Chapter summary
Sammy nearly confesses over birthday pepper soup, but fear of his children preserves the deception.
SAMMY
Tuesday night Dinner on Tuesday was Sarah’s pepper soup, the one she made only for birthdays and for illness. The boys had gone to bed with a sword each, drawn on paper. Sammy sat at the table with a spoon in his hand and a feeling in his stomach like a stone in a shoe.
She sat across from him in the soft light, in a blue house dress he had not seen in a year. She was eating slowly. She had put her hair up. For a moment she looked exactly as she had looked on the third floor of the Camera with a pencil in her mouth, and he nearly put the spoon down and said everything there and then. The three women. The second phone. The house in Lekki. The rose.
“You’re quiet,” said Sarah.
“I’m thinking about the trip.”
“Yes.” She dipped her spoon. “I have packed your grey suit and the blue tie. And the lotion, the one for your elbows.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll miss you,” she said.
It was said lightly, without any weight at all. And somehow it was the cruellest sentence that anyone had ever said to him. He looked at her and found that his mouth had gone dry.
“Sarah.”
“Yes?”
Down the stairs came a thud and the sound of a small boy crying. “Mummy! Bayo took my sword!”
She smiled at him over the rim of the bowl, a small smile, a little tired, and rose to deal with it. He watched her go. He sat on at the table with the spoon in his hand, listening to the soft quarrel above him, and heard in the sound of his own breathing the word he had meant to say.
Tomorrow.
Later he went out to the garage, as he had gone out every night that week, and stood by the Mercedes with the Samsung in his palm. Its screen was dark. He did not switch it on. Across the lawn a light was burning in the study window. Sarah had gone to work, he supposed, on a candle order. He could see her shadow move against the blind.
He thought of knocking. He thought of how a man walks across a lawn at night to tell his wife that he has been lying to her for two years. And what would he be, on the other side of that conversation, in her eyes?
He thought, too, of the boys’ faces the morning after. Bayo, who did not miss things, would work it out from the shape of the silence. A man can survive being found out. But in front of his children? Never!
He put the phone back in the glove compartment and went to bed. Coward!
Loose Ends · Continue reading
Continue to Chapter 20
The story continues in the next chapter.
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The featured photograph is used under the Pexels licence. Four contextual images are AI-generated editorial illustrations for this fictional serial; no generated image depicts a real event or named person. Featured photograph source. Editorial design by akinakingbogun.com.
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