Chapter 10 I

“ Sophie is alive ? “

🎵: Golden by Jill Scott

🏚️

Kainene

I woke up before him.

This was the first fact.

The second fact arrived approximately three seconds later, in the precise moment that full consciousness settled and my body registered, with unhelpful clarity, the specific geometry of where everything had ended up.

The pillow wall was still there.

Structurally. In theory.

In practice, two of the three pillows had migrated to ambiguous positions and my arm — my arm, which I had placed with deliberate intent on my own side of the bed — was wrapped around Kes from behind, my hand resting against his chest, my chin somewhere in the vicinity of his shoulder blade. His hand had closed over mine sometime during the night. Not loosely. With intention, even in sleep.

I did not move.

I told myself this was because moving would wake him. This was a reasonable explanation that I committed to completely and did not examine further.

Outside, Ogun State was beginning. Generators humming at the low frequency of early morning. Birds starting their conversation in the trees that lined the lake. The light coming through the curtains was the particular gold of the hour before the day becomes itself — soft and uncommitted, the world still deciding what it wanted to be.

I watched the ceiling.

His chest rose and fell under my hand. Steady. The specific steadiness of a man who has been carrying too much and has finally, temporarily, put it down. I had heard him stop turning sometime past two in the morning. I had heard the exact moment his body decided to let go.

I had not been asleep yet.

I lay there now and thought about that. About what it meant that his settling had allowed mine. About what it meant that I had apparently decided, somewhere between consciousness and sleep, that the appropriate response to the pillow wall was to dismantle it with my entire body.

I thought about his voice in the dark.

‘She used to wait for him by the window.’

I thought about the way he had said it. Level and deliberate and cracking at the hairline.

I thought about the second mug I had set out without deciding to.

He shifted.

Not much. Just the small realignment of a body moving toward waking. His hand tightened over mine briefly and then relaxed, and I felt the precise moment he registered what he was holding.

He went completely still.

I went completely still.

We lay there, both of us awake, both of us aware, neither of us moving, in the particular suspension of two people deciding simultaneously whether to acknowledge a thing or simply let it be.

He turned his head.

I turned mine.

We looked at each other in the gold morning light with approximately four inches of space between our faces and the demolished remains of a structural pillow arrangement, and I watched something move through his eyes that I did not have a precise name for yet but which I recognised the shape of.

He opened his mouth.

His phone exploded.

―――

Neato's name on the screen.

Kes sat up. I sat up. The moment folded itself away with the efficiency of something that understood it was not yet its time.

He picked up.

“You need to come downstairs.” Neato’s voice carried through the speaker with the compressed energy of a man who had been awake long enough to move past urgent into something quieter and more dangerous. “Now. Both of you.”

Kes looked at me.

I was already out of bed.

―――

Keside

Neato had his laptop open on the kitchen counter.

He had the specific hollowness of a man who had not slept and was operating on the other side of it — past tiredness, into a kind of electric clarity that was not entirely healthy. His eyes were sharp in a way that concerned me. I knew that look. I had seen it on him once before, years ago, when he had found something he wasn’t supposed to find and had spent three days unraveling it alone before telling anyone.

I came to stand beside him. Kainene appeared at my other shoulder. I was aware of her the way I had been aware of her hand on my chest twenty minutes ago — without effort, without choosing to be, just simply aware.

“The texts,” Neato said. “I’ve been tracking the number since the first one. VoIP, bounced through three servers — whoever it is knows what they’re doing. But they made a mistake last night.”

He turned the laptop to face us.

A photograph.

Sophie.

I stopped breathing for a moment. Just stopped. The way you stop when something you have been carrying as absence suddenly has a face again.

She was standing in a room I didn’t immediately recognise. Her hair was down. She was wearing the white linen dress she had bought in Porto the summer before she died — or the summer before I was told she died — and around her wrist was the gold bracelet with the engraved coordinates. The one I had buried with her.

Or thought I had.

“When was this taken?” Kainene's voice was steady. The particular steadiness of someone who has decided that composure is currently load-bearing.

“Three days ago,” Neato said. “Timestamp is embedded in the file. And Kes —” He paused. “The metadata puts the location inside a twelve-kilometre radius of this compound.”

The kitchen held the three of us and the silence of that information.

I looked at the photograph for a long time.

Sophie looked back at me from three days ago.

“Don’t tell anyone yet,” I said finally. “Not until we know what we’re looking at. Not my mother. Not yours.”

Neato nodded.

Kainene said nothing. She was still looking at the photograph with an expression I couldn’t fully read — careful, processing, something underneath the processing that she had decided not to surface yet.

Then she closed the laptop gently and said: “Go shower. Both of you. Today still has to happen.”

She walked out of the kitchen.

I watched her go.

Neato looked at me. “Is she always like that?”

“Like what?”

“Like the building doesn’t fall if she’s still standing in it.”

I didn’t answer him.

I didn’t have an answer that wasn’t more than I was ready to say.

―――

Mrs. Umeh

The guest room had good curtains.

She was grateful for this because it meant she could lie in the half-dark for as long as she needed to and the morning could not force itself in before she was ready. She was not ready. She was not certain she would be ready today, or perhaps tomorrow, or perhaps for a stretch of days she didn’t currently have the energy to estimate.

She wanted to call Adaeze.

The want was so immediate and so specific it was almost a physical sensation — the need to hear her voice, low and direct and full of that particular warmth she reserved for the people she was going to be honest with. Twenty-three years. That was how long they had been each other’s first call. Before husbands. Before children had grown into people with their own lives and disasters. Before everything. Adaeze would pick up on the second ring and she would say talk in that way of hers, and it would all come out.

But Adaeze was the reason she could not call.

Adaeze was the beginning of all of it. Not because she had done anything — she hadn’t, she was certain of that, she had to be certain of that or the whole structure of what she understood about her own life would require rebuilding from the foundation. But Emeka had loved her first. Had stood at the altar holding someone else’s rings and been in love with the woman in the dress. And every dinner, every holiday, every time Adaeze had touched her arm and said you look tired, are you sleeping had been threaded through with a history she hadn’t been given the right to know.

She pressed the pillow over her face.

Not dramatically. Just to have something to press against.

Outside, she could hear voices beginning. Movement. The compound gathering itself for the day. Through the wall she heard Kainene's voice — low, organising, the kind of voice that a space orients itself around. She had liked Kainene from the first moment. There was something in her that reminded her of the women she had admired her whole life — not loud about their capability, just quietly, consistently capable.

She thought about Emeka in that boxing room.

She thought about twenty years of a request she had made clearly and been refused politely and what that made of the time between.

She thought about the divorce she had offered him this morning.

Not in anger. Not even in grief, exactly. In the exhausted certainty of a woman who has finally understood that she has been waiting by a window that was never going to open from the outside.

She pulled the pillow tighter.

Let herself cry for a while without performing anything about it.

Outside, the day continued becoming itself without her. She would join it eventually.

Not yet.

―――

🎵: Jowo by Fireboy DML

―――

Kainene

The site was a large flat area behind the B-wing of the complex, shaded at the edges by trees that the morning light came through in layers. Someone had already brought out the long tables the night before. I worked backward from those.

Fairy lights first. I had three sets in varying warmths — amber, gold, the cooler white — and I strung them between the trees in an arc that would look, by evening, like the sky had come down to be useful. Somkele appeared at seven-thirty with coffee and no questions, which was the correct response to finding me already deep in extension cords and spacing decisions.

“You’ve been up since before God,” she said.

“The tarps need anchoring on the east side or the afternoon wind will take them.”

She looked at me for a moment with the expression she uses when she has decided to let me have my coping mechanisms in peace.

“Pass me the other end.”

We worked in comfortable quiet. The mattresses came next — arranged in a loose semicircle for the evening, angled toward the lake so that whoever lay on them would have water and lights and the particular Ogun State sky above them. I set up the food station on the long tables. I arranged the activity zones: one for Lego, one for clay, one for the tie-and-dye tubs that Tunde had sourced from the local suppliers at my request two days ago. I set up the jewelry station last, because Adaeze’s materials needed a surface with good light and I wanted that corner to feel intentional.

I did not think about the photograph while I did this.

I thought about the photograph constantly while I did this.

The two things existed simultaneously and I allowed them to. Grief and motion have always understood each other. The hands keep working. The mind goes somewhere else and comes back.

The kids arrived at nine.

Forty-three of them, from the two orphanages in Abeokuta that Jidekene had been coordinating with since March. They came off the buses in the specific way of children who have been told to behave and are deciding how much of that instruction to honour — not quite contained, not quite not. Their eyes were doing the work that children’s eyes do in new places: cataloguing, assessing, finding the things that looked like permission.

I crouched down.

A girl in the front, maybe eight, maybe nine, with box braids and the expression of someone who has learned to assess adults quickly and accurately, looked at me with direct brown eyes.

“Are you in charge?” she asked.

“Right now I am,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“Favour.”

“Favour. Do you want to help me set the last table?”

She considered this with the seriousness it deserved.

“Yes,” she said. And walked beside me without being asked again.

―――

Keside

I found her with twelve children around a long table covered in Lego.

She had drawn a floor plan on a large sheet of paper — a simple house shape, then beside it an event hall, then beside that something that might have been a gallery — and she was moving between the children with the particular patience of someone who is not performing patience. She crouched beside a boy who was struggling with a wall section. Said something low. He tried again. Got it. The expression on his face when it clicked into place — she saw it and matched it, a full quiet smile that she didn’t modulate for anyone watching.

Nobody was supposed to be watching.

I stayed at the edge of the activity zone and watched anyway.

I had been building robots with the older boys at the next station — simple servo mechanisms, nothing complex, enough to make something move and feel the specific satisfaction of causing motion with your own hands. I had stepped away to check on Neato’s station and ended up here instead.

Favour — the small one with the box braids who had apparently appointed herself Kainene’s deputy — appeared at my elbow.

“Are you her husband?”

“Yes,” I said. It came out without negotiation.

“She’s the nicest one here,” Favour said, with the tone of someone delivering a verdict. Then she walked back to the table.

I stood there.

At the table, Kainene had positioned herself beside a girl who was building what appeared to be an entirely structurally unsound tower and was doing it with complete conviction. Kainene watched for a moment. Then she placed one small block at the base, without comment, without redirecting anything, and the girl’s tower stopped leaning.

The girl didn’t notice.

Kainene moved on to the next child.

I thought about a window. A chair. A woman in a yellow house who had learned very early to stay until she fell asleep waiting. I thought about what it meant that I had spent thirty-four years of my family’s life watching the wrong kind of love calcify into architecture and I was standing here watching a woman quietly prevent a small tower from falling and feeling something in my chest I was absolutely not equipped to deal with at nine-forty-five in the morning in Ogun State.

I went back to my robots.

I built things with my hands and did not think about her.

It didn’t work.

―――

🎵: Overloaded by Skales

―――

The Bid — Midday

The horse racing came first.

The track had been set up along the eastern edge of the grounds — the horses sourced from the ranch forty minutes outside Abeokuta that F8 had partnered with since the third year of the camp. The children lined the fence in a chaotic enthusiastic mass. The adults arranged themselves with varying degrees of dignity.

Every bid went to the orphanage fund.

Leo Akpan-Archibong — who had the specific quality of a man who performs casual very expensively — took the spot beside Charles at the rail. Both of them had been in the general vicinity of the gymnastics demonstration for the preceding forty minutes with the specific focused attention of men who were not watching gymnastics.

Adora moved through her routine like someone who had been born understanding the relationship between a body and space — clean lines, the specific unhurried confidence of a woman who knows her own competence and has stopped needing to announce it. She had called three of the girls over partway through to teach them a simpler sequence, and they were attempting it with the beautiful serious incorrectness of children encountering something new.

Leo said something low to Charles.

Charles laughed.

Adora, who had the situational awareness of someone who had grown up under Adaeze Wokoma’s roof, did not look at them. Which was its own kind of looking.

―――

Krystal’s booth was set up under the widest of the shade trees.

She had hung the pieces herself — twelve items of crochet work in the earth tones she favoured, each one tagged with a small card explaining the technique. The children had been clustered around it since it opened, running careful fingers along the texture of things. She was showing a girl how to hold the hook when the bidding paddle went up for the first time.

Marobi appeared from the direction of his robotics station with the expression of a young man who has made a private decision.

“I’ll open,” he said.

“You’re bidding on my work?” Krystal's hand stilled on the crochet hook. “Absolutely not. There is a conflict of interest the size of this compound.”

“The conflict of interest is that I made the thing that’s going up against yours and I will still lose,” he said. “So consider it objective assessment.”

“It’s not a competition, Marobi.”

“It is absolutely a competition.”

“We’re raising money for children —”

“And my robot will raise more.”

Krystal looked at him the way she had looked at him for the entirety of his life: with full love and specific exasperation.

“Your robot,” she said, “will raise exactly as much as my crochet because I will personally outbid you at every increment and we will cancel each other out entirely.”

“Mum.”

“Madam.”

The children watching this exchange looked delighted.

The arcade machine Marobi had built — a small functioning cabinet with a cyberpunk aesthetic that had been the subject of his past seventy-two hours — went under the gavel at the highest non-institutional bid of the afternoon. Krystal’s largest crochet piece went three increments higher.

He disputed this.

She walked away while he was still disputing it.

He followed, still talking.

The children applauded.

―――

Adaeze

She worked with her hands when the world required it.

This had been true since she was a girl — the specific peace that came from making something, from putting material through its necessary transformations. She had brought the stones from Jos, wrapped in cloth, in the flat case she always travelled with. Tourmaline. Labradorite. The deep amber that the northern traders called honey stone. Thin gold wire. The specific tools that turned raw material into something a person would want to put against their skin.

The children watched her with the focused attention of people witnessing competence in its natural state.

She let them. Explained as she went. Passed the wire cutters to a boy who wanted to try and guided his hands without taking over, which was harder than it looked and more important than most people understood.

The piece she was making was a collar necklace — labradorite at the centre, the flash in the stone shifting between green and blue as it caught the afternoon light, framed in the gold wire in a setting she had designed herself three years ago and had been making variations of since. She worked without looking up for long stretches. The world went small and manageable when she worked. The large things — Emeka, the years, the specific weight of what she had learned in a courtyard last night — did not disappear but they receded to a distance where she could hold them without being held by them.

Tiara appeared beside her.

Stood watching with her arms folded and an expression that meant she had already decided something.

“I want that one,” she said, when the necklace was complete and set on the display cloth. Matter-of-fact. No preamble.

“Then bid for it, baby,” Adaeze said.

Tiara bid.

Lola, who had appeared from nowhere with the specific energy of someone who had been conserving herself for exactly this moment, bid higher.

Tiara's expression shifted.

Lola did not look at her.

Tiara bid again.

Lola went higher.

The increment war lasted four rounds and a small gathering of spectators before Lola secured it with the kind of final number that ends conversations.

Tiara said nothing. Her face said several things.

Two hours later, Kes found Lola at the food station and bought it from her quietly, with the specific manner of a man who has made a private decision and is not interested in discussing the reasoning. Lola looked at him for a moment, looked at the necklace, looked back at him.

“You know what you’re doing, sha,” she said.

“Do I?”

“Somebody does,” she said, and walked away.

He stood with the necklace in his hand for a moment.

Then he folded it carefully into his shirt pocket.

―――

🎵: Baba Naa by Adekunle Gold ft. Patoranking

―――

Emeka

The boxing room had good equipment.

He had been in here since five in the morning. He did not know what else to do with his body and his body was the only thing currently available to him.

Thirty years.

He put his fist into the bag.

That was what it had cost. Not just Wale’s friendship, which was the thing he would most visibly lose and which he understood he deserved to lose. Not the marriage, which had been failing on its own terms long before any of this. Not even Neato’s voice saying piece of shit in a sitting room in the specific tone that means a child is revising their entire understanding of a parent.

The cost was thirty years of a decision he had made and refused to unmake.

He had loved Adaeze. That was a fact. It had been a fact in the specific categorical way of things that do not ask permission to be true. And when Wale had walked across that room — when Wale, who could not read a room he hadn’t already decided to win, had introduced himself with that particular confidence — Emeka had stood there and let it happen and told himself it was because he was a good man.

He had not been a good man.

He had been a man who wanted to be good and had confused the wanting with the being, which was a different thing entirely and had produced thirty years of consequences he was only now beginning to fully account for.

His phone showed three missed calls from his PR team. Two from his publicist. A string of messages from the crisis management contact the company retained for exactly these situations. He read the topmost one, which said we can contain this if you move quickly, and put the phone face-down on the bench.

The bag received him and did not offer opinions.

He kept working.

―――

Kamara — Somewhere over the Atlantic

The jet was quiet the way private jets are quiet — differently from other quiet, with a quality of insulation that extends beyond sound into the specific hum of being suspended between places.

She had not packed for Brazil particularly. She had packed the way you pack when the decision is made and the details are secondary — enough for a week, the good sunscreen, the journal she had been keeping since the therapist suggested it and which she had mostly used to write things she wasn’t ready to say out loud.

She opened it now.

Wrote: I am not running. I am choosing the distance deliberately. These are not the same thing.

Closed it.

Looked out at the cloud cover.

Her phone had been put on Do Not Disturb at take-off. She had checked it once at cruising altitude and found seventeen messages, four missed calls, two voice notes from Somkele, one from Somebi whose voice had the carefully measured quality of a woman controlling something much larger underneath, and one from her father that she had listened to twice and would listen to again later when she had more room for it.

He had said: “Kamara. Your absence is felt. Come home when you’re ready. But know that I am here.”

That was it. No anger. Not yet. Just I am here, in the voice of a man who had learned, somewhere between last night and this morning, that the fury could wait.

She had cried for the length of that voice note. Then wiped her face. Then looked out the window.

Brazil would be warm. She knew people in Salvador who would not know anything about the blogs or the family or the man in the boxing room or the wife with her teacup pieces. She would sit in the sun and be nobody’s daughter and nobody’s sister and nobody’s wrong decision for a week and then she would come back and face the rest of it.

This was the plan.

It was not a good plan.

It was a plan she had and was committed to.

―――

🎵: Commas by Santi

―――

Jidekene

He found her.

Or he went to the place she had been and she found her way back to it — the small bench near the water’s edge that nobody else had claimed. He had seen her sit there the first night of the camp and noted it the way he noted her things still, without deciding to.

She wasn’t there.

He sat down anyway.

She appeared twenty minutes later.

Saw him. Stopped.

He looked at the water and said: “You can leave if you want. I’m not here to fight.”

A pause. The sound of the lake doing its small continuous work.

She sat down.

Not close. At the other end of the bench, with the specific distance of two people who were once close enough that distance now requires active management.

They sat in silence for a while.

He spoke first.

“I’m not angry at you,” he said. “I want to be. I’ve been trying since last night. But I’m too tired for it.” He looked at the water. “Mostly I’m—” He stopped. Found the word. “Sad. I’m sad. Not in the dramatic way. Just in the ordinary way of someone who covered for a person they loved and then found out what they were covering.”

She said nothing.

“I would have understood loneliness,” he said. “If you had told me. I know what it looks like when someone is drowning quietly — I’ve been told I am not the easiest person to reach. I know that. But I would have tried. I just needed you to trust me enough to ask.”

A very long silence.

Then: “I know,” she said. Her voice was small in a way he had never heard from her and which landed somewhere in him without permission. “I didn’t know how to say it. And then the not-saying became the shape of things and I didn’t know how to undo the shape.”

“You could have started with the truth and let me help with the shape,” he said. Not unkindly. Just honestly.

She looked at her hands.

“I know.”

They sat.

The lake continued.

“The media,” she said eventually. “I’ll fix it. I’ll put out a statement.”

“You don’t have to do it for me,” he said. “Do it because it’s correct.”

She nodded.

He stood. Looked at her once more — and she looked up, and for a moment the full unmanaged sadness of it was visible in both of them, the specific grief of two people who might have been different to each other in a different set of circumstances.

“Take care of yourself, Kamara,” he said.

He walked back toward the compound.

She watched him go.

Did not call him back.

―――

🎵: Peace by Fela Kuti

―――

Evening — The Dinner Night

The food came from everywhere simultaneously.

That was the only way to describe it. The F8 kitchen had been running since three. The local chefs Kainene had arranged were set up at the outdoor stations — pots over open fires, the smell of egusi and banga and fried plantain moving through the complex in warm waves. The children had been involved in the preparation since four: stirring under supervision, learning the names of things, asking the questions that children ask when they have not yet learned to pretend they know things they don’t.

The long tables were full.

The fairy lights came on at six-thirty and the collective exhale that moved through the courtyard at that moment was something Kainene received quietly, standing at the edge of it, watching it happen.

The tie-and-dye tubs had produced forty-three pieces of cloth in varying stages of success. They were hung on lines between the trees and the evening breeze moved through them gently. A girl named Blessing had produced something accidentally geometric that Adaeze had quietly photographed from three angles.

The clay station had produced animals and faces and several objects whose identity was knowable only to their makers and which had been defended with complete conviction.

Lola, who had been resting for most of the afternoon on specific medical instruction, appeared at the dinner table with the slow careful movement of someone who has decided that rest has had its turn. She sat beside Ruby da Silva, who had been running the cooking demonstration all day with the specific focused competence of a woman who understood that feeding people was not a small thing. They were deep in conversation by the time the first course came out.

Mrs. Umeh appeared.

She had dressed. Done her face in the particular way of a woman who understands that presentation is sometimes the only armor available. She moved through the gathering with quiet dignity and took the seat that Kainene had without discussion or announcement reserved for her, slightly removed from the main crowd, with a good view of the lake and the lights.

Kainene brought her food herself. Set it down. Said nothing.

Mrs. Umeh looked up at her.

“Thank you, sweetheart,” she said.

Kainene squeezed her shoulder once and moved on.

―――

Keside

The necklace was in my pocket.

I had been carrying it since the afternoon and had not yet determined what the correct moment for it was. There was no correct moment. That was becoming clear. There was only the ongoing situation of carrying a thing and not knowing what to do with it.

I watched her move through the evening.

This was becoming a habit I did not know how to address. She was at the children’s table, then at the clay display, then at my mother’s shoulder for thirty seconds before moving on. She had a way of being present in a space without demanding anything from it. People calmed when she arrived. Not because she performed calm — because she carried it without knowing she was carrying it, the way some people carry warmth, which is not something you can decide to have.

I thought about Sophie.

The photograph. The bracelet I had placed in a coffin. The twelve-kilometre radius.

I held both things — the photograph and the woman across the courtyard — and felt the particular difficulty of a life that had stopped being simple.

My phone buzzed.

Unknown number.

I looked at it for a long moment. Then I found Neato across the table and met his eyes. He had seen. He was already moving.

I stepped away from the table.

Opened the message.

A video this time. Twelve seconds. No sound.

Sophie. Walking through what I now recognised, with the specific cold certainty of a man who has been in a building and is seeing it again, as the east corridor of this compound.

Timestamp: yesterday evening.

While we were all in the courtyard.

While I was catching my mother.

I stood in the middle of a dinner that smelled of everything warm and watched twelve seconds of a dead woman walking through the building I was sleeping in, and the evening carried on around me like nothing had shifted, because nothing visible had shifted, because the world does not pause for private earthquakes.

Neato appeared at my shoulder.

I showed him the phone without speaking.

He watched it once. Then again.

His jaw tightened.

“She’s here,” he said. Quietly. Like saying it louder would change what it meant.

“She’s here,” I said.

―――

🎵: Yellow by Coldplay — slower, instrumental

―――

Later — The Camping Site, After Dinner

Most of the children were asleep.

The ones still awake were the determined kind — five or six of them in a loose cluster on the far mattresses, refusing sleep with the specific conviction of children who understand that sleep is a defeat. Favour was among them. I could see her in profile, still upright, clearly committed to outlasting everyone.

The fairy lights were doing what I had hoped they would do.

I was adjusting the eastern string — one section had drooped where I’d underestimated the tension — when I heard him.

Kes.

He appeared from the direction of the main building without announcement, still in his dinner clothes, and came to stand a few feet from where I was working.

“Here,” he said. “Let me.”

I handed him the string. He found the anchor point on the tree above, retied it, adjusted the line until it sat where it was supposed to sit. He worked in the specific competent silence of a man who doesn’t make conversation out of tasks.

We moved along the string together.

The lake was silver in the dark. The lights were gold above it. Somewhere behind us, one of the children laughed at something and was immediately hushed by another child, which produced more laughing.

“You built all of this today,” he said. Not a question.

“Somkele helped.”

“You built all of this today,” he said again.

I looked at the lights.

“It needed doing,” I said.

He was quiet for a moment. Then he reached into his shirt pocket and held something out to me.

The necklace.

Labradorite. Gold wire. The stone catching the fairy light and doing what labradorite does — shifting, between colours, between states, never quite settling on what it is.

I looked at it.

Then at him.

“Kes —”

“You looked at it twice at the station,” he said. “Before Tiara did. I saw.”

I held it for a moment in my palm. The stone was cool. The wire was finely made.

He reached over and took it back gently, and I stood still while he put it around my neck, and his fingers at my nape were careful in the specific way of someone doing something they are trying very hard to do correctly, and when it settled against my collarbone I did not move and neither did he for a moment longer than was strictly necessary.

Then he stepped back.

I touched the stone.

Said nothing.

He said nothing.

My phone buzzed.

Unknown number.

A photograph downloaded.

I looked at it.

My hand stopped moving.

The woman in the photograph was standing in the trees at the edge of the camping area. Her hair was down. She was wearing the white linen dress. The gold bracelet was visible on her wrist and the coordinates were catching the moonlight.

She was looking directly at the camera.

She was looking directly at me.

I looked up from the phone.

Looked at the treeline.

The trees stood in the dark and gave nothing back.

But the photograph had been taken from there.

From within thirty feet of where I was standing.

Kes was already looking at my face. He read it the way he read things — fast, completely, without asking for confirmation. He took the phone from my hand. Looked at the photograph. Looked at the treeline.

The fairy lights made everything gold.

Somewhere behind us, Favour finally lost to sleep.

The compound held its breath.

―――

Barbie as Narrator — Has Put Everything Down

No.

No, I — wait.

Let me sit with this.

Sophie was in those trees.

Sophie, who has a coffin and a funeral and a burial and a bracelet with coordinates that Keside placed in that coffin himself, was standing in the trees at the edge of a camping site in Ogun State while forty-three children slept under fairy lights that Kainene strung up this morning because she could not fix betrayal but she could fix the lights.

The photograph was taken from within thirty feet.

She was looking at Kainene.

Not Kes. Kainene.

I need everyone to understand that I have been holding this popcorn this entire chapter and I have now set it down because my hands are occupied with the task of being a person who just read that.

Let me also say this, because the chapter earned it and I refuse to rush past it:

The necklace.

The necklace.

Keside Umeh watched her look at it twice. From across a charity auction. While pretending to be building robots. He tracked the exact moment her eyes landed on it and held, and he bought it from Lola quietly and carried it in his shirt pocket through an entire dinner and waited until the fairy lights were gold and the children were asleep and the lake was doing its silver thing.

And then he put it around her neck.

In the dark.

With careful fingers.

And a dead woman was watching from the trees.

Chapter ten II please everyone.

I’ll be right here.

Absolutely not moving.

🖤🍿