Chapter summary
Eni’s revenge encounter unexpectedly reveals where her husband keeps his undeclared money and safe combination.
8.40pm, Thursday 20 January 2022, Victoria Island, Lagos
The message had come the morning after the hotel, from a number she did not have saved.
You looked like a woman waiting for a verdict. I am in a position to help with those.
Eni had read it standing at the sink, with a toothbrush in her mouth and the taste of cigarettes still at the back of her throat. She had deleted it. She had restored it. For three days she had left it unanswered, as she left all the things that mattered, until on the fourth she typed four words into the little box on her screen and sent them before she could argue with herself.
Where? And when?
Now she stood in a mirrored lift in a tall, quiet building off Adeola Odeku, watching the floor numbers climb, with her handbag held in front of her like a shield.
She wore a plain black dress and no jewellery. Her hair was down. She had not worn it down in public in years. In the mirror she looked like a woman on her way to a funeral that she had chosen herself.
Plan A, she thought. Make him feel it. Make him feel what he has done.
The lift stopped at the twelfth floor.
Flat 12B was at the end of a carpeted corridor lit by small gold lamps. She stopped in front of the door and, from a habit she no longer noticed, raised her hand and knocked three times.
It opened almost at once.
“You knock,” said the man. “Most people ring.”
“I like to ask first.”
He stood back to let her in.
She smelled him before she saw him properly. Cedar, warm and dry, and under it a clean cold edge, like air from an open window on a harmattan night. He was taller than she remembered. He wore a white shirt with the sleeves turned back to the elbow, and a plain steel watch, and he held a glass of water in one hand with the kind of unhurried ease that belonged to a man who had never needed to raise his voice.
The flat was small and expensively bare. A sofa. A glass table. Floor-to-ceiling windows full of the lights of the Lagos lagoon, scattered across the black water like a spilled tray of coins. A bedroom door, standing a little open, and beyond it, a lamp.
She did not look at the bedroom door.
“Water?”
“Please.”
He poured her a glass and put it into her hand. His fingers did not touch hers. She noticed that. It was deliberate, she thought. A man giving a frightened animal the room to decide.
“You are shaking, Mrs. Bankole.”
“Eni.”
“Eni.” He said it as if testing the weight of it. “You don’t have to be here.”
“I know.”
“Then why are you?”
She turned the glass in her hands. Below them, a ferry crossed the dark water, small and brightly lit and dragging a little skirt of white behind it.
“Because I would like to do one thing in my life,” she said slowly, “that is not written down in a ledger.”
“Is that all?”
She looked at him. It would have been easy to say something true.
“That is all,” she lied.
He held her eyes a moment longer than a polite man should have. Then he took the glass out of her hand, set it on the table, and laid two fingers very lightly under her chin.
What surprised her was that he was kind.
She had prepared for a great many things. She had imagined clumsiness, or greed, or the faint contempt a man shows a woman who has come to him out of anger. She had imagined that it would be like swallowing something bitter on purpose.
He did not hurry her. He kissed her as if she were a sentence he wished to read to the end. He touched her face and her shoulders and the inside of her wrist, where the pulse beat, as though he were learning a language that he respected. When she flinched, he stopped at once. When she did not, he went on, and the lamp in the bedroom made a small gold square on the ceiling that she looked at for a long time.
For thirteen years, a man had touched her as though she were a position in a company. Now somebody had touched her as though she were a person. It undid something in her that she had not known was tied.
She let it. She had earned a little confusion.
And all the while, in the cold, quiet room at the back of her mind where she had always done her sums, a small clear voice went on counting.
Do not forget why you came.
11.15pm
She lay on her back with the sheet drawn to her collarbone and watched the lights from the lagoon move slowly across the ceiling.
He lay beside her, one arm behind his head. The room smelled of cedar and warm skin. Neither of them had spoken for a while, and the silence was not uncomfortable, which frightened her more than anything else that evening had.
“Do you work with my husband?” she asked at last.
There was a pause. She felt him decide how much to say.
“Everyone works with your husband,” he said. “Very few of us like it.”
“What does he do after midnight?”
“I would not know.”
“Where does a man like Tunde keep what he does not declare?”
The silence changed.
He turned his head on the pillow and looked at her. In the dim gold light his face was unreadable, calm and intelligent and a little sad.
“That is a strange question to ask a man with his hand on your waist.”
“I am a pharmacist,” Eni said lightly. “I like to know what is in things.”
He studied her for a long moment. She held very still and let him look. She had learned long ago that it was the only way to lie well: to behave as though the lie were a small and trivial thing, and not at all the load-bearing wall of a house.
“The thing about men like your husband,” he said finally, in a quiet, careful voice, “is that they sleep better with what they love under the same roof. Money, I mean. They like to be able to reach it at three in the morning. Behind something heavy, usually. Somewhere they think nobody ever looks.”
“A safe.”
“I did not say that.”
“No,” she said. “You didn’t.”
He was still watching her. After a moment, he said, so softly that it was almost to himself, “Be careful, Eni. Whatever you are planning. I do not think it is only a husband you are dealing with.”
“I am not planning anything.”
“No,” he agreed gently. “Of course not.”
He kissed her shoulder. She closed her eyes.
But she was already walking through her own house in the dark. Down the stairs. Past the sitting room, with its cream sofas. Through the door of the study at the end of the corridor, where her husband kept his books and his awards and the framed photograph of his father, and where the heavy mahogany bookcase stood against the east wall, a little too far from the corner, a little too deep for its shelves.
She had walked past it a thousand times.
She had never once asked herself why a man who owned so many books never read any of them.
She knew where the money lived.
And she knew, too, with a small cold click of recognition, the only number he had ever used for anything. His phone. His bank card. His mother’s birthday.
She knew the combination before she knew there was a safe.
The Third Door · Continue reading
Chapter 18 is the next door
The story continues. Follow the next chapter through the door.
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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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