.

Nosa kept one hand on the steering wheel while the other rested comfortably on her hands, his thumb tracing slow, absent circles over it. The car was quiet except for the low hum of the engine as they drove away from the restaurant. Kikelomo had insisted on being a “passenger princess” on her birthday, so he was driving, and he didn’t mind one bit. Having her beside him like this already felt like the best part of his day.

“When did you get back?” she asked, turning slightly in her seat to look at him.

“Today,” he answered, glancing at her before returning his eyes to the road. “Tife and Adanna picked me up a few hours earlier.”

Her eyes widened. “Tife and Adanna knew they were picking you up this morning when they came to surprise me?”

Nosa nodded, a small, satisfied smile tugging at his lips. “Yeah. I told them not to tell you.”

She gasped, then reached over and hit his arm playfully. “If I wasn’t so in love with you, I would’ve given you a proper knock on the head right now. I was busy dying of anticipation while you were over there plotting surprises like you are some kind of secret agent.”

He grinned, clearly pleased with himself. “But you were surprised, weren’t you?”

She tried to fight her smile and failed. “It was a good surprise,” she admitted, her voice softening. “The best one.”

“Of course it was. It’s what I’m good at.” He glanced at her, that smug little smile still in place.

“This man, you’re too proud of yourself.”

Nosa shrugged, playful. “You think it’s easy impressing a woman like you? I did well. Give me my flowers.”

She rolled her eyes, but the smile she was fighting won anyway. “Okayyyy. It was the best surprise. Are you satisfied now?”

“Extremely.” He brought her hand up without even looking and pressed a kiss to it.

Nosa slowed down as they approached a stretch of traffic. For a few seconds, the only sound was the low music playing from the speakers. Then his voice came, quieter this time.

“That man troubling you earlier… who was he, Kikelomo?”

He felt her tense beside him almost immediately. Her body seemed to curl in on itself, the easy, bubbly energy she’d had moments ago dimming. Nosa’s chest tightened. He wished he hadn’t asked, but the question had been sitting heavily in his mind since the moment he saw the man.

“Kikelomo…” he started gently, “You don’t have to—”

“I used to be in love with him,” she said softly, cutting him off. Her voice was small. “We almost dated, but it never happened because he broke my heart right before anything could start.”

Nosa didn’t say anything at first. He simply reached over, took her hand in his, and brought it to his lips, pressing a slow, lingering kiss to the back of it. His thumb brushed over her knuckles.

“Are you okay?” he asked, voice low.

She nodded, but it took her a second. “I thought I was meeting a potential partner for the new product we just launched. I didn’t know it was going to be him.”

He was quiet for a moment, processing. Then he asked carefully, “Do you want to talk about it?”

“They’re not very sweet memories, Nosa,” she murmured. “I still hurt when I think about it.”

He nodded, understanding. He kissed her hand again, softer this time. “Today is a good day. We can talk about it later.”

She didn’t respond right away, and the silence that followed felt heavier than before. Nosa glanced at her and caught the look on her face — something like fear flickering behind her eyes. It made his heart ache. He didn’t push. Instead, he gently squeezed her hand, letting her know he was still right there.

The traffic started moving again. He changed lanes smoothly, his hand never leaving hers.

“Nosa?” Her voice was quiet, almost hesitant.

“Yeah?”

There was a short pause before she spoke again.

“There’s a lot I want to tell you,” she said. “So many things I haven’t told you yet. And sometimes… I’m scared. I’m scared it might be a deal breaker for you.”

Nosa turned his head slightly, giving her a soft, reassuring look even as he kept driving.

“First, there’s no deal breaking in this. Second, let’s not talk about it now,” he said gently. “Whatever it is, it can wait until after your birthday. Today is about you.”

She studied his face for a moment, then nodded. “It can wait.”

“Good.” His voice dropped into something warmer, more intimate. “Right now, I just miss my woman. I want to spend some time with her without the world interrupting.”

“‘My woman,’” she repeated, teasing. “You’re really out here claiming me like that?”

Nosa smirked, eyes still on the road. “Facts are facts.”

She laughed under her breath. “Bold. Very bold.”

He shrugged one shoulder. “What can I say? I missed you.”

A faint blush crept up her neck and settled on her cheeks. She turned to look at him, eyes glinting with both affection and mischief.

“You just like showing off,” she accused lightly.

“What did I do?” he asked, feigning complete innocence, though the smirk on his face gave him away.

She cleared her throat and dropped her voice, doing her best impression of him from earlier. “If it involves my woman, then it’s very much my business.”

Nosa burst out laughing, the sound filling the car. “That was terrible, Kikelomo.”

“It was not!” she protested, laughing too. “I sounded exactly like you.”

“You sounded like a man who swallowed gravel,” he teased, still chuckling.

“And here you are, still in love with me.” she shot back, lifting her chin.

“Obviously. I know you do not sound like that on a normal day.”

She gasped, mock-scandalized. “So, if I sounded like that, you wouldn’t be with me? Nosa, are you rationing your love already? On my birthday?”

A chuckle. “I’m not rationing anything, this woman.” He glanced at her, eyes warm despite the teasing edge in his voice. “You just do not sound that way and neither do I.”

“Of course you don’t.”

“And rather than rationing my love, I’m pouring it out.”

She rolled her eyes. “Because you chose to drive me on my birthday?”

He nodded, a soft smile playing across his lips. “My services are exceptional.”

“You?” She scoffed playfully. “The driver who kissed my hand like four times in the last thirty minutes.”

“Five,” he corrected, lifting it for a fifth, right on cue, pressing his lips to her knuckles without so much as a pause in his driving.

She laughed, the sound bright and unguarded, and swatted lightly at his shoulder with her free hand. “You’re impossible.”

“You love it.”

“I never said I didn’t.”

He drove on, the road was getting clear now. They were almost at their estate.

“You enjoyed it, didn’t you?”

“Of course, I did.” She said, excitedly. “I kept thinking, that’s my man. I’m proud of my man.”

Something in his chest went warm and full at that, and it took him a second before he could speak again.

“Say it one more time,” he said, voice quieter now, almost boyish. “Just so I hear it properly.”

She turned fully toward him, one leg tucking under her, and reached over to rest her palm against his jaw, guiding his face a fraction toward her without pulling his eyes off the road. “That’s my man,” she said softly, like it was a secret between just the two of them. “I’m so proud of my man.”

His jaw flexed under her hand. She pressed a kiss on his jaw before he could pull it back.

“Don’t do that to me while I’m driving,” he murmured, voice low and strained. “You’ll get us both killed.”

“Then pull over.”

“We’re literally few minutes from home, Kikelomo.”

“Hurry up and drive. I may just change my mind and start being sweet to somebody else.”

He barked out a laugh, shaking his head, but he pressed a little harder on the accelerator anyway, and she laughed too, delighted with herself.

Nosa smiled, pride filling his heart. “Don’t worry, I’m here now. No one would cross your path.” His voice turned serious. “And I mean it.”

She shifted closer to him in her seat and leaned over, pressing a soft, lingering kiss to his cheek. Her lips stayed there a second longer than necessary. When she finally pulled back, it was slow, reluctant, her warm breath brushing his skin the whole way.

“That was very romantic of you, Mr Soldier,” she whispered against his skin.

Nosa’s grip on the steering wheel tightened slightly, but his voice came out smooth. “Of course I’ve got more where that came from.”

Kikelomo pulled back just enough to stare at him in mock horror, one hand dramatically placed over her chest.

“Please have mercy on Jesus’s daughter,” she said, eyes wide. “You don’t want her to lose her home training.”

“Jesus’s daughter that just pressed her lips against me while I’m driving,” he said dryly, glancing at her with a slow smirk. “I don’t think her home training is in danger. I think it left a long time ago.”

“Whattt?!” She hit his arm, laughing even as her cheeks burned hotter.

A sly little smirk curved Nosa’s lips as he looked at her again.

“But don’t worry,” he said, voice low and teasing, “before you lose your home training completely… you’ll already be Mrs. Eghosa.”

“Babeeee!” she squealed, smacking his arm again, her face flaming as she tried and failed to hide her smile. “You can’t just say things like that!”

“Why not?” he asked, clearly pleased with himself. “It’s true.”

“Because you say it so casually! Like it’s nothing!”

He raised an eyebrow, entirely too smug. “Would you rather I got down on one knee right here in traffic? Because I will. Hazard lights are ready.”

“Don’t you dare,” she warned, but she was laughing too hard for it to land, both hands now pressed to her burning cheeks.

He laughed, the sound rich and warm, and reached over to intertwine their fingers again.

“I can,” he murmured, bringing her hand to his lips, “and I will, soon.”

She let her head fall lightly against his shoulder, still smiling, still blushing at the ears. “You’re going to be the death of me, Eghosa.”

“Good thing I’ll be right there to bury you properly, then.”

“That’s not funny.”

“You’re smiling.”

“I’m smiling because you’re ridiculous, not because it’s funny.”

“Same thing,” he said, and at the next red light, he leaned over and pressed a slow kiss to the top of her head, unhurried, like the rest of the world could wait.

Jaiyeola Richards drove slowly across Allen Avenue, Ikeja. His heart was beating rapidly against his chest — had been since the restaurant, had not once slowed. The AC was on but he still felt warm, his shirt sticking faintly to his back, his hands too tight on the wheel for a road he’d known his whole life, a road his hands should have been able to navigate without thinking. This was the second time he was seeing Kikelomo in eight years, and she still did the same thing to him she’d done the first time he saw her at that café — that quiet, involuntary lurch in his chest, like something in him recognized her before his mind had caught up and asked permission.

The meeting hadn’t gone well. She’d told him to leave her alone. She’d said she’d forgiven everything, and something about the evenness in her voice when she said it had frightened him more than anger would have. But he couldn’t just leave her. He couldn’t. Not after what Bimbo had told him in that mail. Not after what his father, Revd Richards Ola, had said to him at the end of his life.

He eased the car to a stop at a light that didn’t need him to stop for long, and let it hold him there a second longer than it had to.

The past eight years had been a rollercoaster of many things. Revd got ill — heart failure, a terminal diagnosis — and they had managed for a number of years before Revd finally gave up the ghost eleven months ago. Jaiye could still remember the exact weight of his father’s hand in his the last time it had strength in it. How light it had become. How a hand that used to grip a pulpit rail, and a steering wheel, and the back of Jaiye’s neck when he was a boy in trouble, had shrunk down to something he was almost afraid to hold too firmly, afraid his own grip might be the thing that finally broke it.

They’d moved from country to country. London first, then Canada. For years he’d left his life behind to attend to his dying father — a difficult thing, because he’d been building a ministry that was thriving, school after school, expanding faster than he could keep up with. Then the Kikelomo fiasco happened, and he was still trying to navigate the wreckage of it when the call came about his father. And immediately, they’d moved out of the country.

The light changed. He didn’t move for a second. A horn sounded behind him, and he lifted a hand in apology and drove on, slower than the man behind him would have liked.

It was in London that Revd received treatment. Jaiye stood with him through all the years of it, tending to the only parent he had left, his mother long gone. There were nights he sat by hospital beds counting the rise and fall of his father’s chest just to have something to do with the fear. Nights he prayed out loud in empty corridors because the silence of the ward felt like it might swallow him whole if he let it go quiet. He wasn’t ready to lose his father yet, so he gave everything he had to keeping that from happening, one day at a time, for years.

He got a job in Silicon Valley eventually — got busy, but kept enough time carved out to stay close to his father. And just when the illness seemed to be winning, Revd asked him for something.

“Jaiye, I’d love to see my grandchildren just before I die.”

The words had landed somewhere just beneath Jaiye’s ribs, and he hadn’t known, in that moment, whether to cry or to run. He still didn’t know, all these years later, which one he’d actually done.

It was a difficult decision. He hadn’t gotten over Kikelomo. He’d only pivoted to another stage of his life — the way a man pivots after an accident, not because he’s healed but because staying still hurts worse than moving does. He hadn’t been given the space to fully process anything, and here was his father, dying, asking him to build a family before there was time left to watch it grow. He thought of her often, in those months. Fear clouded most of the thinking. He’d hurt her deeply. He’d known, somewhere underneath everything, that she wasn’t capable of what she’d been accused of — but something in him had always insisted he didn’t deserve her either way. He was a man who carried his past everywhere, folded up small and tucked somewhere he told himself no one could reach. No matter how much he tried to change, Bimbo was always there, peeking her head around the corner of his new life, holding what he’d done over him like a debt that never stopped accruing interest.

So when a chance came to believe something different about Kikelomo — anything that let him stop carrying what he’d done to her — he took it. A safe escape from a conscience that had been watching him for years.

He was a coward. He’d known the word for what he was for a long time now, and knowing it had never once been enough to change it.

That year, he met Tinuke. She’d been a member of TWC before leaving at two-hundred level, and by the time their paths crossed again she was a doctor at the hospital his father had been referred to. He still remembered the first real conversation they had — a corridor that smelled of antiseptic and burnt coffee, her asking gentle questions about his father’s chart like she actually wanted the answers, not just performing the asking. She became concerned about his situation. Soon they were hanging out. Soon they were talking every day. He didn’t notice it happening in real time, but he started to love again, started to find someone besides Kikelomo attractive, and it frightened him a little — how easily his heart had made room, as though the old wound had simply learned to grow around itself rather than heal.

He proposed seven months later. First because of the urgency of his father’s request. Second because he liked her, genuinely. He told himself the second reason was the real one, and some nights, lying awake alone in his room, he almost believed it.

He remembered the night she said yes — the first time he’d felt happy, uncomplicatedly happy, since Kikelomo. His father was happy. Tinuke’s parents were happy. He was happy. Life had, for a handful of months, fallen entirely into place.

And then it stopped.

Bimbo found a way to reach Tinuke after someone posted their proposal picture on Instagram — threats, stories, evidence of their past. Some lies, some true, all of it enough. Tinuke believed her. She cut it off with him five days before the wedding. He’d never been more heartbroken in his life; he remembered sitting on the floor of his own kitchen for what felt like hours, phone dead in his hand, unable to work out how a life built over months could be dismantled inside a single afternoon.

Revd asked questions. Everyone who knew them asked questions. But what could he say? That a nemesis from secondary school had somehow found her way into infiltrating every woman he ever got close to?

He’d traced it all back, in the quiet after, to one night he barely remembered — fragments, disjointed, unreliable, the kind of memory that felt like it belonged to someone else. He’d been heavily drunk. And Bimbo had come to him after, accusing him of taking advantage of her. There had been no one to prove otherwise, so he ran with the story she gave him — believed it, even — and fulfilled the condition she set for staying quiet about it: dating her.

Not out of love. Out of a forced will, the way a man complies with something he’s too frightened to name aloud. He couldn’t tell his father. Revd was a disciplined man, a man who might have sent him to answer for it if it were true, and Jaiye had been too scared to find out whether it was. That not-knowing had been its own kind of prison — never certain, some nights, whether he was a victim or a man refusing to face what he’d done.

Eventually, she told him she was pregnant. The pregnancy, she said, had come from that night. He begged her to end it — his father must never learn of it, and he was too young to be a father. Weeks later she came back and told him she’d done what he asked. That she’d lost her womb in the process. And then she made him swear, right there, that he would be the one to marry her. He’d sworn it, foolishly, out of fear, not understanding yet how much she’d taken that promise to heart, how a vow made in a moment of panic could calcify over a decade into a debt he’d spend years paying down.

When they finally separated after secondary school, it was the freeing moment of his life. He gave his life to Jesus properly for the first time — not the inherited faith of a manse childhood but something that felt like it was actually his — and started a small fellowship that eventually became TWC. Everything went well until Bimbo reappeared while he was in three hundred level, and everything went down the drain from there.

It wasn’t until Atinuke broke it off with him that he began, finally, to consider that Kikelomo might have been telling the truth all along. That Bimbo might really be capable of the things Kikelomo had said she was. That maybe, if he’d just brought everything into the open eight years earlier, her name would never have had to carry what his silence let it carry.

But the milk was spilled, and there was nothing left to do about it but keep driving with it in the car.

He turned onto a quieter stretch and let the engine idle a little longer at the next junction than it needed to.

He’d redirected himself to his father’s care after that — tending to him fully, until a year ago, when the Lord revealed everything to Revd before he died.

Revd had called him into the room. It smelled of eucalyptus and the particular staleness of a place a sick man hadn’t left in days, the machines keeping their own quiet, steady time in the spaces between his father’s words.

“Jaiye, what did you do to those women?”

He’d broken down. Broken down and told it all — seventeen years of it, the words coming out of him in a rush like something long dammed finally giving way, until he was crying so hard he barely felt his father’s hand land on his shoulder, thin and trembling and, somehow, still steady. And then he heard something he never thought he’d hear.

“You should have just told me everything, Jaiye. You wouldn’t be in the mess that you’re in right now.”

That undid him more than the confession itself had. Seventeen years he’d carried the weight of what he’d done, seventeen years a victim of Bimbo’s charade and a willing participant in his own silence, letting himself be used and used again by her — and here was his father, dying, offering him something that wasn’t judgment.

Before Revd closed his eyes for the last time, he’d said one more thing: “Jaiye, fix it. Go back to God and ask him to help you fix this.”

He’d been far from God for years by then, swallowed up in guilt, swallowed up in the daily terror of his father’s failing body. But just before Revd let go of the world, Jaiye returned — kneeling at the edge of a hospital bed in a country far from home, making a promise to fix what he had caused, not knowing yet if such a thing was even possible.

His cousin Khalid had visited Canada once he heard about the death, broken up over losing his favorite uncle. It was during that visit that Jaiye first saw Kikelomo again — a morning Zoom call Khalid was taking, her face there for a fraction of a second, and he couldn’t have missed it if he’d tried. Her voice had changed. Steadier now. Sharper. A woman who’d learned to hold a room in a way the girl he remembered had never needed to yet. She was arguing about a product launch’s ability to scale in emerging markets, and he sat there listening and thought, with a certainty that felt like it came from somewhere outside himself: this is God, giving me the chance to fix this.

He’d taken her number from Khalid’s phone without telling him — something he still wasn’t proud of — and called her.

He remembered the silence on that call more than anything either of them said. Not anger. Not tears. Just a long, terrible quiet that told him more than words could have, and undid something in him that took a while to put back.

He hadn’t reached out again after that. Fear kept him from it — fear of rejection, fear of facing her, fear that the quiet on that call meant there was nothing left to fix. Not until five months ago, when a mail arrived from Bimbo, finally owning up to everything.

He remembered reading it standing in his kitchen. Reading it twice. Then a third time, his hands gone cold by the end of it. She confessed she’d never actually been taken advantage of — that she’d liked him for a long time, wanted the life he could offer, and known she’d never naturally be someone he’d choose. So she’d drugged his drink at a party and done what she needed to do, then made it look like the reverse. She confessed she really had gotten pregnant, and really had lost her womb removing it at his request, and that the fear of it all coming out had made her cling to him harder rather than let go. And then, finally, she told him what she’d done to Kike — the drink that had destroyed her womb too, what jealousy and rage had made her capable of, and how afraid she’d been, to ask for forgiveness for any of it.

He hadn’t responded to her. He’d booked the next flight to Nigeria instead.

He didn’t mind groveling. He was going to beg Kikelomo’s forgiveness and try, however late, to fix what he’d caused.

He’d come back with exactly that in mind, and then — fortunately, or unfortunately, he still didn’t know which — he’d ended up at her mother’s party. He’d suspected whose party it was when Khalid mentioned the event, and he’d gone with him anyway, hoping against every reasonable odds that she’d be there.

He’d seen her. He’d seen her with a baby in her arms, and felt two things land in him at once — sadness, for what Bimbo’s cruelty had cost her, years and a womb she would never get back; and relief, shameful and immediate, when Maryam later mentioned the child wasn’t hers.

Small relief. It hadn’t lasted. Because today he’d met her man. A man who looked like he meant business — something in the set of his shoulders, in the way he’d stood close enough to Kikelomo without needing to say a single word, that had told Jaiye everything he needed to know and none of what he wanted to.

The gate to his compound came into view a few houses ahead, and he slowed the car further still, in no hurry now to arrive anywhere at all.

Was it not his place to fix things? Or should he simply move on, the way she’d asked him to — let the eight years close over quietly, like water over a stone?

“Lord.” He said it low, barely more than breath, his eyes stinging in a way he refused to name as tears. “Tell me what to do. I want to do it sincerely. Not for me this time. For her.”

He turned into the compound slowly, gravel shifting under the tires, and as the gate closed behind him he heard it — not loud, not dramatic, just quiet and certain in the place where his prayers usually went to be answered.

Wait.

Author’s Note: ☺️

Read Previous Episode Here.

Yet reality has never once been altered by our refusal to speak its name. Death has never required our permission, our comfort, or our vocabulary. It arrives in its own language, on its own schedule, indifferent to the euphemisms we have built like fences around it.

Some years ago, I read of a woman whose family possessed what many would consider an unusual habit. They spoke of death as naturally as they spoke of tomorrow's errands or next week's plans. Not because they were consumed by morbidity, nor because they possessed some peculiar attraction to dying, but because they had made peace with death's place in the order of things — had, in effect, invited it to sit at the table rather than hover outside the window.

Her children would ask one another, almost playfully, "May I have your sweaters if you die before I do?" Or they would say, over dinner, with no more solemnity than they might discuss the weather, "Let us settle this today, in case one of us is gone tomorrow."

To many ears, such conversations sound almost irreverent, even unkind — as though naming death aloud were itself a small act of violence against the living. They seem to violate an unwritten rule: that death must remain hidden, boxed, sealed away until it forces itself upon us uninvited and unannounced.

Yet I found myself envying them.

Not because they expected death more than the rest of us. All of us, if pressed, will admit the same statistical certainty. But because they feared it less. They had done the strange, counterintuitive work of turning toward the thing most of us spend our lives turning away from, and in turning toward it, they had somehow disarmed it.

The Anatomy of Fear

There is a curious thing about fear: it flourishes most vigorously in darkness. Whatever we refuse to bring into the light acquires a monstrous size in the imagination. A shape in a dark room is always larger than the same shape seen at noon. We spend years — sometimes entire lives — fleeing shadows that would shrink the moment we simply turned to face them, that would resolve, on inspection, into ordinary furniture.

Death is no exception to this law of the mind. Unexamined, it grows. It becomes not simply an event at the end of a life but a kind of ambient dread that colors everything before it — a tax levied quietly on every joy, a whisper beneath every celebration. We do not usually notice how much of our anxiety, our hoarding, our restlessness, is death wearing other clothes.

The Christian faith has never taught us that death is unreal, and this is worth pausing over, because it is not the obvious position. It would be easier, in some ways, to declare death an illusion, a trick of perception, something the enlightened simply see through. But Scripture does no such thing. It treats death with remarkable, almost startling seriousness. It calls it an enemy — the last enemy, in fact, the final holdout — but not an unconquered one. It does not ask us to pretend that graves do not exist, that grief is unwarranted, that the tearing away of someone we love is somehow not a tearing at all. It simply insists, with defiance, that the grave has lost its final word. The enemy is real. The enemy is also, ultimately, defeated. Both things are true at once, and the faith asks us to hold them together rather than resolve the tension too quickly.

Perhaps that is why Christians, of all people, ought to be the freest to speak of death. Not because we delight in it — we are not asked to romanticize an enemy — but because we know it is not sovereign. We know it holds a temporary office, not an eternal throne. A guard can stand at a door and still not own the house.

The Illusion of Tomorrow

What surprises me is not that we die. Every culture, every religion, every scrap of human wisdom across every age has agreed on this one fact without exception. What surprises me is that we succeed, so thoroughly and so consistently, in living as though we shall not.

We build our calendars several years in advance with an unspoken confidence that those years already belong to us, as though time were a bank account we had already opened rather than a gift extended one day at a time. We postpone difficult conversations until life becomes more convenient — and life, notably, never becomes more convenient; it only becomes more crowded. We defer repentance, telling ourselves there will be a quieter season for it. We delay obedience, waiting for clarity that faith was never meant to provide in advance. We store up affections and apologies for a tomorrow that has made no promises to us, that has, in fact, made no promises to anyone who has ever lived.

Yet tomorrow has never entered into a covenant with any man. It is not a debtor. It owes us nothing.

This is why the Scriptures never command us to prepare for next year, to have our affairs in order for a decade hence, to store up readiness like grain against a distant famine. They command us to be faithful today. The manna could not be hoarded; it had to be gathered fresh, each morning, with no surplus carried into tomorrow. Faithfulness, it seems, was designed to work the same way.

Stewards, Not Owners

I suspect much of our anxiety springs from a quiet but persistent illusion — that permanence may yet be found somewhere beneath the sun, if only we search hard enough, build carefully enough, love cautiously enough. We attach ourselves to houses, titles, fortunes, even to the people we love, until we begin to speak of them as though they were ours by right, as though our claim on them were a legal one rather than a borrowed one.

But ownership, in the deepest sense, has always been temporary. Everything we possess has been entrusted, never transferred. Our homes are borrowed. Our bodies — these very instruments through which we love and labor and speak — are borrowed. Even our children, who feel so entirely ours in the small hours of their infancy, are entrusted to us only for a season, on loan from a Giver who has never relinquished the title.

One day every earthly possession will continue on without us — the house will shelter other families, the title will pass to other hands, the money will be spent by people who never knew our face — proving retroactively that we were stewards all along, and never owners at all. It is a painful lesson only because we had mistaken stewardship for possession, had signed, in our hearts, a deed that was never actually issued to us.

A Modest Seat at the Table

Suppose, then, that death occupied a modest seat in our ordinary conversations; not as an obsession, not as a morbid fixation dragged into every gathering, but as an acknowledged companion on the journey, the way an old family friend might sit quietly at the far end of the table, present but not the center of attention. Suppose we occasionally remembered that this meal may be our last together, that this embrace need not be repeated to be complete, that every farewell deserves to be spoken with sincerity because one of them, eventually, without warning, will be the final one.

Would such thoughts make us gloomy?

I wonder, instead, whether they might make us grateful — whether the remembrance of an ending is in fact the very thing that teaches us to notice the middle.

Gratitude is born whenever we cease assuming that what we have is guaranteed. The man who believes every sunrise is owed to him seldom notices the beauty of dawn; he has already filed it under the category of expected, and expected things rarely receive our attention. It is the man who knows that each morning is an undeserved gift who looks longest at the light — who sees, in the ordinary color spilling over the horizon, something closer to a miracle than a routine.

So it is with life. The remembrance of death does not diminish life's sweetness. It intensifies it, the way a border intensifies the color of the field it encloses. It teaches us to love without delay, to forgive before sleep rather than let the sun set on an unresolved account, to loosen our grip on possessions we were only ever holding, to hasten toward obedience before the voice of conscience grows faint from being ignored one time too many.

Every Ordinary Afternoon

Indeed, I suspect one reason God has withheld from us the knowledge of our final day is so that every day might become equally sacred. If we knew the hour, we should almost certainly waste the years preceding it — spend them in careless drift, saving our attention, our courage, our love for some appointed final scene, and treating everything before it as rehearsal. Instead, He has clothed every ordinary afternoon with eternal significance, refusing to let any single day announce itself as more important than the rest, and thereby making all of them important.

Every conversation may be the last. Every act of kindness may be the final one remembered. Every opportunity to obey Him may never return in quite the same form again.

Thus the question is not whether death will come. That has already been settled — settled before any of us were born, woven into the very fabric of a world east of Eden. The question is whether we shall live so faithfully that, whenever it comes, it finds us occupied — not paralyzed by dread, not scrambling in a panic to make up for lost time, but occupied, in the quiet, ongoing sense — with the work of love, the work of repentance, the work of faith.

Perhaps we ought to speak of death more often. Not because we are fascinated by endings, and not because we wish to import gloom into rooms that could otherwise hold laughter. But because only those who have learned that life is brief can finally discover how immeasurably precious it is. And only those who have ceased pretending that death is distant are truly prepared — clear-eyed, unhurried, unafraid — to live.