Chapter summary
Television exposure unsettles Tonye, then a mysterious woman recognises her, awakening fear she cannot suppress.
10.15am, Friday 12 September 2025, Trans-Amadi, Port Harcourt
The television crew had arrived before the pastor, which Tonye took as a bad sign.
There were three of them: a cameraman with a beard like a hedge, a sound boy carrying a long grey pole, and a young reporter in a turquoise dress and very serious lipstick. They had set up on the forecourt of the second branch of Briggs Pharmacy, between the balloons and the canopy, and the red lens of the camera followed Tonye across the tiles like the eye of an animal that had not yet decided whether to attack.
“Good morning, Madam Briggs.” The reporter hurried toward her with a microphone held out like an offering. “Ebiere Pepple, Rivers Today. We would love a few words. How does it feel to open your second branch? Where did you grow up? What advice would you give young women in business?”
“No interviews,” Tonye said, pleasantly.
“Just two minutes, Ma.”
“I am sorry. You are welcome to film the shop.”
“Madam,” the cameraman called, grinning, “make you just look small for camera. I no go bite.”
“Film the shop,” she repeated.
Chief Amakiri arrived at that moment, bright as a lamp in a gele of peacock green, and swept the reporter aside with a smile that had ended arguments in three decades of boardrooms. “My dear, the founder is shy. She is a genius. Geniuses do not give interviews. Ask me. I will say wonderful things.”
It worked. Tonye stood to one side and let the Chief perform, and counted the minutes under her breath.
She did not enjoy cameras. It was a small, private, unreasonable dislike, like the dislike some people have of mirrors in lifts. A camera was a thing that remembered. And she had learned, in the last three years, that the less any machine remembered of her, the more of herself she got to keep.
The ribbon was white and gold this time. Chief had chosen it, with the air of a woman selecting a coffin lining.
Tonye lifted the scissors. The crowd hushed. She turned her face, as she always did, three-quarters from the lens, her eyes lowered, and let the blades come together.
The ribbon fell. The applause rolled out under the canopy. In the corner of her vision, the red light on the camera blinked once, twice, and stayed on.
“Ten seconds,” the cameraman said afterwards, scrolling through the footage with a pleased, sweaty face. “Just a profile. Nobody go know you.”
“Please do not use my name,” Tonye said. “The pharmacy only.”
“Eh, Madam. No wahala.”
She watched him pack his equipment, and she told herself that ten seconds were nothing. A ripple on a pond. Nobody watched regional news after eight at night. Nobody ever noticed anything on a screen unless it shouted.
It was only when she was back in her car that she felt, for no reason she could name, her hands begin to shake on the wheel.
9.40am, Saturday
“Ma, you were on TV!”
Oyin met her at the door of the new branch with her phone held out in both hands, as though she were presenting a trophy.
“Last night. Rivers Today. Ten seconds. You look like a minister!”
“Delete it.”
“E don dey WhatsApp, Ma. Everybody don see am. My mama call me from Aba. She say, ’Na your madam?’”
“Then let it be.”
She said it lightly. She said it the way one says it does not matter about a thing that has already begun to matter.
Saturday was the open day: free blood pressure checks, a table of vitamin samples, a queue of old women in church hats who regarded the whole event as a form of entertainment. Tonye moved among them with a clipboard and a smile, calm and brisk and slightly out of reach, and the whole place hummed around her like a well-run machine.
At ten thirty she went to stand in the doorway to take a breath.
The morning was bright and hot. The traffic on Trans-Amadi crawled past in bands of yellow and white. A boy was selling puff-puff from a tray on the pavement opposite, and a woman in a green wrapper was haggling over a bag of oranges.
And beside the boy, at the very edge of the pavement across the road, stood a woman in a cream blouse.
She was slim, in her thirties, with braids pulled back from a narrow face. A leather handbag was clutched to her chest in both arms, like a child. She was not buying anything. She was not walking anywhere. She was simply standing in the middle of a busy Saturday morning, looking across the road with an expression that Tonye had never in her life seen on a stranger.
It was the look of a drowning woman who has just seen a rope.
Tonye’s breath went out of her.
She did not know why. She did not know the woman. She was certain she did not know the woman. But something in her chest had gone suddenly wide and cold and strange, like a door standing open in a house she had thought was empty.
The woman took one step off the kerb.
Tonye stepped back.
She did not decide to. Her body did it for her, one pace, two, until the glass door swung shut between her and the street, and she was inside, among the shelves, among the pensioners, with her heart going so loudly she thought someone must hear it.
“Ma?” Oyin looked up from the blood pressure machine. “You dey alright?”
“Tell the Chief I have gone to the other branch,” Tonye said, in a voice that sounded perfectly normal to her. “I have a meeting.”
“But you no get…”
She did not wait for the end of the sentence.
She went out through the back.
The yard behind the shop was a bare square of concrete between a wall and a pile of flattened boxes. A generator sat in one corner under a tarpaulin. Mr. Ibifuro’s van stood in the shade, with its door open and its owner asleep across the front seats with a newspaper over his face.
Tonye stopped in the middle of the yard.
She put both palms flat against a stack of cardboard and leaned on it, as she had leaned on every hard cold surface that had ever held her up.
She counted the cartons.
One. Two. Three. She counted them to the end of the stack, and she began again.
It was only when she was on the fourth count that she noticed there was a gap in the corrugated fence at the side of the yard, a vertical crack no wider than a hand, and that through it she could see a thin bright slice of the road.
She did not mean to look.
The woman in the cream blouse had not moved. She stood on the kerb on the other side of the road with her bag held to her chest, and she was not looking at the traffic, or at the puff-puff boy, or at the shop.
She was looking at the empty doorway where Tonye had been standing, the way you look at a house you once lived in.
The Third Door · Continue reading
Chapter 19 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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