The Third Door — Chapter 42: Can I Help You?

Chapter summary

Dami finally meets Tonye across the pharmacy counter, where three knocks leave recognition deliberately unresolved.

11.05am, Friday 18 December 2026, Old GRA, Port Harcourt

December came in with the harmattan.

It blew down from the north in the first week, a dry brown wind that put a haze over the sun and a fine gold dust on every surface in Port Harcourt, the window ledges and the leaves and the bonnets of the cars, so that the whole city looked as if it had been lightly dusted with flour. The mornings were cold. The evenings smelled of woodsmoke. People wore cardigans to church, and rubbed cream on their cracked lips, and told each other that this was the weather in which things came home.

Dami had come back on a Friday, on the early flight, with one small bag and no list at all. She had spent the autumn in Lagos in her mother’s house, among her mother’s things, apart from one wet week in October that she did not speak of. She sorted the cupboards, folded the rugs and gave the sewing machine to Bukola, who was starting a business. The exercise books she carried to the post office and brought home again, unable to let go of them, and put back in their pillowcase at the bottom of a box, in a room with two bunk beds under a sheet. She visited the grave on a Sunday and said nothing. She left her husband’s last three messages unanswered, and wrote him one letter, which said only: Thank you for telling me. I forgive you for the year. I do not forgive you for the silence. I do not think I ever shall, and I think that is all right.

She had also, on a bright morning in November, found a small round man in a brown safari suit at the gate of her mother’s house, holding a newspaper. He had taken off his cap. He had said, in a voice of such crumpled apology that she nearly laughed, that he was sorry for the trouble, that he had been following her since 2022 on the instruction of a person who no longer required his services, that he had been dismissed in October and was therefore free to say that she was the most patient woman he had ever followed, and that he hoped that she would find what she was looking for.

“Is she happy?” Dami had asked him. She did not know why.

Mr. Etim had considered the question gravely.

“Madam,” he had said, “she dey calm. For my own experience, na the same thing.”

11.05am, Friday 18 December 2026, Old GRA, Port Harcourt

She stood on the pavement in front of the white building with the green cross, in the dusty gold light, and looked at the glass door. There was a ramp for wheelchairs. A row of pots with red geraniums. A banner for the Christmas season in blue and white. Behind the glass, through a haze of her own breath, she could see the shelves, the till, the girl with the braids setting out a display of vitamins, and, at the far end, behind a counter, a woman in a loose dress the colour of a ripe mango, bent over a ledger.

She was too far to see her face.

Dami stood and held her handbag against her chest, and felt her heart beat against it.

She had come with no speech. She had thought, on the flight, of a hundred things she might say, and had let each of them go, like paper from a train window. Eni. It’s me. Mama is dead. I found the book. I know what you did. I don’t care what you did. I am so angry. I missed you.

None of them was right. Each of them was a door.

She lifted her hand.

She knocked on the glass. Three times, softly, evenly, the way a woman had once taught a girl of fourteen to do it on the edge of a bed.

She waited.

Nothing happened. A bus went past. The harmattan breathed against her face.

Then the girl with the braids looked up, and smiled, and came across the shop, and unlocked the door.

“Good morning, Ma. Welcome to Briggs Pharmacy.”

“Good morning.” Dami’s voice came out surprisingly steady. “I would like to speak to the superintendent.” “Madam Briggs?” The girl’s smile widened, then faltered a little, and she looked at Dami’s face for rather longer than politeness required. “Ah. I think say I don see you before.”

“I think you may have.”

“Ma, come.” She stood back. “She dey for counter.”

It was eleven paces from the door to the counter. Dami counted them.

She counted them the way her sister had once counted the steps of a school bus, and the cracks in a ceiling, and the lights of a city seen through a window at five in the morning. She counted the shelves. She counted the bottles of vitamin C. She counted her breath. Three, four, five, and the faint smell of cocoa butter. Seven, eight, and the soft tick of a clock on the wall. Ten.

The woman behind the counter did not look up.

She was writing something in the ledger. She wrote in a round, tidy, upright hand, with her left hand cupped lightly beneath her right, as a person steadies a pen. The light came in over her shoulder and caught the short red hair and the line of her cheek. She was heavier than she had been. She was older. She wore a small gold cross on a chain.

Dami stood in front of the glass counter with her bag in both hands.

She could not speak. She could not have said how long she stood there. It might have been a second. It might have been the whole of the thirty-five years. She was aware of the shop around her, bright and dusty, and the girl with the braids standing a little way off with a bottle in her hand, and of the harmattan pressing against the windows.

The woman wrote a figure. She blotted it. She lifted her head.

Their eyes met.

They were small, steady, watchful eyes. They were brown, with a thin dark ring at the edge, and they travelled across Dami’s face slowly, from forehead to chin, as a person reads a page in a language that she was taught as a child and has not spoken since.

Something moved in them.

It was only a half second. Dami would remember it all her life and never be able to say what it was. It was a hesitation, a small, soft, interrupted breath, the pause of a foot upon a stair that is not there. A flicker, like the first grey line of the dawn in a sky that has not decided to be morning.

Then the woman laid down her pen.

She raised her hand, and she knocked three times on the glass of the counter.

Softly. Evenly. With the knuckle of her first finger. Once. Twice. Three times.

And she smiled.

It was a gentle, courteous, professional smile, and it went up on one side only, a little higher on the right, like a house that had settled.

“Good morning,” said Tonye Briggs. “Can I help you?”

The Third Door · Series finale

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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.