The Week

The first thing Adaeze did, on the Monday morning of the week she had asked for, was leave her phone in a drawer.

Not all of her phones. Her work phone stayed with her, because Quartz Pay did not stop running because she had asked a man for seven days of distance, and her CFO needed her to sign three things and approve a wire transfer and respond to an investor email by 11 AM. But her personal phone — the iPhone with the green leather case Segun had given her in week two, the one she had used for two months to text him at 11 PM and 6 AM and every hour in between — that phone went into the second drawer of her bedside table, and she closed the drawer, and she did not open it again until Wednesday.

This was discipline. She knew it was discipline.

The other thing it was, she could not yet name.

Monday — Ifeoma's couch.

She went to Ifeoma's at 7 PM. Ifeoma had three children under nine and a husband who travelled for a Pan-African manufacturing conglomerate and a four-bedroom house in Parkview that always, somehow, smelled faintly of red oil and Pinesol. Adaeze had keys. She let herself in. The children were already asleep. Ifeoma was on the sofa in pyjamas, the silk ones with the embroidered collar, with a glass of red wine in one hand and the TV showing a Nollywood movie she was not watching.

"Sit. Wine?"

"Please."

Ifeoma got up. She came back with a glass and a plate of small chops — puff puff, samosa, two cocktail sausages — that she had clearly been eating alone at 7 PM on a Monday because her husband was in Cairo and her mother had told her at thirty-six she should be eating better. She set the plate on the coffee table.

"Eat."

"I'm not hungry."

"Eat anyway. You've lost weight. You think I haven't been watching."

Adaeze ate a samosa. It was excellent. Ifeoma's housekeeper made them on Sunday afternoons and froze them in batches.

"Tell me," Ifeoma said.

Adaeze told her.

She told her the whole thing — Circa, the contract, the four weeks of Fridays, the kitchen, the bed, the morning after, the three weeks of forgetting the contract had an end date, the tea with Yemisi, the conversation in the apartment, the I fell in love with you, the week she had asked for. She told it without performance. She told it the way Ifeoma deserved to hear it, which was the truth.

Ifeoma did not interrupt.

When Adaeze was done — twenty-three minutes, she would later realise, of unbroken talking — Ifeoma set down her wine glass. She picked up the plate of small chops. She held it out.

"Eat another samosa."

Adaeze ate another samosa.

"Now drink your wine."

Adaeze drank her wine.

"Now I will say what I think. Are you ready."

"I'm ready."

"He is in love with you."

"Ifeoma."

"He is, babe. The driver. The mother. The cooking. The four weeks of letting you decide. The I have been performing calm for you — Adaeze, I'm sorry, that was the line that did me in when you said it. That is not a man making a deal. That is a man falling. He fell. He is still falling. I do not have to know him to know this."

"And the other woman?"

"The other woman is a problem. Yes."

"Is she a deal-breaker?"

Ifeoma was quiet for a long second. She set her wine down again. She turned, on the sofa, so that she was facing Adaeze fully. The TV played silently behind her.

"Adaeze. Listen to me carefully. I have known you for nineteen years. You are the smartest person in any room you walk into. You are also — and you know this is true, so I am allowed to say it — you are the worst at trusting men of any woman I have ever known. There is a reason for that. We do not have to talk about your father tonight, but we both know the reason. So when I tell you this, I want you to hear me as your friend and not as a woman trying to push you toward a decision: this man, from what you have told me, is not behaving like a liar. He is behaving like a coward. There is a difference."

"Is there."

"There is. A liar would not have told you about the other family at all. A liar would have ended it on his own and never let you know it had been a question. A liar would not have flinched when you asked him was the contract leverage. A coward, on the other hand, is a man who could not tell you a difficult truth at the right time and is now trying to figure out how to tell you a difficult truth at a slightly less right time. A coward is fixable. A liar is not."

Adaeze looked at her wine.

"What if he is both."

"Then you'll know. You'll know within a week. Cowards reveal themselves. Liars, if you give them long enough, also reveal themselves. Either way, the week you asked for is the right thing. You did the right thing, babe."

"I told him that if he ends it with the other family this week, without asking me first, that would mean something."

Ifeoma's eyebrows went up.

"You did?"

"I did."

"And you said this calmly."

"I said this calmly."

"Adaeze Okonkwo."

"What."

"You set him a test. Out loud. To his face. With the door open behind you."

"I did."

Ifeoma laughed. It was not a small laugh. It was the laugh she did when she was genuinely surprised, the one that carried into the kitchen and woke up the housekeeper sometimes.

"Babe."

"What."

"You are in love with him too."

Adaeze did not answer.

She drank her wine.

Tuesday — the office.

She worked twelve hours.

This was not unusual either. She had built Quartz Pay on twelve-hour days. What was unusual was that for the first time in three months, the twelve hours felt long. She caught herself at 4 PM looking at the clock and being surprised it was only 4 PM. She caught herself at 6 PM looking at the clock and being annoyed it was only 6 PM. She caught herself at 9:30 PM still at her desk because she did not want to go home to an apartment that did not smell of palm oil and onions and a man cooking jollof in a kitchen she could see from the sofa.

Her CFO came into her office at 9:45.

"Adaeze."

"Tunji."

"You're still here."

"I'm catching up."

"On what."

"Things."

"Adaeze."

"Tunji. I am fine."

He looked at her. He had been her CFO for four years. He was forty-one, married, three children, a man of the kind of quiet competence she had built the company on. He did not pry. He was looking at her now the way he had looked at her the week her father's anniversary fell on a board meeting and she had not been able to focus.

"Go home," he said. "I'll close up."

"It's my company."

"It's your company. Go home, Adaeze."

She went home.

She went home, and she did not open the second drawer of her bedside table, and she lay on her bed in her own apartment in Ikoyi and listened to the silence of a building that was not in a tower on Glover Road and she thought —

I have made my apartment feel like a guest room. I did this to myself.

She slept badly.

Wednesday — her mother.

She drove to her mother's house at 11 AM. Surulere. The house her father had built in 1991 with money from his fourth contract with the federal government, the one that had let him stop worrying about money and start worrying about other things. Three bedrooms, a small front garden with a guava tree that produced exactly four guavas a year, a generator that ran on diesel and complained about it, and her mother — Mrs Chika Okonkwo, sixty-eight, a retired secondary school principal — sitting on the front porch in a wrapper and a faded t-shirt, drinking tea, not expecting her.

"Adaeze. You did not call."

"I know."

"I would have made stew."

"I'm not hungry, mama."

"I would have made stew anyway."

She came up the porch steps. She kissed her mother on both cheeks. She sat in the second chair, the one her father used to sit in, the one her mother had not let anyone repair when the cane seat had started to fray six years ago because fixing it would mean accepting that he was not coming back to use it again.

Her mother poured her tea without asking. Lipton. With Peak milk. Two sugars. The way Adaeze had taken it since she was twelve.

"Tell me," her mother said.

"Mama, I — "

"Adaeze. Tell me."

She told her mother.

Not all of it. Not the kitchen. Not the bed. Not the I fell in love with you. Just the contract — which her mother knew about, Kemi had told her, as Kemi always told her — and the existence of another arrangement, and the fact that Yemisi Machi Johnson had taken Adaeze to tea on a Friday and explained to her, over cooling Lipton, that she had been a kind of substitute her son had walked into by accident.

Her mother listened.

When Adaeze was done, her mother set her own cup down. She looked at the guava tree for a long moment.

"Adaeze."

"Yes mama."

"You know your father almost married another woman."

Adaeze said nothing.

She had known this since she was nineteen, when she had found the letter in a drawer. She had never told her mother she knew. Her mother had never told her she knew that she knew. They had kept this single thing between them for fifteen years — a thing that had happened thirty years before Adaeze was born, that they had never spoken about, that had nonetheless sat in every room of this house like a third occupant.

"I know, mama."

Her mother turned to look at her. Her face did not change.

"How long have you known."

"Since I was nineteen. The letter. In the green drawer."

"Ah."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry. I left it where you would find it. I wondered when you would find it. I assumed you had."

Adaeze blinked.

"You — what."

"Adaeze. My daughter. I am not a fool. I knew you would go through that drawer. I left the letter there because I wanted you to know without my having to be the one to tell you. Some things are easier when they are read instead of spoken."

"Mama."

"Drink your tea."

Adaeze drank her tea.

Her mother watched her drink her tea.

"Adaeze."

"Yes."

"Your father chose me because I was the right woman. Not because I was the convenient woman. I want you to understand the difference. The other woman — the one he was supposed to marry, the one his mother had chosen — she was a good woman. She was a kind woman. She would have been a good wife. She would have made him a comfortable life. He chose me because comfort was not what he wanted. He wanted me. He wanted, specifically, me. And he hurt her, and his mother, and his sisters, when he chose me. He did the cowardly thing first — he let it go on too long. He should have said no in May. He said no in August. The other woman waited four months for an answer that he had known the answer to since May."

Her mother paused. She refilled her cup.

"That is the part of the story I have never told you, Adaeze. That your father was not a brave man at the start of our love. He was a slow man. He took a long time to do the right thing. He took so long that the other woman cried for three weeks, and his mother did not speak to him for two years, and his sisters spent a decade holding it against him. He took so long that when he finally came to me and said Chika, I am leaving her, I want you, I almost said no. I almost said no because the slowness had become a part of who he was, and I did not know if I could marry a slow man."

"What changed your mind."

"He came back the next day. And the day after. And the day after that. For sixteen days. Every day he came to my mother's house and sat on the porch and waited for me to come out of the kitchen, and on the seventeenth day I came out and I said yes."

"Sixteen days."

"Sixteen days, Adaeze. A coward who keeps coming back is not a coward. He is a man who is learning courage in front of you. There is a difference."

Adaeze put her tea down.

She did not cry. She did not let her face change. She sat in her father's chair on her mother's porch in Surulere and looked at the guava tree, and she thought about a man in a tower on Glover Road, and she thought about how many days he had now, and she thought about whether she had been counting.

She had been counting.

It was Wednesday. He had four days left.

Thursday — the function.

She did not want to go.

It was the kind of event she normally went to without thinking — a media awards ceremony at the Federal Palace Hotel, three hundred and fifty people, the kind of room where every person in it was someone someone else had wanted to know for a year. She had been invited as one of the honourees. She had said yes in February. February felt like a different lifetime. February had been before Circa.

She went anyway.

She wore black. Her hair was up. She did not check her personal phone. She arrived at 7:30, walked the red carpet for twenty minutes, gave one interview to Genevieve magazine, gave another to BellaNaija, and then went inside to find her assigned table, which was at the front, near the stage, and which she shared with her CFO Tunji and his wife and three other founders she knew from the ecosystem.

She accepted her award at 9:14 PM. Quartz Pay had been named one of the Top Twenty Companies Built by African Women, which was a category that had not existed five years ago and which she had won because she had built the company at a kitchen table when she was twenty-six. Her acceptance speech was forty-two seconds long. She thanked her team. She thanked her mother. She did not thank her father, because she had stopped thanking her father in public years ago — it made the audience uncomfortable, and she was not in the business of making audiences uncomfortable.

She came down from the stage.

She was walking back to her table when she saw her.

The other woman.

Adaeze did not know how she knew. She had never been told the woman's name, or shown a photograph, or given any identifying detail beyond the phrase an old family I have known since Segun was a boy. But she saw her, across the room, sitting at table eleven, in a champagne-coloured dress that had been made for her body, with her hair pulled back in the kind of low chignon that took an hour to set, and Adaeze knew in the way her body sometimes knew things her brain had not been given permission to confirm.

The woman was beautiful.

This was the first thing. She was beautiful in the specific way old-money Lagos women were beautiful — the kind of beautiful that did not depend on lighting or angle, that you could not lose by gaining six pounds, that sat in the bones of the face. She was probably thirty-two. She was talking to a man at her table, laughing at something, with the kind of unbothered grace that comes from having been beautiful since you were nineteen and never having had to worry about whether anyone noticed.

She looked, Adaeze realised, kind.

This was the part Adaeze had not been prepared for. She had been prepared for arrogance, for old-money froideur, for the polished disdain of a woman who knew she was the original choice. She had not been prepared for kindness. The woman was laughing the way kind women laugh — with her whole face, with no calculation, with her hand briefly on the man's forearm in the way Lagos women touch men who are obviously not their husbands and obviously not threats. She was a person you would want to sit next to on a long flight.

Adaeze stood in the middle of the room with her award in her hand and looked at her.

The woman did not see her.

Adaeze went back to her table. She sat down. Tunji's wife asked her if she was alright. She said she was alright. She drank her wine. She did not look at table eleven again for the rest of the night, but she could feel it, in the small, wrong way you can feel a person you have decided to know about across a crowded room.

She left at 10:40.

In the car, going home, she thought:

She is a good woman. She would make him a comfortable life. He would have to choose me on purpose, knowing that. There is no version of this where he does not have to choose me on purpose.

She thought:

That is what my mother was telling me.

She thought:

That is the whole point.

Friday — the call that did not come.

It was the first day she expected him to call.

She did not say so to herself in the morning. She did not write it down. She did not tell Bolu, who would have noted it. But by 11 AM she had checked her work phone four times, which was unusual, because her work phone did not ring with personal calls, and she knew — she knew — what she was doing.

He did not call.

By 1 PM she had moved from expectation to a small held breath, the kind you take when you have asked someone for a thing and you are starting to wonder if you asked for the wrong thing.

He did not call.

By 4 PM the small held breath had become a question. Is he respecting the week. Is he taking it literally. Is he hiding. Is he gone.

He did not call.

By 7 PM she went home. She did not open the second drawer of her bedside table. She made dinner — she actually cooked, for the first time in three weeks, a small pot of egusi soup that took her ninety minutes and that she ate alone at her own kitchen table — and she went to bed at 10 PM.

He did not call.

She did not sleep until 2 AM.

Saturday — Yemisi.

The text came at 8:02 AM. It was not from Segun.

Adaeze. My house. 11 AM. — Yemisi

She read it three times.

She showered. She put on a different dress. She drove herself.

She rang the bell of the house in Ikoyi at exactly 11 AM. The same woman in the wrapper let her in without speaking. The same back veranda. The same pot of tea. The same chin-chin on the same small plate. Yemisi was already seated, reading the paper, in the same gold reading glasses on the same gold chain.

"Sit."

Adaeze sat.

"Tea?"

"Please, ma."

Yemisi poured.

"I will not be long today, Adaeze. I have an appointment at noon. I asked you to come because I want you to know something."

"Yes, ma."

Yemisi set the paper down. She folded her hands on the table.

"My son spoke to the other family on Tuesday."

Adaeze's hand stopped halfway to her cup.

"He spoke to the father, who you have not met. He spoke to the daughter, who I believe you may have seen at an event last night — yes, Adaeze, I saw you there too, do not look surprised. He told them, with my presence in the room, that the arrangement that had been paused was now formally declined. He apologised to the father. He apologised to the daughter. He explained that he had met a woman and was no longer in a position to consider the arrangement, and that the reason he was telling them in person was that he respected them too much to do otherwise. The daughter — whose name I will not give you, because it is not for me to give — said three things to him. She said she had suspected for three months. She said she was not surprised. She said she hoped you and he would be happy."

Yemisi paused. She picked up her cup.

"My son has asked me not to tell you this. He believes that telling you would be a violation of the week you asked for. He believes that you should not know unless you ask, and that asking will mean something he wants the meaning of. He is a fool. I love him, but he is a fool. I am telling you because the woman who would otherwise have married him is, in my judgement, a better person than my son is, and she said yesterday on the phone that she hoped you would be told. So I am telling you. You may do what you like with this information."

She drank her tea.

Adaeze sat very still.

"Ma."

"Yes."

"Why are you telling me this."

Yemisi looked at her over the rim of her cup.

"Because, Adaeze, I am too old to watch my son fail at love because he has confused privacy with cowardice. He is being respectful. I am being a mother. There is a difference."

"Ma."

"Yes."

"Thank you."

"Drink your tea, Adaeze. You have not touched your tea."

Adaeze drank her tea.

She drove herself home.

She sat on the edge of her bed in her own apartment in her own building in Ikoyi and she opened the second drawer of her bedside table for the first time in five days, and she took out the iPhone with the green leather case, and she turned it on, and she watched the screen come to life, and she did not check her messages.

She opened a new text. She typed his name. She did not type anything in the body. She held the phone for a long time.

Then she set it down, face up, on the bed beside her.

She stood up. She walked to her wardrobe. She opened the door. She looked at the clothes she had not chosen to take with her in the last three weeks — the silk shirts, the trousers, the cream slip dress, the black dress, the silk pyjamas she had not worn in his bed because she had not needed pyjamas in his bed.

She took a small overnight bag down from the top shelf.

She did not pack it.

She set it on the floor. She stood in front of it. She looked at it.

It was 2 PM on Saturday. She had until Sunday at midnight to decide.

She had made her decision in Yemisi's veranda but she did not know it yet. The body had decided. The mind would catch up at midnight on Sunday, and the mind would tell her what she had already known on the drive home — that she was going to him on Monday morning, at 6 AM, before he left for work, with the overnight bag packed and her hair down and the green leather phone in her hand, and she was going to ring his bell and when he opened the door she was going to say —

She did not know what she was going to say.

But she knew where she was going to be at 6 AM on Monday.

And so did her body. And so, somewhere across town, in a tower on Glover Road, in an apartment that had been quiet for a week, did Segun Machi Johnson — who at that exact moment, on a Saturday afternoon, was in his kitchen, cooking nothing, sitting at his counter with his hands flat on the marble, waiting out the last forty-five hours of a week he had not asked for and could not shorten.

Both of them, on opposite sides of Lagos, sat with their hands still.

The week was almost over.

Module 05 drops next Friday.

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