Loose Ends — Chapter 23: One Lie in Each Hand

Chapter summary

Sammy stages a confession for Sarah, then Karo’s impossible pregnancy claim exposes another devastating deception.

SAMMY

Wednesday

Sarah stood at the gate in her morning wrapper, with a hand on each boy’s shoulder, and held on to his lapels a little longer than the occasion needed.

“Go well,” she said. “Call me when you land.”

“Take care of the boys.”

“I always do.”

He kissed her on the forehead and breathed in. It hit him there, in the heat of the driveway, with the driver loading his bag. Soft, powdery, sweet, with a trace of cream. The smell he had been calling hotel soap for two years was the smell of her pillow. He had been carrying his own house into other women’s rooms, and not one of them had needed to tell him.

The driver took him to the airport. Sammy walked through the departures hall, bought a bottle of water he did not want, left by the far door, and took a taxi to Ikoyi.

The baker was a small woman with flour to her elbows. The cake she had made was a lemon sponge in the shape of a dome, with a tiny white-chocolate bicycle propped against it. He had described it to her three weeks earlier, a round library in a small English city, a girl in boots, and she had listened as if it were a love story. He supposed it was.

At the florist he bought yellow roses, the colour of the notebook Sarah had carried everywhere at Oxford.

At the house in Lekki, Baba Sule met him at the gate with a worried face. “Oga, the madam came yesterday.”

Sammy went still. “Which madam?” “A woman from the agency. She asked plenty questions. Big woman, nice perfume. She had the boots.”

The roses slipped a little in his arm. He had not told any agency. There was no agency.

He gave Baba Sule five thousand naira and told him that from now on the gate was to open for nobody except a lady named Sarah.

Strangely, what he felt was relief. If she knew, she would come, and everything he had to say would be easier. A man who has rehearsed a confession for three weeks does not mind if the audience arrives early.

He spent the afternoon in the kitchen, helping the cook, who did not want his help. At five he laid the table for two on the terrace. At eight he stood in the master bedroom in front of the mirror and practised his opening line in the voice of a man who had done nothing wrong. It did not work. He tried the voice of a man who had done everything wrong. That one fitted.

At midnight, when the lanterns were lit and the sea was a dark noise beyond the wall, he went down to the car, took the Samsung from the glove compartment, and switched it on.

Thirty-one missed calls.

Dara had written eleven times. Where are you. Why is your phone off. Baby please just say you are alive.

Tobe had written twice. Please call me. Something is wrong. Somebody is inside my phone.

Sammy read that one twice. His wife’s hands were fast on a keyboard. He took the thought, folded it small, and put it where he put things he could not afford to look at. A coincidence. The world was full of people who got hacked.

Karo had written four times. I need to see you. I’m not well. And then, on Monday evening after he had sent her home with thirty thousand naira, Are you ignoring me? And then, on Wednesday at four minutes past four, the last one.

I am pregnant. It is yours.

Pregnant? Pregnant?!

He read it three times. The sea went on in the dark. A gecko ran across the windscreen.

There was one fact about his own body that he had told no one for six years. Not his wife, not his doctor’s receptionist, not God. It turned the message on the screen into a riddle, and Sammy had never been good at riddles. He laughed, quietly, and it was the worst sound he had ever made.

His other phone, the real one, buzzed against his thigh. Sarah. Landed? Send me a picture of the hotel.

He searched for a hotel lobby in Dubai and found one in two seconds, all marble and gold, and sent it with the word Beautiful. A small red heart arrived almost at once.

He sat in the dark car with two phones in his hands, one lie in each, and felt like a man holding a lit match in a petrol station.

Loose Ends · Continue reading

Continue to Chapter 24

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Five contextual images are AI-generated editorial illustrations for this fictional serial; no generated image depicts a real event or named person. Editorial design by akinakingbogun.com.