The Call

For three weeks, Adaeze Okonkwo forgot that the contract had an end date.

This was the problem. She understood it was the problem even as it was happening, the way you understand a wave is going to hit you before it hits you. She kept forgetting. She would be in a meeting on a Tuesday afternoon, listening to her CFO walk her through the Q3 projections, and she would catch herself thinking about the particular way Segun Machi Johnson poured coffee in the morning , slow, from high up, holding the pot with his left hand because he was left-handed, which was a detail she had learned only by sleeping in his bed four nights a week for three weeks , and she would have to physically clear her throat and look at the spreadsheet again.

She had been professional her entire adult life. She had built a company from her childhood bedroom. She had sat across from men twice her age and negotiated valuations that would have made her father weep. She had never, once, been the kind of woman who lost the thread of a meeting because a man made coffee a particular way.

She was losing the thread of meetings now.

Bolu noticed. Kemi, her lawyer, noticed. Ifeoma noticed and did not say anything, which was worse. Her mother called on a Sunday and said, before hello, "You sound happy," in a tone that suggested she was not sure this was a good thing.

Segun noticed too. He did not comment. He simply adjusted , put her phone face-down when they ate together, stopped checking his own phone in her presence, started asking her about the payment reconciliation error at the end of the day instead of the beginning. As if he had decided, in some unspoken corner of himself, that she was allowed to be distracted around him and he would arrange his behaviour so that she could be.

This was also the problem.

Because if you spent three weeks being taken care of in small, unadvertised ways by a man who had not asked you to notice, you began to notice anyway. You began to expect it. And expectation, Adaeze knew, was how women like her , women who had taught themselves not to need , got themselves killed.

On the third Thursday, she came home to her own apartment for the first time in a week.

She had meant to go to his place. He had meant her to go to his place. But she had said, over the phone at lunchtime, "Let me sleep in my own bed tonight. I miss my own pillows." And he had said, "Okay, Adaeze," in a voice that had almost , almost , sounded like disappointment, which she had replayed in her head the entire drive home.

Her apartment felt borrowed. That was the first thing she noticed. Three weeks. She had been gone three weeks. The plants needed water. The fridge had gone bare. Bolu had been keeping the place alive in her absence, but the bed was unused, and the indentation on her pillow had relaxed back into flatness, and she sat on the edge of her own bed in her own apartment and thought: I don't live here anymore.

Which was a stupid thing to think. She had lived here for four years. She owned it. She had paid for it with money she had made herself. It was hers in every possible sense of the word.

But she did not live here.

She lived, for the last three weeks, in a tower on Glover Road with a man who poured coffee from high up and knew how she took hers.

She was thinking about this when the phone rang.

Not her phone. The old landline her mother had insisted she install in case of emergencies, in case the cell network went down, in case , her mother's list of possible disasters was long and specific and had been calibrated by thirty years of Lagos. Adaeze never used it. Almost no one had the number.

She answered it.

"Hello?"

"Adaeze," said the voice, "it's Yemisi Machi Johnson."

His mother.

Adaeze sat up straighter. The woman had her landline number. Of course she did. That was the kind of thing Yemisi Machi Johnson knew.

"Good evening, ma."

"Good evening. I won't keep you. I would like to see you. Tomorrow. Eleven AM. My house. Come alone."

Not a question. Not even quite a request. A woman of her generation did not ask.

"Ma. If this is about Segun , "

"It is about Segun."

"Then shouldn't Segun , "

"No."

The silence that followed had weight. It was not hostile. It was patient. It was the silence of a woman who had raised four children and buried a husband and run a textile business for forty years and had long ago stopped explaining herself to anyone.

"Yes, ma," Adaeze said. "Eleven AM."

"Thank you, Adaeze."

The line clicked.

Adaeze sat with the dead receiver in her hand for a full minute before she moved.

She did not tell Segun.

This was, she realised later , much later, in a different house at a different hour , the first real mistake she made. She told herself, standing in her kitchen with the kettle heating, that she was not telling him because she did not want to worry him. This was half true. The other half was that she did not want him to tell his mother not to do it. She wanted to know what Yemisi Machi Johnson wanted to say to her. She wanted to hear it in the woman's own voice. She wanted, in the part of herself that had built a company, the unmediated data.

She drank her tea. She did not sleep well.

At 11 AM the next morning, in a dress she had changed twice, she rang the bell of the Machi Johnson family house in Ikoyi , the old one, the one Segun had grown up in, not the one he lived in now , and a woman in a wrapper let her in without speaking and led her to a back veranda where Yemisi was already seated with a pot of tea and a small plate of chin-chin, her reading glasses on a gold chain around her neck, a newspaper folded beside her saucer.

"Sit."

Adaeze sat.

"Tea?"

"Please, ma."

Yemisi poured. Her hands were older than her face. Adaeze had noticed this at the dinner three weeks ago too , the hands were brown and spotted, the face was the face of a woman twenty years younger, done monthly at the salon on Akin Adesola. The effect was of a woman who had refused, on principle, to age where anyone could see her.

"I will be direct with you, Adaeze. You are a direct woman. I respect this."

"Thank you, ma."

"Do you love my son?"

Adaeze set her cup down.

She had prepared for many questions. She had not prepared for this one. She had a whole drive-over of prepared answers for: what is the arrangement, what are your intentions, how serious is this, what is your family background on your father's side. She did not have a prepared answer for do you love my son.

She said, carefully, "Ma. With respect. I have known Segun for two months."

"That is not an answer."

"It is an honest one."

"Is it? Honest women know how they feel, Adaeze. I do not think you are a woman who does not know how she feels. I think you are a woman who does not want to say."

Adaeze looked at her. Yemisi looked back. Neither of them blinked.

"I am thinking about your son," Adaeze said finally, "more than I thought I would be at this stage."

"Good," said Yemisi. "Then listen carefully."

She set her cup down. She folded her hands on the table.

"My son has not told you," she said, "that his father's estate includes a controlling interest in three companies that are currently in a probate holding pattern. He has not told you that the terms of probate require him to demonstrate, before the end of this calendar year, a stable domestic arrangement. He has not told you that the word arrangement is not metaphorical. He has not told you that six months ago, before he met you, there was a proposal on the table from a different family , an old family, a family I have known since Segun was a boy , involving a daughter I have also known since she was a child. He has not told you that this proposal was not declined. It was paused. He has not told you that the pause ends in January. He has not told you that I have, twice this month, asked him when he plans to tell you, and he has, twice, said soon."

She paused. She picked up her tea. She drank, slowly.

"I am telling you now," she said, "because I like you, Adaeze. I liked you at my dinner. I like the way you argue about Fela. I would be very pleased if you were the one my son chose. But I will not have you chosen by accident, because my son is a coward about difficult conversations."

Adaeze did not cry.

She wanted to. She did not. She sat across from Yemisi Machi Johnson with her hands flat on the table and she said, "Thank you for telling me, ma," in a voice that did not shake. And Yemisi said, "Finish your tea, Adaeze. You have not touched your tea." And Adaeze finished her tea because to leave it would have been a concession and she was not prepared to concede anything yet, not here, not on this veranda, not in front of this woman.

When she left, she drove herself.

She told Tunde to go home. She drove to the Lekki Conservation Centre, which was empty on a Friday at noon because everyone was at work, and she walked the canopy walkway alone, three hundred metres above the treetops, and she did not think about the contract and she did not think about Segun and she did not think about the woman she had never met whose name she did not know but who had apparently been, for six months, the default option.

She thought about her father.

Her father had loved her mother. Her father had also, she knew , she had known since she was nineteen, since she had found the letter by accident in a drawer , almost married another woman first. A woman her grandmother had chosen. A woman he had been weeks away from proposing to when he met her mother at a church function and decided, in one evening, that the woman his grandmother had chosen was not the woman he was going to marry.

He had told his grandmother two weeks before the wedding.

He had broken the other woman's heart. This was the part nobody in her family said out loud, but Adaeze had always known. The other woman had moved to London and married a Nigerian doctor and apparently done well, by all accounts. But she had been broken first. Adaeze's mother had been chosen over her, and Adaeze's mother had known this, and it had been one of the small cold things in her mother's life , the knowledge of being chosen at someone else's cost.

Adaeze walked the canopy walkway and thought: I am that woman now. The first one. The paused one. And someone, somewhere, is about to find out.

Then she thought: no. I am both women. I am the one he is choosing and I am the one he is choosing against. He has not chosen yet. He is the one in the middle.

And she thought: and his mother has just handed me a weapon.

She did not go to his place that night.

She texted him at 4 PM: Pushing tonight. Slammed at the office. She had not been at the office. She was in her own apartment, in her own bed, not working, staring at the ceiling.

He wrote back within a minute: Okay. Tomorrow?

She wrote: Let me see how tomorrow looks.

He did not write back for eleven minutes. When he did, he wrote: Is everything okay?

She looked at the question for a long time.

She wrote: Yes.

She sent it.

She put the phone face down.

It was the first lie she had told him.

She went to his place the next night.

She had thought about it all Friday night and all Saturday morning. She had thought about not going , about making him call, making him ask, making him come to her. But she knew herself. She knew that she would not be able to sit across from him in her own apartment, in the space where she had been a person before him, and hear whatever he was going to say. She needed to hear it in his kitchen. She needed to hear it in the place where she had sat on his counter and told him she was in trouble.

She needed to know what his face did when she asked.

She wore a different colour. Not black. Cream , a slip dress the colour of poured milk, soft around her ankles, demure in a way that was its own weapon. She did her hair in a low knot at the base of her neck. She looked, in the mirror before she left, like a woman who had decided something.

Tunde drove her. She did not speak the whole ride. Tunde did not ask.

Segun opened the door. He looked , she saw it instantly , worried. He had been worried since her text Friday. He had been, she realised, going over the last three weeks in his head trying to figure out what he had done.

"Hi."

"Hi."

"Come in."

She came in.

The apartment was warm, as it always was. Something cooking. A record playing low. He had, she noted, poured her wine already, which was new , usually he waited, asked her what she wanted. He was trying to make it easy. He was trying to compensate for something he did not yet know she knew.

She took the glass. She did not drink from it.

"Segun."

"Adaeze."

"I had tea with your mother yesterday."

She watched his face.

She had been watching for a long time and she knew how to watch, and what she saw , what she saw in the single unguarded second before his face closed , was the exact thing she had come to see. He knew. He knew what his mother had told her. He knew before she said it. Because his mother had told him, probably that same afternoon, probably in a phone call he had taken in this apartment, probably while he was cooking something for a Thursday night dinner that never happened because Adaeze had wanted to sleep in her own bed.

"Adaeze , "

"I want you to tell me," she said, "everything she told me. In your own words. Now."

He set his wine down.

He sat on the sofa. He did not invite her to sit. She did not sit.

"Yes," he said, carefully, "there is another , family. Yes, there was a , an understanding, at one point. Yes, it was paused. Yes, my father's estate has , provisions. Yes, I should have told you. I was going to tell you. I have been planning to tell you."

"When."

"Soon."

"Segun. When."

"Next week. I was going to tell you next week. I wanted to tell you at the right moment. I wanted , "

"You wanted to sleep with me first."

He stopped.

She had not meant to say it that crudely. It came out of her mouth before she could soften it, and once it was in the room she could not take it back, and she watched him flinch and did not apologise.

"Adaeze. That is not , "

"Isn't it?"

"No."

"Segun. Isn't it?"

He stood up. He took a step toward her. She took a step back.

"Don't."

"Adaeze."

"Don't touch me right now."

He stopped. His hands went to his sides. He stood there, four feet away from her, in his own living room, in front of the sofa where they had eaten jollof three weeks ago, where she had let him see her, and he looked, for the first time since she had met him, like a man who did not know what to do.

"I am not," he said, slowly, "in love with her. I never was. The arrangement with her family was , arranged. It was paused because I did not want it. I have not wanted it for two years. I met you at Circa because Tomi suggested you, and I went because I thought it would be a good distraction from a decision I did not want to make, and instead , instead I met you, and I , "

He stopped.

"I what," she said.

"I decided something else."

"When."

"The second dinner. I decided at the second dinner."

"Then why didn't you tell me."

"Because I didn't know how."

"Segun , "

"Because I was afraid that if I told you, you would think the whole thing was , compromised. That I was using you to get out of the other thing. That the contract was , leverage."

"Was it?"

"No."

"Segun. Was it."

"No. Adaeze. No. I fell in love with you."

The words landed in the room the way a stone lands in water. Everything went still.

She stood there with her wine in her hand, and he stood there with his hands at his sides, and between them was a stretch of wooden floor she could not make herself cross, and he had just told her something she had been waiting to hear and did not know if she could believe.

"When," she said, finally. Her voice was different now.

"I don't know. Gradually. Then all at once. The night you came here. When you said you were in trouble. When you cried in my kitchen."

"I didn't cry in your kitchen."

"You did. A little. You didn't notice."

She had not noticed.

She set the wine down on the side table. She did not sit. She did not move. She stood in the middle of his living room and she looked at him and she said ,

"I need a week."

"Adaeze."

"I need a week. I need to think. I need to be , I need to be not in this apartment, not in your bed, not in your kitchen, for a week. I need to figure out what I feel on my own, without you in the room, because when you are in the room I cannot , I cannot think clearly."

"Okay."

"I am not ending the contract."

"Okay."

"I am not saying no."

"Okay."

"I am saying I need a week."

"Okay. Take a week."

She nodded. She picked up her bag. She walked to the door. He did not follow her. He stood where he was, in the middle of his living room, and watched her go.

At the door, she stopped. She did not turn around.

"Segun."

"Yes."

"If you tell her , the other family , if you tell them no. This week. Without talking to me first. Without asking me. Without making it contingent on my answer. If you do that this week, and I hear about it from your mother, not from you." She paused. "That would mean something."

"Okay."

She opened the door.

She closed it behind her.

In the car, Tunde did not look at her in the rearview mirror. He drove her home. He said, at the door of her apartment building, "Good night, ma."

"Good night, Tunde."

"Ma."

"Yes."

He hesitated. He was not a man who hesitated.

"Ma. The traffic tonight. I took the long way."

"I know you did."

"I thought , you might need the time."

She looked at him. He was twenty-nine, maybe thirty. He had a wife, probably. Children, probably. He drove Lagos for a living and he had taken the long way home for a woman whose face, in the back of his car, had been doing whatever it had been doing for thirty-five minutes.

"Thank you, Tunde."

"Yes, ma."

She went inside.

She climbed the stairs to her apartment. She turned on one lamp, the smallest one, by the window. She sat on the edge of her bed. She did not cry.

She pulled out her phone. She opened a new message to Ifeoma. She typed: Can I come over tomorrow. I need to tell you something.

She sent it.

Ifeoma wrote back in nine seconds: Come now.

Adaeze put her shoes back on.

She left her own apartment for the second time that night.

She did not know, yet, what she was going to do.

But somewhere, in a different part of Lagos, a phone was ringing in a different house, and a woman she had never met , the one who had been paused, the one who had been the default , was about to be told that the pause was over.

And in another house, in Ikoyi, Yemisi Machi Johnson was pouring herself a second glass of sherry, watching the lagoon go black through the window, waiting to see what her son was going to do.

And in a tower on Glover Road, Segun Machi Johnson sat on the edge of his bed with his phone in his hand and did not know, for the first time in his adult life, what the next right thing to do was.