CHAPTER FIVE

Morning came the way it always did.

Without asking.

I was already sitting up when the first grey light touched the window. My back against the wall. I had not slept again after four. Just sat there in the dark thinking until the dark became something lighter and the something lighter became day.

I got up.

The room looked the same. It always looked the same. But something about it felt different this morning. Like I was seeing it from a small distance. The mattress on the floor. The three nails on the wall. The eviction notice face down where it had been for days. The empty gari tin.

I looked at all of it for a moment.

Then I reached for my dress.

I missed my first lecture.

I did not know it had happened until I was standing outside the faculty building looking at my phone and the time on the cracked screen told me something I was not ready for.

I stood there.

First lecture. Gone. Just like that. Without intention. Without a decision. I had left the house and walked and somewhere between my room and campus my feet had brought me here instead of to the lecture hall and I had not even noticed.

That had never happened before.

Not once.

I pressed my phone against my side and stood very still for a moment. The campus moved around me. Students passing. Voices overlapping. Someone called out to someone else across the courtyard. An ordinary morning doing ordinary things.

I turned and walked to my second lecture.

I sat through it without being inside it.

The lecturer’s voice reached me from somewhere far away. My pen was in my hand. My notebook was open. I wrote things down without reading them. My body was in the chair and everything else was somewhere down a corridor that smelled like old paper standing outside a door numbered fourteen.

When the lecture ended I did not move immediately.

Students filed out around me. Chairs scraped. Bags zipped. The room emptied itself the way rooms do when they have finished being useful.

I sat there.

The piece of paper from yesterday was still in my bag. The one the girl had handed me with the expression of someone glad to have found me.

“This is not optional.”

That was yesterday. Today nothing was optional anymore. Not my mother’s fever. Not the empty tin. Not the thirty days. Not any of it.

I stood up.

I walked out.

The break between lectures was thirty minutes.

I stood outside the faculty building for most of it.

My bag was on my shoulder. My hands were not steady the way they usually were. I pressed them against my sides and looked at the building entrance and told myself to move.

My feet did not move.

I thought about yesterday. The way I had placed that contract back on his desk. The way I had stood at the door and said I am not an option. The way I had walked out with my head up and something that felt like dignity wrapped around me like a second skin.

And now here I am.

Standing outside the same building twenty four hours later with empty hands and a mother who had been sick for a week and a gari tin that had run out and no customers and no plan and nothing except the one door I had already walked away from.

I thought about her voice.

“Are you eating well?”.

I picked up my bag properly on my shoulder.

And I walked inside.

The corridor was the same.

Long. Quiet. Smelling like old paper and something closed off. My footsteps sounded too loud in it. I walked slower than I needed to. Not because I was lost. Because every step forward was costing me something I could not name yet.

I stopped outside Room 14.

The door was closed.

I stood there for a moment. My hand raised. Not moving.

I thought about walking back. I thought about it seriously. My feet even shifted slightly backwards before something in my chest pulled them forward again.

My mother’s face.

The empty tin.

The nail on the wall with my dress hanging on it.

I knocked.

“Come in.”

I pushed the door open.

He was at his desk. Of course he was. Like he had not moved since yesterday. Like time passed differently in this room. He looked up when I entered and his face did the thing it always did.

Nothing.

No surprise. No satisfaction. Nothing.

I walked to the chair across from his desk and sat down. Put my bag on my lap. I smoothed the fabric of my dress once. Then again. Then I made myself stop.

I opened my mouth.

“Dr. Cole I want to….”

“Are you ready?” he said.

Just that.

Not unkind. Not warm. Just a question placed in the air between us like he had been expecting it since yesterday and had simply been waiting for the scheduling to catch up.

I closed my mouth.

I looked at him.

He was already reaching into the desk drawer. He placed the contract on the desk between us. The same one. He had not put it away.

He had known.

Something moved through me at that. Not anger. Not relief. Something that did not have a clean name.

“I have conditions,” I said.

He looked at me. His pen was already in his hand.

“State them,” he said.

I straightened in the chair.

“One year,” I said. “Not a day more. When the year ends the contract ends. No extensions. No renegotiation.”

He wrote something on a notepad beside him.

“Separate rooms,” I said. “No entering each other’s private space. Not without knocking. Not without permission. Ever.”

He wrote again.

“My studies stay untouched,” I said. “You do not interfere. You do not have opinions about my research or my lectures or anything that belongs to my education.”

“Agreed,” he said.

“My tuition gets cleared within the week,” I said. “Not eventually. Not when it is convenient. This week.”

He looked up at me briefly. Then back down.

“Within the week,” he said.

“My mother needs medication,” I said.

My voice stayed even. I made sure of it. I did not look away from his face.

“She has been sick for a week. Before I sign anything that gets handled today.”

The office was very quiet.

He looked at me for a moment. Something moved behind his eyes. So brief I almost missed it.

“Her location,” he said.

I told him.

He picked up his phone. Typed without looking up. Set it back down.

“Anything else?” he said.

I looked at the contract on the desk.

“In public we maintain the arrangement,” I said. “In private we are strangers who live in the same space. No performance behind closed doors.”

“That suits me,” he said.

I looked at him one more time.

This man with his cold eyes and his ordered office and his books arranged in ways that made sense to nobody but him. This man who had written three words on a piece of paper and left it on a desk and somehow knew I would end up sitting here.

I picked up his pen.

I looked at the signature line.

My hand paused there for just a second.

Just one.

Then I signed my name.

The sound of the pen going down was small. It should have been louder. It felt loud enough inside me.

I set the pen down.

He picked up the contract. Looked at my signature the way he had looked at everything else in this room. Like he was confirming a calculation.

“Friday,” he said. “Seven in the morning.” He looked up.

I nodded.

I stood up. Picked up my bag. I walked to the door.

I did not look back.

Friday came quietly.

No announcement. No ceremony. Just another morning that arrived the way mornings did. Without asking.

I was up before the light again.

I took my bath in the cold water. Dried off. Reached for my dress from the nail.

I looked around the room.

The mattress on the floor. The three nails. One dress still hanging. The eviction notice I would not need anymore. My textbooks in the corner. The empty tin.

I had one bag.

I packed it slowly. Not because there was much to pack. Because leaving a place, even a place like this, even a place that had given you nothing but cold water and dead torchlight and a ceiling stain that never changed, leaving still meant something.

I set the bag by the door.

Knocked on Mama Chioma’s door on my way out.

She opened it and looked at my bag. Then at my face.

She did not ask.

She pulled me in and held me for a moment the way older women hold young girls who are carrying things they should not be carrying alone. Her arms were wide and warm and she smelled like firewood and something cooking.

She let me go.

“You know where this door is,” she said.

“Yes ma,” I said.

I walked out through the gate. Lifted it slightly. Pushed at the same time.

It gave way.

His apartment building was nothing like my building.

I stood outside it with my one bag beside my feet and looked up at it for a moment. Clean. Ordered. The kind of building that did not need you to know its tricks.

I found the right floor.

The right door.

I stood in front of it.

My hand went up.

I knocked.

Silence.

Then footsteps.

The door opened.

Dr. Adrian Cole stood in the frame. Dark shirt. No coat for once. He looked at me. Then at my bag. Then at me again.

He stepped back without a word.

I picked up my bag.

And I walked in.

The door closed behind me.

And somewhere in the silence of that clean cold apartment something shifted.

Not in the walls.

Not in him.

In me.

Like a chapter ending.

Like something else quietly beginning.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​