Chapter summary
Tobe regains her job and deletes stolen leads; Dara cautiously reopens her home to Felix.
TOBECHUKWU
Friday afternoon Tobe’s phone rang at three, and the screen said Mr. Briggs.
She let it ring four times. Then she answered. “Good afternoon.”
“Tobechukwu Anyanwu.”
She waited.
“I have received a document from Group HR,” said Mr. Briggs. His voice was thinner than she remembered, with the shrill gone out of it. “A signed statement from a lady. It says she accessed your account on Sunday night and sent the offending message under your name. It is very detailed. I did not know such things were possible.”
“No, sir. Neither did I.”
“Your suspension has been lifted with effect from today. I have been advised by Legal that there will be no entry on your file.” A cough. “I wish to say that I should have asked you before I shouted. The Handbook requires an inquiry. I did not conduct one. I apologise.”
It was the longest speech she had ever heard him make. She found, to her surprise, that she was not angry. She was only tired, and very clear.
“I accept your apology, Mr. Briggs. I do not accept the side hug.”
“The…” There was a silence. “Yes. Of course.”
She hung up and sat on her bed with the phone in her lap. On the table beside her lay a bouquet that had arrived at noon. The card, in a careful hand, said Welcome back. Hope your week was less dramatic than ours. Bisola and Madame A. She laughed out loud, alone in her flat. It was a very large laugh. It had a good deal of the week in it.
She picked up the phone and opened the notes. There was the joke she had written on the toilet last Saturday, which she deleted without reading again. And below it, a list she had titled Sunshine. Leads. Deal names. Six months of her best kept secret, in neat bullet points.
Her thumb hung over it.
Her mother had phoned again that morning about the school fees. Her brother’s bursar had sent another letter. She would find it. She would find it the slow way, with a calculator and a plate of cold rice, with her own leads and her own name on every one.
She pressed delete.
The note went with a small sound. She felt lighter by about a kilogram and a half.
DARA
Friday afternoon On Friday afternoon Dara cooked stew. She had not meant to. She had come home from the police station at noon, with Tobe’s second statement still ringing in her ears, and stood in her kitchen with her hands on the counter. The flies had gone. The smell had gone. All that was left was a woman standing alone with a bag of tomatoes.
So she cooked. She made enough for four.
At four o’clock she opened the kitchen door onto the fire escape. Felix was sitting on the top step in the late light, with a cardboard box beside him and his phone in his hand. He had not shaved. The smile she had thought too perfect to be real was nowhere on his face.
“The landlord gave me a week,” he said, without looking up. “Karo’s name is on the lease. I have told the police everything. They said I will probably be called as a witness. They said the program on your computer is an offence. I will not argue.”
“Felix.”
“I should have told you in March. I told myself it was safer, and it was only safer for me.” His voice cracked. “I am not asking you to say it is all right.”
Dara sat down on the step beside him. It was iron and still warm from the sun. For a long while the two of them watched the traffic through the gap between the buildings.
“I owe you a slap’s worth of apology,” she said. “The first one. The second one was fair.”
A sound came out of him that was half a laugh. “It was fair.”
“I am not going to kiss you,” said Dara.
“I know.”
“You listened to my life through a wall for five months and you let me think you were just a nice man.”
“I was a nice man. I was also a liar.” He turned the phone in his hand. “It is possible to be both.”
She looked at him. The frozen peas. The note on the bag that said Emergency. The painter who had fixed her walls, and the wardrobe that he had carried up four flights, and his face in the dark when she said the word boyfriend.
“Come for stew on Sundays,” she said. “At my table. Not on this fire escape.”
He did not say anything. He put his face in his hands.
She went back in and left the kitchen door open an inch. The stew went on cooking. When she looked again after a while, he was still sitting there, and the door was still open, and neither of them had said a word more than was needed.
Loose Ends · Continue reading
Continue to Chapter 47
The story continues in the next chapter.
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Featured and contextual photographs are used under the Pexels licence and are illustrative; the characters and events are fictional. Featured photograph source. Editorial design by akinakingbogun.com.
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