Chapter summary
Sarah tracks Sammy to Lekki, prepares evidence, and accepts an anonymous invitation to confront him.
SARAH
Wednesday morning Sarah stood at the gate in her morning wrapper, with a boy on each hip, and watched her husband leave for a place he was not going.
He had held her lapels a moment too long. She noticed. She noticed everything now. He had kissed her on the forehead and stood with his face in her hair, and she knew, with the sudden certainty that came to her about once a year, that he was smelling her.
“Go well,” she said. “Call me when you land.”
“Take care of the boys.”
“I always do.”
She did not say what she was thinking, which was that he looked like a man who was going to the dentist. She did not say that she had never once seen him look at a Dubai itinerary with that face. She stood at the gate and waved, and Deji waved, and Bayo, who was eight and had a sensitive nose for lies, looked up at her and said, “Mummy, why are you smiling like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like a Christmas card.”
She laughed. It was the first real laugh she had managed that week, and it ended in a cough.
SARAH
Wednesday The boys had gone to school and Sammy was supposedly over the Atlantic, so the house had fallen into the silence of a stage between acts.
Sarah sat at the desk in the study with BODLEIAN-7 humming and a cup of tea going cold. At 9:40 she had watched a small blue dot, her husband’s real phone, leave the airport in a taxi and drive to Ikoyi. At 11:15 it stopped at a bakery. At 12:30 it stopped at a florist. At 2:05 it crossed the Lekki-Ikoyi link bridge and came to rest at the end of a sandy lane she knew very well.
He was not in Dubai. She had known that since Monday, but there is a difference between knowing a thing and watching it blink.
There was no sign of the Samsung. It had been dark since
Sunday afternoon. She could not decide whether that made her feel better or worse. A man who switches off a phone has either learned shame or learned to hide. She had been married to him for twelve years and could not tell which.
At 4:20 her own phone buzzed. The same unknown number as the night before.
He is at the house. Tomorrow he will be with her from five. Do not be late.
She read it five times and answered, for the first time, with two words. Who is this?
The reply came after eleven minutes. Someone who is tired of being hurt by him.
Sarah put the phone down and walked around the study. Everything in her trained mind said the sender was one of the three. Tobe, who had lost a job. Dara, who had lost a pizza and her dignity. Karo, who had lost her sleep. But the stranger knew about Lekki. The stranger knew about the boots. None of the three had known she existed on Saturday.
She traced what she could. The number belonged to a prepaid SIM, registered last Friday and used for nothing else. She called Tunji and told him to check the Mercedes for a tracker, and he looked twice and found nothing.
There was a way to be sensible about all this. She could cancel
Thursday. She could walk into Sammy’s office, put the evidence on his desk and let the lawyers do the rest. She could call her mother.
Instead she went upstairs and opened the boys’ room. Bayo’s card for his father lay on the desk, a drawing in marker of a man with a very large head standing on a plane. Happy birthday Daddy. Come back soon from Dubai. Under it, in the careful letters of a six-year-old, Deji had added, Bring me a sword.
She sat on the small bed with the card in her hands.
She had set out to ruin three women, and she had done it. It had been easier than she expected, and that bothered her more than it should have. Some part of her had been waiting for it to feel good. It had not. It had felt like scrubbing a floor that was not her own.
But a plan is a ladder, she told herself, and you do not stop halfway because you looked down. She put the card back where she found it.
In the study she printed everything: the messages, the photographs, the rent receipts, the booking under the name Ernest. Four hundred pages. She slid them into a folder, put the folder in a bag with BODLEIAN-7 and a spare charger, and set the bag by the door. Beside it she placed the boots.
Whoever the stranger was, they wanted her at the house on
Thursday, and that, she thought, was the first thing she and the stranger agreed on.
She went to the kitchen to make dinner for the boys. She hummed. Her hand, she noticed, was shaking, so she turned the radio up and went on stirring.
At nine she rang her mother in Ibadan. She had not planned to. Her thumb had done it while she was thinking about something else. “Sarah?” Her mother’s voice was sleepy and instantly alert. “What is it?”
“Nothing, Mummy.”
“You sound the way you sounded the night before your Oxford interview.”
“Do I?”
“Like somebody carrying a very full cup.” A rustle. “Have you eaten? Is it Sammy?”
She almost said it. She had it in her mouth. What she said was, “Mummy, when I was small, did you think I would amount to something?”
“I thought you would be the Queen of England,” said her mother, “and I was disappointed when you only became a professor’s student.” They both laughed. “Why are you asking?”
“No reason.”
“Sarah. Whatever you are about to do, do it with your whole heart or do not do it at all. That is how you got to Oxford.”
She said she would, and meant it, and put the phone down, and stood for a long time at the sink with the tap running over her wrists.
Loose Ends · Continue reading
Continue to Chapter 23
The story continues in the next chapter.
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The featured photograph is used under the Pexels licence. Contextual scene illustrations are original editorial artwork created for this serial; the characters and events are fictional. Featured photograph source. Editorial design by akinakingbogun.com.
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