Chapter summary
Kamsi recognizes disguised Eni by her crooked smile, then follows her toward Port Harcourt bus.
10.00am, Saturday 22 August 2026, Akoka, Lagos
Kamsi sat at the very back of St. Peter’s, in the last pew on the left, with her head wrapped in a black scarf and her eyes behind dark glasses, and watched the family bury its mother.
She had not planned to come. It was the kind of thing she did without planning, the way one’s tongue goes to a broken tooth. She had read the notice on Sunday in a newspaper at a kiosk in Yaba, standing in the sun with her flask of zobo in one hand, and she had read it again, and on Saturday morning she had put on the plainest black dress she owned and taken an okada to Akoka without knowing why.
Mrs. Eniola Bankole. Pharm. Damilola Lawal.
Two names. She had carried them for twenty-five years in the shoebox of her mind, and she had never seen them side by side on anything but a court report. She did not wear the wig. It lay on its stand in the flat in Yaba, round and dark and patient. She had thought of it as she dressed, and put her hand on it, and taken her hand away. Eni knew that face. Eni had seen it in a hotel lobby and on a laptop screen in the dark. If she came, even now, even in this crowd, a pair of small, watchful eyes would find her out in a second, and the whole four years would be thrown away in a church.
So Kamsi sat at the back with a face that belonged to nobody, and looked.
She looked at the coffin. She looked at the great ugly wreath with her old lover’s name on it. She looked at the younger sister in the front pew in grey lace, with her braids drawn back from a narrow, tired face, and a handbag set down beside her on the wood like a piece of luggage left for someone at a station.
An empty place. Kamsi knew whom it was for.
She felt, in her chest, something that she did not want to name. It was not satisfaction. For twenty-five years, she had imagined this family’s grief as a thing she would one day be able to look at with a cold and shining heart: a kind of bill, paid at last. It was not like that. It was only a church. A tired woman, an old woman in a box and a hymn that smelled of dust.
Finish it, said her grandmother’s voice, in the back of her head. Finish am.
She did not know what that meant. She sat straight and put her hands together in her lap.
10.20am
The woman came in late. Kamsi saw her only because the doors opened behind her, and the light fell across the back pews, and a shadow stopped in it.
She was a large woman in a loose black dress, with dark glasses, a bag and short red hair. She stood in the doorway for a moment with the sun behind her.
Then she did something that made Kamsi’s skin go tight from her scalp to her heels.
She raised her hand and knocked on the open door.
Three times. Softly. On the wood of the frame, the way a person knocks who has been taught that every room is somebody’s.
She waited. Then she came in.
Kamsi did not move. She had not moved when she saw the first red hair, or the dress, or the glasses. But she had kept a notebook for twenty-five years, and in a margin of it, in blue biro, under a drawing of a pharmacy front, she had once written: Why would anyone knock on an open door?
The woman walked up the side aisle with her head bowed. She was heavy, and moved the way heavy people sometimes do who have decided to be quiet about it, with her weight carried low and her shoulders drawn in. She slid into the second pew, directly behind the younger sister, and sat.
Kamsi took off her dark glasses. She was a make-up artist. It was the one true thing she knew about herself. She knew how to build a face and she knew how to unbuild it. She knew that a person can add forty pounds and take away a colour and hide a jaw in a round of softness, and that all of it, in the end, is a layer. Under it, the architecture does not change. The set of the ears. The distance from the brow to the first curve
of the eye. The angled, stubborn bone at the point of the chin.
She looked at the red hair, and thought: wig, or dye? Dye. It had grown out half an inch at the root in the colour of ash.
She looked at the weight, and took it off in her mind, one stroke at a time, the way you lift a mask.
She looked at the eyes behind the glass, and the glass was dark, but not dark enough.
Small, she thought. Watchful.
A choir began on the left, and the congregation stood. The woman in the second pew rose with it. Somebody, down at the front, made a sound, and the younger sister’s shoulders went rigid, and half the church turned to look at the aisle. Kamsi did not turn. She was looking at the woman, and the woman was leaning forward in her pew, and laying a hand on the sister’s shoulder, quietly, as one lays a hand on something that has been hurt.
And then, as the sister drew breath, the woman smiled.
It was only a flicker. It was a tiny, tender thing, directed at nobody, and it passed over her face the way a bird’s shadow passes over a lawn. It went up on one side only. It leaned a little to the right, as it had in a newspaper photograph twenty-five years old.
Kamsi stopped breathing. She had been looking for a thin woman with black hair for four years. She had searched for her in airports and on the covers of magazines and in a hundred crowds, in all the places where a
woman might hide, and she had never once thought to look in the one place where a woman might hide best.
She had looked for a face. She should have looked for a bend in a smile.
The hymn came to its end, and the woman did not wait for the benediction.
She turned quietly and left by the side door, with her head bowed and her bag held close, and Kamsi was on her feet before she knew it, sliding along the back pew, shouldering past an usher with a tray, out into the glare of the lawn.
She saw the red hair at the gate.
It moved without hurry through the crowd, between the men in agbada, past a woman selling bottled water, and out onto the road. Kamsi followed, with a hand pressed flat against her scarf. She did not run. She walked at the same pace, thirty paces behind, the way she had once followed a pharmacist through Lekki in a hired Corolla, with a flask of zobo and a pair of cheap sunglasses, in a city where everyone was in a hurry and nobody looked at anybody.
The woman stopped an okada. She said something to the rider. He nodded, and she climbed on behind him, and the bike pulled out into the traffic and was gone. Kamsi hailed another.
“Follow that one,” she said, and held out a thousand-naira note over the rider’s shoulder. “Oya. Go.”
They went down through Yaba and up the flat grey sprawl of Ikorodu Road, through a haze of exhaust and dust and the shouting of conductors. The first okada was always a hundred yards ahead, a black shape with a red head bent over the rider’s shoulder. At every junction it slowed, and at every junction Kamsi’s heart slowed with it.
She knew where it was going before it turned off the road.
Ojota. The great sodium bowl of the motor park, with its long rows of buses and its smell of diesel and roasted groundnuts, its touts shouting the names of cities into the afternoon: Abuja! Kaduna! PH, PH, PH! Aba!
She had stood here once, a few months after a woman had vanished, with a photograph in her hand. She had thought it was only a bus park.
The okada stopped. The woman paid, and went in. Kamsi stood at the edge of the tarmac, beside a heap of tyres, and watched her cross the ground to a small booth lit by a bare bulb, where a clerk in a bobble hat looked up from a ledger.
She could not hear what was said. She did not need to. She saw the woman take a ticket, fold it small, and put it in her pocket. She saw her walk down the long row of buses to one with a cracked windscreen and a picture of a saint over the driver, and climb in. It was a bus for the east.
Kamsi stood still in the heat for a long time.
Then she went to the booth.
“Sister, where you dey go?”
“Port Harcourt,” Kamsi said. “The next one.”
The Third Door · Continue reading
Chapter 34 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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