Chapter summary
Eni watches Tunde meet Kamsi at a hotel and begins planning her calculated response alone.
6.20pm, Thursday 13 January 2022, The Meridian Court, Ikoyi
The Meridian Court did not have a lobby so much as a stage.
Cream marble floors. A fountain of black stone that whispered to itself in the middle of the room. Three chandeliers and a staircase curving upward like the neck of an expensive animal. Everything was arranged to make a person feel they had arrived somewhere, and had better look it.
Eni sat in the glass-walled smoking lounge off the main hall, behind a potted fern the size of a small tree, with a cappuccino cooling in front of her and a cigarette burning between two fingers.
She smoked rarely, and only when she was deciding something. She had bought a fresh pack on the way, from a kiosk on Awolowo Road, because it seemed the sort of thing a woman did in a scene like this. She hated the taste. She held the smoke in her mouth, let it hang and turn, then released it in a thin grey ribbon. It gave her hands something to do.
She wore a headscarf, large dark glasses and a long camel coat that belonged to no particular woman. In the glass wall she looked like exactly what she was: someone whose life had stopped on a Wednesday night and who had not yet been told.
“Madam, you wan another coffee?” The waiter hovered, polite as a closed door. “Na Ikoyi tax we dey add o.”
“No, thank you.”
Her phone buzzed against the table.
Atlas Trust: Debit Alert. NGN 84,000.00. Meridian Court Ikoyi.
She read it twice. Then, quietly, almost in wonder, she laughed.
Her husband was paying for his mistress’s room with a card issued in her name.
6.52pm
Tunde came through the revolving door like a man arriving at his own birthday.
Charcoal suit. A lilac tie she had given him two Christmases ago. He crossed the marble with his easy, forward-tilted walk, adjusting a cuff as he went, and nodded to the doorman, who bent from the waist.
“Oga Tunde, welcome back o! E don tey wey you come. Na the same room I don arrange.”
“Thank you, Samson.”
He did not look toward the lounge. Why would he? Nobody looks at a fern.
He stopped at the fountain and took out his phone, and the little cold light of it lit his face from below. He looked younger when he was lying. It was the most irritating thing about him. His whole body loosened, like a boy sent out to play.
She had known that face for thirteen years. She knew its small kindnesses and its large cowardice, the way it went quiet in front of his mother, how it softened when he was drunk. It had never occurred to her that she might one day study it through glass.
Her cigarette had burned down to the filter. She stubbed it out and lit another.
7.01pm
The revolving door turned again, and the woman in the red coat stepped into the light.
She came in like a held note. A coat the colour of fresh blood, belted at the waist. Heels that clicked on the marble in a slow, even rhythm. And above it, framing a face turned slightly to the room, a huge, round, dark halo of hair.
Eni’s cigarette stopped halfway to her mouth.
It was not a photograph now. It moved.
The walk was her walk. The line of the jaw. The slight lift of the chin as if she were balancing something on it. In the soft chandelier light, the years went out of the world, and the woman who had looked up from her father’s bed in 1990 crossed a hotel lobby in Ikoyi, in the flesh, alive, thirty-two years too late.
Not her, Eni told herself. Not her. Her daughter. The daughter, who has not yet turned thirty, who was a child when it happened, who was…
The woman passed the glass.
Her eyes slid across the lounge, across the fern, across Eni, without stopping. They were dark and steady and without hurry, and they lit on Tunde and stayed.
Eni knew those eyes.
She knew them the way you know a word you have not said in years. She went back through the weeks as through the pages of a ledger, line by line, until she reached a night in December, a ballroom, a white backdrop, two umbrella lamps.
A girl in a black apron. A black mask. A scarf. A brush.
The steadiest hands she had ever seen.
She had stood three feet from this woman, in her emerald dress, with a glass of chapman in her hand. She had watched her tap powder on her husband’s forehead. And she had thought: what steady hands.
The cigarette dropped from her fingers into the saucer and hissed in the cold coffee.
This was not an accident. It was not a coincidence, or a lonely man’s mistake, or the sort of thing that happens to wives in Lagos. Somebody had walked into her life in a black mask, with a brush in her hand and a plan in her head, and she had not even looked up.
How long has she been watching?
Tunde met her at the lifts.
He took her hand. He laid his other hand on the small of her back, at the place where he always steered Eni through a crowd. The same hand. The same small, proprietary pressure. The woman leaned into it, smiling, and Eni saw the smile.
She did not recognise it. That was the strangest thing. It was not Ijeoma’s smile. It was not the gentle, crooked, kind smile from the bedroom door. This one was exact. Polished. A smile that had been rehearsed in a mirror until it stopped belonging to anyone.
The lift doors opened. They stepped inside. They did not look back.
Eni watched the numbers above the doors, lit one by one in amber. Two. Three. Four. She counted them as she had once counted the steps of a school bus. Five. Six.
Seven.
The light stopped. Stayed.
She waited for the rage. She was a reasonable woman, and rage was the reasonable thing. She waited for jealousy, humiliation, the dry heave of a wife in a hotel lobby.
None of it came.
What came was something much colder and much older. It was recognition. As though she had watched a play a hundred times from the wings and had only now been handed her costume.
On her phone, a message from Dami lit the screen. Sunday? Same place. I have a Chapter Eight.
She left it unanswered.
8.30pm
The waiter had stopped asking. The ashtray was full. The fountain went on whispering to the marble, patient as a priest.
Eni sat for a long time with her hands in her lap.
Then she picked up her phone. She opened the notes app. A blank white page, the cursor blinking.
She typed: Plan A.
She looked at it. Then she pressed return and typed: Plan B.
She did not write what came under either. For now, the names were enough.
On the seventh floor, a light would be coming on in a room she had paid for.
The Third Door · Continue reading
Chapter 11 is the next door
The story continues. Follow the next chapter through the door.
What do you think happens next? Share your theory in the comments below.
Cover and contextual photographs are used under the Pexels licence. Cover source; cover design for The Third Door by akinakingbogun.com.
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