CHAPTER THREE

The torchlight was dead.

I knew before I opened my eyes. The darkness behind my eyelids was too complete. Too final. The kind that does not lift when morning comes because there is nothing left to lift it.

I opened my eyes anyway.

The room was grey with early light coming through the small window. My textbook was still across my leg. My neck ached from the angle I had slept in. The eviction notice was folded beside me on the mattress where I had placed it before the dark took everything.

I sat up slowly.

I looked at the notice.

Then I set it face down on the floor and stood up.

The water in the bucket was cold the way it was always cold. I did not have fire to heat it up. My body moved fast and quiet the way it did every morning. Just water and soap and the business of getting clean enough to face whatever was outside that door. I looked through the broken piece of mirror. Nothing in it was perfect. Just like everything else.

I dried off. Reached for my dress from the nail on the wall. The better one. Not because today deserved it. Because the other one was still tired from yesterday.

Then I reached for my cardigan.

I slid my arms through and pulled it across my shoulders the way I always did. My hands smoothed it flat from the shoulders down.

My right hand stopped at the pocket.

Something was inside it.

I had forgotten.

I reached in slowly and pulled out the note. Unfolded it standing there in the middle of my room with the grey morning light doing its best around me.

Love is coming.

And the date.

Tomorrow.

I stared at it.

Not with excitement. Not with the same unsettled feeling from yesterday. I stared at it the way you stare at something that belongs to a different version of your life. A version that had not yet received a finance email or an eviction notice or stood outside a food stall doing brutal mathematics with coins that did not add up.

I folded the note back.

Put it in my pocket.

Picked up my bag and my books.

And walked out without eating.

The road to campus was longer on the second day.

Or maybe my legs just knew what they were carrying better now. My stomach had been empty since the gari last night and it had stopped asking loudly. It was just there. Quiet and patient and waiting.

I passed the food stall on the corner.

I did not stop.

I did not even slow down.

I was almost at the campus gate when I realised how quiet the road had become. The usual crowd of late students was gone. The gate was not busy. I looked at my phone.

The screen tilted in my hand so the cracked side faced down.

I was late.

I walked faster.

The lecture hall door made its sound when I pushed it.

Every head turned.

I had prepared myself for it this time. I kept my face even and my steps steady and I walked toward the nearest empty seat without looking at anyone directly. But I felt them. The recognition moving through the room like a current. The whispers starting before I had even sat down.

“That is her.”

“The one who argued with him.”

“She actually came back.”

I set my bag down. Opened my notebook. Clicked my pen.

At the front of the room Dr. Adrian Cole stood with his back to us writing on the board. His coat was dark again. His posture was the same. Straight and unbothered and completely sealed.

He turned around.

His eyes moved across the room the way they always did. Steady. Measuring. They passed over me without stopping.

Nothing.

No acknowledgement. No recognition. No memory of Tuesday on his face at all.

I looked down at my notebook.

Fine.

He picked up a sheet of paper from the desk.

“There is a compulsory handout for this course,” he said. His voice was flat and even. “It covers the remaining topics for the semester and it is required for the final examination. You are to obtain a copy before next week.”

He turned to the board. Wrote a name and a price.

Around me the room shifted immediately. Bags opened. Phones came out. Someone behind me was already calculating out loud. A girl two seats away unzipped her purse without looking, the kind of automatic movement that comes from never having to think twice about money.

I looked at the number on the board.

I wrote it in my notebook.

Slowly.

Like writing it down was the same as having it.

I closed my notebook and sat straight and looked at the front of the room and held my face very still.

The lecture continued. Words filled the room. I wrote what I could and heard less than I should have. My pen moved but my mind kept drifting back to the number on the board. To the finance email. To the eviction notice sitting face down on my floor at home.

To the note in my pocket.

I pressed my hand flat against my cardigan from the outside.

It was still there.

The corridor after the lecture was loud and full.

I walked through it with my bag on my shoulder and my books under my arm. Head forward. Moving like I had somewhere to be.

I was almost at the side exit when I saw her.

She was standing near the staircase with her phone in her hand. Her hair sat neatly on her head. My work. The braids I had done a night ago in a corridor outside her room, two hours and twenty minutes of my hands and my back and my time.

She looked up and saw me at the same moment.

Her eyes dropped back to her phone immediately.

I stopped walking.

She did not look up again.

I watched her for just a moment. The way her fingers moved too deliberately across her screen. The way her shoulders had gone slightly stiff.

She knew.

I turned and walked out through the exit.

I did not say anything.

There was nothing to say that would give me back what she had taken.

Mama Chioma’s door was open before I reached the gate.

I had never spoken to her before. I had seen her. Heard her. Her laugh came through walls without asking permission. But we had never exchanged more than a nod in the corridor.

She was standing outside her door with a bucket of water and a look on her face like she had been waiting for something to complain about.

She looked at me when I came through.

“You are the student,” she said. Not a question.

“Yes ma,” I said.

She looked at my hands. Then at my bag. Then at my face.

“Come and help me move this thing inside,” she said, pointing at a heavy bag of rice leaning against the wall. “My back has been worrying me since morning.”

I set my things down inside my door and came back out. Lifted the bag. Carried it inside her room and set it where she pointed.

“Sit,” she said.

I sat on the low bench near her door.

She moved to her small stove without asking me anything. A pot came down. A ladle. The smell that followed was immediate and serious. The kind of smell that finds the empty places in you and points at them.

“That landlord,” she said, her back to me, stirring. “He has been coming since morning yesterday. Up and down. I told him you leave early and come back when it is already dark.” She clicked her teeth. “He did not want to hear. Came three times. Said he was going to come back in the evening to make sure he meets you.”

I said nothing.

She turned and looked at me.

“How long has he been disturbing you?” she asked.

“He slipped a notice under my door,” I said.

She made a sound with her mouth. Turned back to the pot.

“Eat first,” she said.

She put a plate in front of me. Rice and stew, real stew with colour and warmth and pieces of fish that I had not tasted in longer than I wanted to count. I picked up the spoon.

I ate slowly.

She talked while I ate. About her son who had not called in two weeks. About the rain that was coming. About the landlord whose heart she said was made of something harder than stone.

I listened and ate and did not say much.

When the knock came I already knew.

Three of them. Hard. The kind that were not asking permission.

I set my spoon down.

Mama Chioma looked at the door and then at me.

I stood up. Walked out to my door and opened it.

My landlord filled the frame the way he always did. Tall and certain and already decided.

“You got my notice,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Then you know why I am here.”

“I have thirty days,” I said.

“You had thirty days two days ago,” he said. His voice did not rise. It did not need to. “I have been coming since yesterday. You are never here.”

“I am a student,” I said. “I have classes.”

“I have somebody who wants this room,” he said. He looked past me briefly into the space behind me. Then back at my face. “Somebody ready to pay. No waiting. No notices.” He straightened. “I have been patient with you. That patience is finishing.”

He left.

I closed the door.

Stood with my back against it.

The room was the same. Mattress on the floor. Clothes on the nails. Books in the corner. Eviction notice face down where I had left it this morning.

Everything the same.

Everything closing in.

I stood there for a long moment.

Then I slid down slowly until I was sitting on the floor with my back against the door.

My hand found my cardigan pocket.

The note was there.

I pulled it out. Unfolded it one more time.

Love is coming.

The date at the bottom.

Tomorrow.

I sat on the floor of my room with the landlord’s words still in the air and my books in the corner that had cost me more than I had and I looked at those three words written in sharp clean handwriting by a man who did not believe in anything warm.

And for the first time since he wrote them I did not think about the argument.

I thought about the number on the board today that I had written down like writing it was the same as having it.

I thought about thirty days that were already becoming less.

I thought about tomorrow.

And what it meant that he had chosen it.

I folded the note carefully.

Put it back in my pocket.

And sat very still in the quiet of my room while something I had not yet named began to take shape in the back of my mind.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​