Chapter summary
Dami uncovers Eniola’s legal rebirth, then Dele admits enabling and protecting her meticulously planned disappearance.
Monday 7 and Tuesday 8 September 2026, Lagos
It took Dami three days to find the name of the man.
She started on Monday morning at the library of the Ministry of Justice in Alausa, in a long, cold, ill-lit room with a ceiling fan that groaned and a clerk at a desk who looked at her request with the open, perpetual weariness of a man who had been asked for the same thing by ten thousand frightened women. She asked for the gazette. He gave her the key to a green steel cabinet. In it, in rows of fat bound volumes, the Lagos State Official Gazette lay in order of date like the minutes of a long and dull argument.
She knew the month. She knew the name.
Tonye Briggs.
She turned pages for four hours. Notices of land. Notices of appointments, of vacancies, of the death of a chief. Under a bare bulb at a table, she went through the whole of January and February 2022 with a ruler held under every line, and her eyes burned, and at ten minutes to four she found it. It was set in the tightest, greyest type, a column among columns, three notices of change of name stacked one above the other. The top and bottom were for strangers. In the middle, between a man who wished to be called Chukwuemeka and a woman who preferred Adebimpe:
CHANGE OF NAME. I, TONYE BRIGGS, formerly known and addressed as ENIOLA OYELARAN-BANKOLE, female, Pharmacist, of c/o 14 Marina, Lagos Island, hereby give notice that I have renounced the use of my former name and that I shall at all times hereafter be called and known by the name of TONYE BRIGGS. All persons are hereby requested to address me accordingly. Dated this 3rd day of February 2022. Solicitors: FASHINA & ASSOCIATES, Chambers, 14 Marina, Lagos Island.
Dami read it standing up.
She read it a second time, with her hand pressed flat to the page, as though it might otherwise lift off the table.
Formerly known and addressed as.
So there it was in black type and a government’s seal. Not a doubt in a woman’s head. Not a trick of the light on a television screen or a pair of scissors held too gracefully. A legal fact, with a date and a clerk’s stamp and the name of a firm.
She copied the address onto the back of her hand with a ballpoint. She walked out through the cold green corridor and into the white glare of the car park, and sat in a taxi with her forehead against the window for a long time before she said, Marina.
Tuesday 8 September 2026, 11.15am The chambers of Fashina & Associates occupied the fourth floor of an old building on the Marina with a creaking lift and a view of the lagoon. It was a quiet, dim, expensive suite, panelled in dark
wood, with a receptionist in a navy suit who took her name and went away and came back and said, in a voice that had no surprise in it whatever:
“Barrister will see you now.”
Dami knocked three times on the door before she went in.
He rose from behind a desk of black wood and stood with his hands loose at his sides. He was perhaps forty, tall and lean, in a white shirt with the sleeves turned back to the elbow, with a plain steel watch on his wrist and a trimmed beard going faintly grey at the chin. He had a quiet, intelligent, sad sort of face. He looked, she thought, like a man who had been expecting a particular knock at a particular door for a long time and had grown tired of waiting.
And he smelled of cedar.
She had never smelled it before in her life. It reached her across the room, warm and dry, like the inside of a wardrobe in a good house. A thin cold thread ran down her back.
“Mrs. Lawal,” he said. “I think you had better sit.”
“You know who I am.”
“You have your mother’s neck. And your sister’s way of looking at a door.”
She sat. “Is she alive?”
“I believe so.”
“Where?”
“Port Harcourt. She is a pharmacist, and, from what I read in the business pages in June, a rather successful one. Three shops. A name you have already found, I suspect, or you would not be here.”
“Tonye Briggs.”
“Yes.”
“Is it her?”
“It is her.”
The room did not change. A ferry hooted on the lagoon. Somewhere down the corridor, a printer was spitting out its pages with the unhurried regularity of a heartbeat. She had waited four years and six months to hear a single sentence, and she heard it, and it was just a sentence.
She had thought that she would cry. She did not.
“You drew up the papers.”
“I did. In January. It took four days.”
“Did she tell you why?”
“No.”
“Did you ask?”
“No.” He looked at his hands. “She asked that I should not.” “Who are you to my sister?”
He took a long time to answer. He looked out of the window at the water, and a muscle moved in his jaw.
“For five weeks,” he said, “I was a man she did not have to be careful with.”
Dami let that sit.
“I am not going to ask you what you mean by that.”
“I would not blame you if you did.”
“Did you know she was going?”
“Not until the night before.” A faint rueful flicker crossed his face. “I think a part of me always knew. She would sit in the lamplight and look at the window as though she were counting the floors.”
“And you let her go.”
“I did what she asked.”
“You helped her.”
“I did what she asked,” Dele Fashina said again, quietly, “and I would do it again.”
11.50am
“There is something I should tell you.” He had risen, and was standing at the window with his back to her. He did not turn.
“In March of 2022, a small man came to see me. Mr. Etim. A private investigator. He worked for your sister’s husband. He had traced her telephone north, and he wanted to know whether I, as a colleague of Mr. Bankole’s, had heard anything at the bank.”
“And?”
“I told him that a woman matching your sister’s description had been seen in the Wuse market, in a green headscarf, two weeks before.” He paused. “There was no such woman. I invented her.”
Dami stared at him.
“Why?”
“To keep him looking in Abuja.” He turned. His face was tired. “A man who is looking in Abuja is not looking anywhere else. I am not proud of it. But I was the one person in Lagos who knew where she was not, and I could not tell him where she was.”
“You knew where she was?”
“I knew a name. A city.” He lifted one hand. “She did not tell me. I only put it together. A woman who had never been to Port Harcourt, asking me to draft a name from a Port Harcourt family, with a Port Harcourt surname that appears on a pharmacy sign in the east. It is not very difficult. I have told nobody.” He smiled, a little. “I am telling you.”
She was silent a long time.
“Does she remember me?” It was not what she had meant to ask. It came out of her in a cracked voice that she did not recognise.
Dele Fashina looked at her gravely.
“When she left, she said to me, ’I am going to forget all of it. Please make that easy.’ I did not know what she meant. I do not know whether she was speaking figuratively or whether it was a plan. I have thought about it for four years. I do not know what a person can do to herself, or what she can decide to do, or whether the two are very different.” He shook his head slowly. “I think she meant it. I think it worked. Or I think she is the most patient liar in Nigeria. I have never known which.”
“And if I go?”
“Then you will see.”
“Is she happy?”
He did not answer for so long that she thought he had not heard. When he did, his voice was quiet.
“She asked me for one thing, the night before she left. She said that if you ever came here, if you ever found me, I was to give you a message. Only that. Nothing else.”
Dami’s hands were shaking. She laid them flat on her knees.
“What was it?”
“Tell Dami,” said Dele Fashina, “that I always knocked first.”
The Third Door · Continue reading
Chapter 37 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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