The Third Door — Chapter 7: The Text

Chapter summary

A midnight text exposes Tunde’s affair, forcing Eni to confront guilt, memory and inherited consequences.

11.52pm, Wednesday 12 January 2022, Ikoyi, Lagos

The house in Ikoyi was too quiet at night. It was the quiet of expensive things: double glazing, a sleeping generator, floors that gave nothing away. Eni lay awake on her side of a bed so wide that two people could live in it without ever touching.

Tunde slept on his back, one arm flung out, his mouth a little open. In sleep he looked like the man she had married: boyish, trusting, unguarded. It was one of the cruelties of his face.

On the bedside table, his phone lit up.

She did not move.

The screen glowed there, a small white rectangle in the dark, then dimmed itself and went out. She counted to thirty. When it lit again, she turned her head very slowly and read it.

K: Thursday. 7pm. The Meridian Court, Ikoyi. Same room as last time? I’ll wear the red.

Her first thought was clinical. Eleven fifty-two. A woman who sends that at this hour is either careless or wants to be caught.

Her second thought was nothing at all.

She went very still, as she had at fifteen in a hospital corridor when a doctor came out to speak to her mother with a face like a closed door. She let every feeling in her body wait outside the room.

Then she slid out of bed.

His passcode was his mother’s birthday. She had known it for eleven years. She had never used it, and had been proud of that, the way one is proud of the keys to a house one has never needed to enter.

She entered it now.

The thread was short. Nothing coarse. Four weeks of dates and room numbers and small, careful jokes, written by a woman who knew exactly how to write to a married man. At the top of the screen, a single letter in a grey circle. K.

She copied the number onto her palm with a ballpoint from the drawer. She put the phone back exactly as she had found it, face down, the cable at the same angle.

Tunde stirred and turned onto his side. She stood motionless until his breathing evened.

12.20am

In the downstairs bathroom, with the door locked and the extractor fan humming, Eni sat on the closed lid of the toilet and typed the number into a search engine.

She expected nothing. A name, maybe. A company.

The first result was a business page. Kamsi Nwosu Make-Up Artistry. Bridal, editorial, film. Bookings. A link. She followed it.

A professional profile. A headshot, simple, almost austere: a young woman with her hair drawn back, face turned slightly toward the camera, chin lifted.

Eni looked at the face.

She looked at it for a very long time.

The bathroom did not change. The fan hummed. A drip fell from the tap into the basin at its own patient pace.

She scrolled down to the portfolio. Bridal shoots. Pale faces under glossy lights. Then a series called Seventies. A model in an enormous round afro, tilted toward the lens, lips parted, eyes dark and amused. Beneath it, a behind-the-scenes photograph: the make-up artist herself, holding the wig on its stand beside her own cheek and laughing at something out of frame.

And suddenly Eni was ten years old.

It did not come as a memory. It came as a door.

A hallway in the old house. The school bus driver’s apologetic face. A hot head, a note from the teacher, a key that turned too easily in the lock. A door standing a hand’s width open, and a strip of yellow light along the tiles. Her own small fingers on the wood. The weight of it giving.

A woman’s face looking up from the bed. Young. Round cheeks. A huge dark halo of hair.

The woman smiled at her.

Not cruelly. Not cruelly at all. That was the part that had never been explained in thirty years. A small smile, one corner higher than the other, as if she were saying something very quietly with her mouth.

And behind it the sounds, the sounds from beyond her father’s back, which Eni’s mind had always packed away in cotton wool.

She was on the bathroom floor. She did not remember getting there. The tiles were cool against her cheek, and her palm, with its smeared blue number, lay open beside her face like a dead leaf.

Ijeoma Nwosu.

She knew the name. It had been on every front page the year she turned twenty. A student. A pregnancy. A back-street clinic. A dead girl in a one-bedroom flat in Ogba, and a lecturer-doctor in the dock with his face in his hands.

Even then, she had known why the photograph looked so familiar.

She had told no one. Who could she have told?

And now the same face, the same mouth, looked out of a laptop in the dark, not yet thirty and wearing a black sweater, and was sleeping with her husband.

Eni lay on the bathroom floor and, with the terrible clarity of the very frightened, did the arithmetic she had been doing since she was ten.

I saw. I said nothing. A woman died. My father went to prison. My mother worked herself into the ground.

And now there is a girl with that face. And my husband is about to lose everything because of me.

It was not rational. She knew it was not rational. She had a degree in pharmacy and had never believed in curses. But in the arithmetic of a ten-year-old’s guilt, she was the one who had stood at the door. She was the one who had begun it all.

Now it was beginning again.

1.05am

She washed her face. She hung the hand towel back on its rail. She looked at herself in the mirror and arranged her smile, left it to settle, and watched it lean, as it always did.

She climbed the stairs in the dark.

At the door of the bedroom she stopped.

Her husband slept on the other side of it. A good man, some days. A bad man, on others. A stranger, certainly, in this one respect: she had just realised that she did not know whether she wanted him to be caught.

She knocked on the door. Three times, softly, as she had every night of her marriage.

No answer came. Nobody inside was awake to give one.

She stood with her hand flat on the wood.

She had seen that smile before. It had belonged to a dead woman.

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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.