Chapter 10
🎵: *Blood on the Leaves by Kanye West — still*
---
**Kainene**
The courtyard had gone the particular kind of quiet that follows something irreversible.
Not peaceful quiet. The other kind — the kind that sits in the space where sound used to be and reminds you of exactly what filled it. Mr. Umeh's voice. Her father's. The crack of porcelain on flagstone. And underneath all of it, the sound Mrs. Umeh's body made when her legs decided they were done holding her upright — that slow, terrible descent that Kes crossed the courtyard in four strides to interrupt.
He caught her before she hit the ground.
I stood and watched him do it.
I don't know what I expected from that moment — some version of him I hadn't seen yet, something that would read as performance or obligation or the careful management of optics. What I got was none of that. He went to her the way you go to something that matters without deciding to — without thinking about it, without calculating the distance. One moment he was standing still. The next he was there, his arms around her, her weight absorbed into his chest, his mouth at her temple saying something too low for the courtyard to catch.
Something happened in my chest.
I didn't name it.
I watched him guide her toward his side of the duplex with the careful deliberateness of a man who had done this before — who knew the specific weight of a woman who had stopped trusting her own legs, who knew how to move someone without making them feel moved. And I stood with Somkele's hand finding mine in the dark and said nothing, because there was nothing that belonged to me in that moment.
But I felt it.
Whatever it was, I felt it completely.
---
Inside was barely quieter.
Neato had his father by the collar of his shirt in the far corner of the sitting room — not hitting him, not yet, but holding him with the compressed energy of a man deciding whether the next few seconds would be something he regretted.
"You piece of shit," he said. Low. Controlled. The kind of voice that is more frightening than shouting because it means the person using it has moved past the part where emotion takes over. "Do you understand what you've done? Do you even—" He stopped. His jaw worked. "She was crying for *years*, Dad. I watched her cry and I didn't know why and you were the reason. You were right there being the reason while she set your plate and ironed your shirts while she had maids to that and waited for you by the window until she fell asleep in the chair—"
Mr. Umeh said nothing.
That was somehow the worst part.
Neato released him with the specific disgust of someone putting down something they no longer want to touch. He stepped back. Looked at his father with an expression I recognized — the particular devastation of realizing the version of someone you built your understanding of the world on was never fully real.
"Sort yourself out," he said. "Before I do it for you."
He walked out.
---
Jidekene had not moved.
He was standing near the entrance to the sitting room with his arms at his sides and the expression of a man watching a building he had been inside come down around someone else. Still. Entirely still. The kind of stillness that comes not from calm but from a mind processing faster than the body can respond to.
I knew what he was doing. I knew because I knew Jide — the way his brain filed and cross-referenced and assembled, the way he never reacted until he had the full picture because half-pictures made him feel stupid and feeling stupid made him dangerous in the quiet way.
He was watching every suspicion he had ever carried about Kamara's marriage — every unanswered question, every gap in the story she'd handed him, every moment he'd held himself responsible for a failure that apparently had roots he hadn't been allowed to see — unravel in real time in a sitting room in Ogun State.
The media had blamed him.
He had let them.
Because she had asked him to, and because he had loved her enough, and because he had covered for an incompetence he'd spent years mistaking for fragility, and this — *this* — was what it had been covering *for.*
His face was doing something I could not look at directly.
I moved toward him. Put my hand on his arm.
He looked down at it. Then at me.
"Not now, Kai." His voice was flat in a way that meant it was holding everything. "I'm okay. I'm completely fine."
He was not fine.
He was beyond livid in the way that looks, from the outside, exactly like fine.
---
🎵: *777 by Burna Boy*
**Barbie as Narrator — Has Folded Both Hands and Is Simply Present**
Let me tell you what just happened in this sitting room because I need to say it out loud to believe it.
Neato called his father a piece of shit and meant every syllable and I felt it in my spine.
But what I cannot stop thinking about is Jidekene standing at that entrance looking like a man watching the verdict come in on a case he already knew the outcome of. This man covered for Kamara. While the blogs dragged his name and the comment sections decided his character and his reputation sat in the mud — he covered for her. Because he loved her. Because that is the specific tax of loving someone who has not yet learned how to deserve it.
And now he is standing in a room finding out that the thing he covered for had a name and a face and thirty years of complicated history.
I don't have a joke for Jidekene tonight.
I just have a long, quiet look in his direction and the sincere hope that someone gets him a glass of something strong.
---
🎵: *Overdue by Ayra Starr — different now, less playful*
**Kainene**
Kes reappeared forty minutes later.
He came through the connecting door between the two sides of the duplex and found me in the kitchen making tea I didn't actually want, which is what I do when I need something to do with my hands.
He looked tired. Not the surface kind — the kind that lives behind the eyes, that comes from spending emotional energy you hadn't budgeted for.
"She's asleep," he said. "Guest room. Oby is with her."
I nodded. Set a second mug out without deciding to.
He watched me do it. Said nothing about it.
We stood in the kitchen in the particular silence of two people who have been through too much of someone else's day to have anything easy left to say. I slid the mug toward him. He wrapped both hands around it and looked at the surface of the tea the way you look at something when you're not actually seeing it.
"Thank you," I said.
He looked up.
"For catching her," I said. "She would have gone down hard."
Something moved across his face — not quite surprise, not quite something else. He held my eyes for a moment and then looked back at the tea.
"She's my mother," he said simply.
*Yes,* I thought. *Exactly.*
---
We agreed on sleep without formally agreeing on anything.
He asked me — and this was the part I turned over later, the phrasing of it, the way he delivered it without his usual armor — he said, *please, let's just share the room tonight. I don't want her knowing there's anything between us to worry about. She doesn't need more on her plate.*
Not a command. Not the performance of confidence he usually wore. Just — *please.*
I said okay.
I changed in the bathroom. Shorts. Spaghetti top that sat just above my navel. Silk robe over it that I shrugged off as I came around to my side of the bed, which I had already decided was the left side without consulting him about it, because some things you simply claim.
I didn't look at him when I came out.
I was aware of him the way you are aware of something that takes up significant space in a room — the specific gravity of him, the way the air in the room felt organized differently with him in it. I heard the bathroom door. The shower. Silence. Then the door again.
I arranged myself against the pillows and looked at the ceiling.
The bed dipped on the right.
I stacked three pillows down the center with precise architectural intention.
A pause.
"A pillow wall," he said. "Thoughtful."
"Structural," I corrected. "Not personal."
He made a sound that was not quite a laugh and also clearly was.
I looked at the ceiling. He looked at it. The room settled into the particular silence of two people lying very still in close proximity and working very hard to make it look effortless.
It was not effortless.
I was aware of every breath.
---
He started turning.
Not dramatically — just the small, repeated adjustments of a man whose mind was too loud for his body to commit to stillness. Left side. Back. Right side. Back again. I heard it in the mattress, felt it in the minor disruptions to the pillow wall, catalogued each one without meaning to.
Ten minutes of this.
Fifteen.
"Kes."
Stillness.
"Do you want to talk about what's on your mind?"
A longer pause. The kind that means the answer is *yes* and the question is whether to admit it.
He turned onto his back. I could feel it rather than see it — the shift in weight, the particular quality of stillness that is different from sleep-stillness.
"I don't usually," he said. "Talk about it."
"I know."
Another pause.
"Duke," he said. "Neto. Sophie. Adora — when things were good." He stopped. "That's the list."
I understood what he was telling me. I stayed quiet and let him find his way into it.
"I watched her—" He stopped again. Started differently. "She used to wait for him by the window. I'd come downstairs at night and she'd be in the chair by the front window, asleep, still in her day clothes. She did that for years." His voice was level. The levelness was deliberate. "I'd cover her with a blanket and go back upstairs and tell myself it was fine. That's what I told myself. *It's fine. This is just how they are. This is just what marriage looks like sometimes.*"
I said nothing.
"She asked him once," Kes said. "I was in the hallway. I wasn't supposed to hear it. She asked him — *please, if there is someone else, just tell me. I can handle knowing. What I cannot handle is the not knowing.* And he—" A breath. "He was on his phone. He looked up, and his eyes were — I still think about those eyes. Like she was somewhere he hadn't expected to find her. Like she was an interruption." He paused. "He told her she was being dramatic."
The ceiling held both of us.
"She asked him for a divorce twice. I know of twice. Maybe more. He wouldn't give it to her. Said he was going to be a better man, that he was going to make it up to her, that the family needed to stay whole." The levelness in his voice had developed a hairline fracture. "The family needed to stay whole. For events. For appearances. For the specific image of a man who had built something and wanted people to see the building. The inside of the building wasn't his concern."
I turned my head on the pillow and looked at his profile in the dark.
"He was mostly missing," Kes said. "Just — absent. There for the occasions that required him and absent for everything that didn't photograph well. And she just—" He stopped. "She just kept. Waiting. By the window."
*And now she's broken,* he didn't say.
He didn't need to say it.
"I'm sorry," I said.
He turned his head toward me in the dark. This close, with the room held in this specific quiet, I could see the exhaustion behind his eyes clearly. The grief underneath the exhaustion. The thing underneath the grief that didn't have a clean name.
"Go to sleep, Kainene," he said.
Gently. Like the words themselves were careful.
I turned back to the ceiling.
Closed my eyes.
Did not sleep for a long time.
---
🎵: *Twice by Little Simz*
**Kamara**
The night air outside was warm and unhurried and completely indifferent, which was what I needed from it.
I sat on the low wall at the edge of the complex and let the dark settle around me and tried to locate something inside myself that felt stable enough to stand on. The compound had gone quiet. The kind of quiet that comes after something ruptures — not peaceful, just exhausted. Even the birds had stopped.
The first time I thought about it — really thought, not pushed away and covered with other things — I let myself go back to the jet.
We were flying to a retreat. Eighteen months into my marriage to Jide, which was already a structure I was maintaining rather than inhabiting. The kind of marriage where you have mastered the performance so completely that you occasionally catch yourself believing it. Uncle Emeka — which was what I had called him since I was small, since he was the man who appeared when Dad was occupied with triplets or business or whatever required him that week — Uncle EKene had taken the seat across from me when everyone else was asleep.
He hadn't touched me.
That was the thing I remembered first. That he hadn't touched me.
He had looked at me across the aisle with the expression of a man who had been holding something at arm's length for a long time and was very tired of the effort. And he had said — quietly, like it cost him — *You know I can't do this.*
I had known what this was.
I had known for longer than I was prepared to say out loud.
*Bro code,* he said. *Your father. It's not right.*
I had looked at him and said nothing because there was nothing to say that would make it simpler. He was right. It wasn't right. It had never been right and it was also the truest I had felt seen in years, which was a fact about my life at the time that I am not proud of but cannot pretend away.
He resisted for longer than people would believe if I told them. He was consistent about it in a way that, later, I would understand was its own kind of torment — showing up, being present, holding the line, then going home to whatever the inside of that house actually felt like and starting over.
It wasn't until after Jide and I fell apart — after the quiet cruelty of a marriage dissolving in slow motion had finished and the papers had been filed and I was standing in the rubble of a choice our parents forced us into too young for the wrong reasons — that he found me.
And the thing that I have never been able to explain to anyone, including myself, is that it felt *right.* Not right the way correct things feel right — right the way coming in from cold feels right. The specific rightness of landing somewhere after a long time of not landing anywhere.
He showed up. That was the thing. He showed up in the particular way my father had never quite managed — not at events, not for photographs, but for the Tuesday afternoon when I was falling apart quietly, for the Wednesday morning when I needed someone to tell me I wasn't invisible. He showed up.
I sat on the wall and turned all of this over and did not try to make it less complicated than it was.
The blogs had their version. The comments had their verdict. Mum had her grief and her slap and her *Kamara e bola m o* that was still echoing in the cavity behind my sternum.
And I had this: the memory of a man who chose, too late and too wrongly, to finally want what he wanted.
I put my face in my hands.
I was not ready to decide yet what that made either of us.
---
🎵: *Feels by Sarz & Wurld*
**Barbie as Narrator — Is Being Very Still About This One**
I need to sit with the Kamara section for a moment.
Because it would be easy — *easy* — to flatten this into something with a clean moral shape. Older man. Younger woman. Someone's daughter. Someone's wife. That is the shape the blogs reached for and the shape the comments filled in and the shape the slap landed on.
But the story is telling us something more complicated and I think we should look at it.
He resisted. He held the line for years, which does not make it right but does make it something other than predatory in the simple way. She was not a child. She was a woman inside a marriage she was maintaining rather than living, looking for something that felt like landing after a long time of not landing anywhere. She found it in the wrong place and the wrong person and in the most inconvenient direction any feeling has ever decided to travel in the history of this family.
Does that make it okay? No.
Does it make it human? Entirely.
I am not putting the popcorn down. I am just holding it more carefully.
Now.
---
🎵: *Roses by Adekunle Gold*
Mr Wokoma**
Thirty-four years ago,Emeka umeh had looked across a gathering in Lagos and said — quietly, the way mr umeh said everything that mattered — *I called dibs.*
Mr wokoma had looked at the woman Kene was looking at. Diane udo . Standing near the window with her chin slightly raised in the particular way of a woman who was aware she was being watched and had decided to find it unremarkable. He had looked at her for approximately seven seconds.
Then he had walked across the room and introduced himself.
He had thought it was a competition at the time.
He understood now, standing in a courtyard in Ogun State having put his fist into his oldest friend's jaw, that Emeka had not been competing.Emeka had been — in his own way, in the specific language of a man who wanted things he never fully allowed himself to reach for — *grieving.* Even then. Grieving the thing before it was lost.
He had not noticed.
That was the part that sat heaviest. He had stood at an altar with Diane udo and looked across to where Emeka stood as his best man and seen only loyalty and love and the face of a brother. He had handed his daughter across two decades of family dinners and shared holidays and every occasion that required witnesses and never once — not once — looked at Emeka’s face when Kamara entered a room.
He had not noticed.
What kind of father does not notice.
He sat in the far chair of the sitting room while Kes and Neato managed the fallout and Adaeze slept in a guest room and the compound held its breath, and he turned it over. All of it. The thirty-four years of it. The friendship. The dibs. The best man. The dinners. The face he had not thought to read.
*My first fruit,* he had said in the courtyard.
He pressed both hands over his eyes.
He had told mr umeh to come to him like a man. Do it the legal way. And he had meant it — he had meant it because he was a man who understood that some things cannot be changed, only navigated, and that his daughter was not a footnote in someone else's tragedy. She was his first. She deserved someone standing at a door asking for her properly.
But underneath the fury, which was real and would not diminish quickly, was something quieter.
The specific grief of realizing that your best friend had been lonely for decades in a direction you never looked.
He did not forgive him.
But he felt the weight of that loneliness in a way that surprised him.
He stared at the ceiling.
The ceiling did not offer anything useful.
---
🎵: *Sinner by Fela Kuti*
**Barbie as Narrator — Has Taken a Seat on the Floor Actually**
Mr. Wokoma remembered the dibs.
He walked across the room anyway.
And for thirty-four years he did not think to look at what that cost the man standing at his altar holding the rings.
Now — and I want to be precise about this — that does not mean Emeka response to that cost was correct or proportionate or anything other than a catastrophe. It was all three of those things. But Mr. Wokoma sitting in that chair doing the accounting of everything he didn't notice is a specific kind of reckoning and I think the story earned it.
*Come to me like a man.* He said it because he loves his daughter.
He also said it because some part of him understood, in the courtyard, that this has a history too long and too tangled to be resolved by a fist, however satisfying the fist was in the moment.
I need chapter eleven.
I need it with a specific urgency that I am choosing not to examine.
Kainene is setting up the camping area somewhere in this complex because that is the kind of woman she is — the world is falling apart and she is sourcing fairy lights and figuring out the blanket situation because *what else do you do* — and Kes is going to find her doing it and I have *feelings* about that.
Also: someone is still texting them.
Someone knows something about Sophie.
And Neato is trying to find them.
And we are all just here in Ogun State with our teacup pieces and our pillow walls and our thirty-four years of uncounted costs.
Chapter ten, everyone.
I'll be on the floor.
🖤🍿