Chapter summary
Dying Mama Nneka gives Kamsi Ijeoma’s diary, ordering her to find Eni and finish everything.
6.00am, Thursday 23 July 2026, Odoakpu, Onitsha
Kamsi came off the night bus at six in the morning with one bag and her cousin’s call still ringing in her head.
Mama dey go. Come quick.
She took a taxi from Upper Iweka to Odoakpu through streets she could have walked blind. The rain had stopped an hour before. Puddles lay in every pothole like pieces of sky, and boys in rubber sandals were already pushing carts of yams through them. At the corner, the woman who sold roasted corn looked up from her fire and said, “Kamsi! You don come,” and that told her more than the telephone call had.
The house was the same. Two storeys of cement block painted green and gone soft at the corners, a zinc roof streaked with rust, a mango tree in the yard, a bucket of rainwater by the front step. A line of washing sagged across the compound. Somebody had been frying fish, and the smell lay over everything.
She stopped at the door of her grandmother’s room and, for no reason she could have given, knocked on it.
“Come,” said a thin voice.
Mama Nneka had been a big woman once. She had carried tubers of cassava on her head from the farm at Nkwelle, sold cloth at the Main Market for forty years, and raised a granddaughter on a trader’s profits and a widow’s temper. Now she lay under a white sheet with her face grey against the pillow and her hands folded on her chest like a priest’s. The pastor’s wife sat on a stool in the corner with a Bible in her lap. The nurse from the clinic on the next road was adjusting a drip.
“Leave us,” the old woman said.
They went. Kamsi sat on the edge of the bed.
“You don come,” said her grandmother.
“I came, Mama.”
“Dem say na Lagos you dey. With that banker.”
“I left him on Tuesday.”
“Hm.” Mama Nneka’s eyes were sunk deep in their sockets, but they were still sharp. They went over her granddaughter’s face slowly, the way she used to check a cloth for flaws. “You dey thin. And you get small wrinkle here.” She lifted a finger an inch toward Kamsi’s forehead. “Four years you dey look for that woman.”
“Yes, Mama.”
“You don find am?” “No.”
The old woman said nothing for a while. Outside, a rooster crowed and was answered by another. The nurse’s shoes squeaked on the corridor tiles.
“Four years,” Mama Nneka said again. “Hm.”
It was the voice she had used when Kamsi was nine and came home with a bad mark in arithmetic. It was not angry. It simply put the fact on the table and left it there, and Kamsi found that her eyes had begun to sting.
“I tried, Mama. I followed the husband. I paid a man. I went to Abuja and Kaduna and Calabar. I found her sister. I worked out that somebody drove her to the park, and I never found out who. I watched the pharmacies and the airports and the churches. She is somewhere, and she has made herself disappear, and I do not know where to look any more.”
“I know.”
“I am sorry.”
“Don’t say sorry to me.” The old woman’s hand moved on the sheet. “Go and bring the box.”
“Which box?”
“The second one. Under the bed. The one wey I tell you make you no open.”
It was where it had always been, pushed against the wall behind the suitcase, furred with dust. Kamsi drew it out and set it on the
bed. A plain shoebox, tied with a string gone brown with age.
She had never touched it. She had been told not to when she was seven, and she had obeyed for twenty-six years, as you obey a rule that has become part of the furniture.
“Open am.”
Her fingers were unsteady on the string.
Inside lay a scarf, folded small. A pair of earrings. A cracked hair comb, and a photograph turned face down. And at the bottom, wrapped in a handkerchief, a red notebook about the size of a hymn book, with a zip along three sides.
“That one,” said Mama Nneka. “Your mother’s own.”
“Her diary.”
“Na so.”
Kamsi held it. It was lighter than she had expected. The red cover was scuffed white at the corners and the zip had rusted, and on the front, in blue biro, in a round, careful, schoolgirl hand, somebody had written a name. Ijeoma Nwosu. Private.
Her mother’s handwriting.
She had not seen it since she was seven years old.
“Why did you keep it from me?” “Because you was a child. And because I no want make you read am for wrong reason.” Her grandmother’s breath came short, and she waited for it to even out. “If you read am when you dey vex, you go see only vex. I read am one time. After dem bury her. I cry
for three days. Then I put am for box. I say, one day, when this girl big, I go give am.”
“And now?”
“Now na the time.”
10.15pm
The pastor’s wife had gone home. The nurse dozed in the next room. A single bulb hung from the ceiling, and the rain had started again, a steady drumming on the zinc that filled the whole house.
Kamsi sat in the chair by the bed with the red notebook on her knee. She had not opened it. She turned it over in her hands. She ran her thumb along the rusted zip.
“Nne.”
“I am here.”
“Listen.” The old woman’s eyes were closed, and her voice came from a long way down, like a voice at the bottom of a well. “There is one page in that book. Somewhere in the middle. It is not for you. It is for the girl.”
“Which girl?” “The one at the door. The doctor’s own pikin. I no understand am when I read am. I think say your mother dey craze. But I see now.” Her fingers moved. “You must read am to her. To her face. When you find her. Not before. Promise me.”
“Mama, I don’t understand.”
“You go understand.”
“What if I never find her?”
“You go find her.” The old woman’s eyes opened, and for a moment they were quite clear, and black, and full of a tiredness Kamsi had never seen in them. “I want make I tell you something. For thirty years I wanted that family to burn. Every night. I put am for your mouth like milk. I no know any other thing to give you.” Her chest rose and fell. “Now I dey go, and I dey look at you, and I no sure say I do you good.”
“Mama…”
“Finish am, Nne. Find her. Finish am.”
She did not say how. She did not say what finish meant, whether it was the revenge, or the search, or the thing underneath both of them. Kamsi did not ask.
“I will,” she said.
“Good girl.”
The old woman’s hand lay on the sheet. After a while, Kamsi took it.
3.20am She woke in the chair with a stiff neck and the notebook still on her knee.
The rain had stopped. The bulb had gone out, and the room was lit by the grey of a street lamp through the curtain. Her grandmother’s breathing had changed. It was slower, and farther apart, with long gaps between the breaths, like footsteps going up a stair in the dark.
Kamsi sat up.
She thought of the night in Ogba, and the tiles, and a woman’s hand cold in hers. Count for me. I want to hear you count.
She began, without meaning to. One. Two. She counted the gaps. Eleven seconds. Fifteen. Twenty.
Then she stopped. She took her grandmother’s hand in both of hers and held it against her cheek, and she did not count any more.
Mama Nneka’s lips moved.
Kamsi bent close.
It was only a whisper, a dry breath with no voice in it. But it was a name, and she knew it, and she heard it clearly, and it was not hers.
“Ijeoma,” said the old woman.
Then she did not say anything more.
The Third Door · Continue reading
Chapter 30 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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