The Third Door — Chapter 19: The Launch

Chapter summary

Dami pursues a glimpse of her missing sister, finding recognition, denial, and unsettling unanswered questions.

11.20pm, Friday 12 September 2025, Surulere, Lagos

Dami had stopped looking for her sister in crowds. She had told herself so many times.

It was not true, of course. She still looked. At the airport, in the back of taxis, at weddings where she did not know the bride. For three and a half years she had caught a particular set of shoulders in a queue and felt her heart slam against her ribs, and then the woman had turned around, and she had been somebody else. A stranger with somebody else’s mouth. After the hundredth time, the heart learned not to jump. It merely paused, like a hand over a hot plate, and went on.

So it was the pause she noticed first.

She was in bed with her phone, in the small flat in Surulere she had rented the year she left Hakeem, scrolling through the Facebook group for pharmacists with the dull, thumb-driven obedience of a woman who could not sleep. Congratulations. Job vacancies. A heated argument about a shortage of insulin. And, near the bottom of the screen, a short video with a caption.

Rivers Today: Briggs Pharmacy opens second branch in Trans-Amadi.

She pressed it.

A canopy. Gold chairs. A bearded cameraman’s too-bright light. A reporter’s voice, thin and cheerful, saying words that slid past her.

Then a woman stepping forward from the edge of the frame in a loose dress the colour of old wine.

Heavier than Eni. Much heavier. A round face with cropped hair dyed the red of tomatoes. She held a pair of scissors over a white and gold ribbon, with her face turned three-quarters away from the camera and her eyes lowered, and for ten seconds she did nothing at all but stand there.

The ribbon fell.

The clip ended.

Dami lay very still with the phone against her chest.

Not her, she thought, with perfect clarity. Eni is thin. Eni’s hair is black. Eni would never in her life wear a colour like that.

She played it again.

It was the turn that did it. A particular way of angling the head, as though the woman were making room for someone beside her. And the hands. The left hand cupped lightly beneath the right, like a person steadying a pen.

She played it a third time. A fourth. By the tenth, she had stopped breathing properly. By the fourteenth, she had paused the frame on the single instant before the ribbon fell and was staring at it with her fingers spread across the screen, as if she might reach in.

Her sister had held scissors like that. There was a photograph in their mother’s album: Eni at ten, before Dami was born, cutting out paper dolls in the front room, her left hand cupped under her right.

You see her everywhere, Dami told herself. You are a woman who has been drowning for three years, and every plank looks like a boat.

She sat up. She opened the airline app. She did not decide anything. She merely noticed that her thumb had already pressed Confirm, and that the seat was for six in the morning.

9.00am, Saturday, Trans-Amadi, Port Harcourt

The pharmacy was bigger than she had expected, and brighter, with a blue and white sign and a ramp for wheelchairs and a ribbon of balloons, still a little limp from the night before.

Dami crossed the road and stopped on the opposite pavement, beside a boy selling puff-puff, and bought a bag she did not want. She stood with it in her hand and watched the door.

The morning dragged. Old women in church hats arrived in twos and threes. A girl with braids set out a table of samples. A man in a short-sleeved shirt checked his blood pressure in the shade and complained loudly about the result. At ten to ten, an elderly woman came out of the door, leaning on a stick, and a second woman stepped out after her, one hand beneath her elbow.

“Mind the step, Mama,” she said.

Dami’s heart did not jump. It stopped.

The woman was the woman from the video, in a dress the deep blue of a night sky, with the same cropped red hair and the same round, calm face. She helped the old lady down the step and into a waiting taxi, quickly and gently and with total attention.

But the voice.

It was low, even and slightly flat, with a faint roll on the r that came from the south-east. It was a Port Harcourt voice, a settled voice, unhurried. Eni’s voice had been quick and clean and lightly Lagos, with a lift at the ends of sentences, like a girl looking up from a book.

The breath went out of Dami slowly.

It is not her.

She was almost relieved. It was a kind of grief with a door in it. She could stand here for another minute, and then she could cross the road, and ask for a vitamin C, and go back to the airport. She could put the video away in the same drawer as all the other planks.

She stayed.

10.30am

The woman came to the glass door again and stood in it.

She was looking at the road, at the sky, at nothing in particular, with her hands loose at her sides. She had the abstract, tired air of someone stepping out for a breath of air.

And then, in the way that eyes sometimes do, hers came down off the sky and met Dami’s across forty feet of heat and traffic.

Dami did not move.

She saw the woman’s face change. It did not do anything so simple as to recognise her. It went still and pale, then a little blind, like a person standing in the first second after a loud noise. One hand rose slowly to her own throat.

Dami took a step off the kerb.

What she wanted to do was shout. Eni. The name rose in her throat like a flood. But she knew with total certainty what would happen if she crossed that road and the woman looked at her with the calm politeness of a stranger. She would have to bury her sister a second time, and she did not know if she could.

The woman stepped back.

One pace. Two. The glass door swung shut and the sun flashed off it, and the doorway was empty.

Dami stood in the middle of the road with a bag of cold puff-puff in her hand, and a horn blared behind her, and a motorbike swerved round her swearing.

She crossed.

The girl with the braids was behind the counter, wrapping a tablet in paper. She looked up with a bright, tired smile.

“Good morning, Ma. Welcome to Briggs Pharmacy. Wetin I fit do for you?”

“The owner,” Dami said. “Is she in?”

“Madam Briggs? She just go to the other branch, Ma. She get meeting.”

“What is her first name?”

“Tonye, Ma.”

“Tonye.” It sat in her mouth like a stone. “Where is she from?”

“Ibadan, Ma. She grow for Ibadan. Her papa na Abonnema man, but she no fit talk the language.” The girl shrugged cheerfully. “She come here three years back. She just dey build, build, build.”

“Does she have family here? A sister?”

“Madam no dey talk about family, Ma.” The girl lowered her voice, confiding. “But she be good person. Very strict. She no dey smile plenty.”

The words went through Dami like a pin.

“Thank you,” she said.

She bought a packet of paracetamol she did not need and walked out into the glare.

5.10pm, Port Harcourt Airport

The flight was delayed by an hour. She sat at the gate with her bag between her feet, among men in agbadas and women with gift bags, and watched the planes come and go through the glass.

She turned it over in her mind, as she had turned it over for three years. A stranger. A Port Harcourt voice. A story about Ibadan and an Abonnema father. Three years of building, and the wrong hair, and the wrong weight, and the wrong accent.

A woman who looked at her as though she were a drowning swimmer.

Or a woman who had simply been startled by a stranger staring. Any woman would have stepped back. Any woman would.

They called her flight. She stood, shouldered her bag and joined the line, and it was only as the cabin crew began their safety demonstration that she realised what had been nagging at her all day, beneath everything else, like a stone in a shoe.

She had watched that woman for an hour and a half. She had seen her frown, concentrate, speak, step back.

But she had never once seen her smile.

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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.