Chapter 17 – Ash & Echo

Months slipped by like pages torn from a book no one would ever finish reading.

The school year ended quietly. WAEC results came out in August: Khalid topped Literature across the state. Chidi came second nationally in the same subject. Tobi and Yusuf both earned distinctions strong enough for any university they wanted. A couple of newspapers ran short follow-ups: “Scandal Students Excel Despite Controversy.” The headlines felt small, almost embarrassed, as if the whole story had worn itself out.

Adeyemi never went back to teaching.

She left the Bourdillon flat in late September too many lingering stares from the balcony, too many delivery boys who recognised her face from the news clips. She found a small two bedroom in Lekki Phase 1, quieter streets, no school nearby. She took freelance work: editing novels for local publishers, writing literature guides for online exam prep sites, ghostwriting education op-eds under a different name. The money was enough. The days stretched long.

She kept the red pen Khalid had given her. It sat on her new desk beside a single framed photo not of the boys, but of her old classroom blackboard on the very last day before everything broke. Someone (probably Tobi) had written in neat chalk:

We rise by lifting others.

Ms. A, thank you.

She never took the photo down.

The boys drifted apart.

Khalid went to the University of Lagos Mass Communication. He started a quiet, anonymous blog about Nigerian literature and young people’s mental health. He never named her, but every third post carried the faint trace of her voice: a question about symbolism, a gentle reminder that desire and power are never clean-cut.

Chidi chose Medicine at Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife. Far enough from Lagos that the memories felt smaller, softer. He stopped talking about the scandal completely. His mother still prayed extra rosaries for his soul every Sunday, but she’d stopped asking questions. He kept one screenshot on his phone the group chat’s final message from Adeyemi and looked at it only when the guilt grew too quiet.

Tobi stayed in Lagos, studying Architecture at Yaba College of Technology. He drew obsessively: staircases that curved but never quite reached the top, rooms with too many doors and no windows. His sketchbook held one page he never showed anyone a rough pencil sketch of a woman bent over a desk, surrounded by four shadowed figures. The lines were soft, almost tender. He never finished it.

Yusuf left Nigeria full scholarship to study Engineering in Canada. Before he boarded the flight at Murtala Muhammed Airport, he sent one last message to the now dead group number (knowing it would bounce):

Wherever you are, I hope you’re still writing the kind of sentences that make people stop breathing.

Thank you for teaching me hunger isn’t always a bad thing.

No reply came. He hadn’t expected one.

Years later five, maybe six, Adeyemi was in a small bookshop in Victoria Island, flipping through the poetry section, when a familiar voice stopped her cold.

“Ms. A?”

She turned slowly.

Chidi stood there taller, broader, stethoscope looped around his neck like a badge he’d earned the hard way. House officer scrubs. Tired eyes, but steady.

For a long moment neither of them spoke.

Then he smiled small, crooked, the same smile he used to flash when he finally cracked a difficult passage.

“I’m doing my housemanship at LUTH,” he said quietly. “Saw your name on a journal article last month. Curriculum reform. Still fighting the good fight.”

She swallowed. “Still breathing.”

Another silence thicker this time.

He reached into his pocket, pulled out a folded piece of paper, and handed it to her.

“I kept this. Thought you should have it back.”

It was her own handwriting. A short note she’d written years ago on the back of an old quiz paper:

Chidi your analysis of Okonkwo’s fear is the best in the class. Don’t ever let anyone make you feel small for feeling deeply.

Ms. Adeyemi

The ink had faded at the edges. Someone had traced over her signature with a different pen, years later, as if trying to keep it from disappearing completely.

She looked up. His eyes were wet.

“We were reckless,” he said. “We were young. We were selfish. But I’ve never regretted wanting you. I only regret how it ended for you.”

Adeyemi folded the note carefully, slipped it into her bag.

“I don’t regret the wanting either,” she answered softly. “I regret that the world still doesn’t know how to hold desire and power in the same hand without breaking one of them.”

He nodded.

They stood there among the shelves two people who had once burned together, now careful not to touch.

“I should go,” he said finally. “Rounds start soon.”

She reached out just once and brushed the back of his hand with her fingertips. The same small gesture she’d used in the corridor that last day before everything unravelled.

“Take care of yourself, Chidi.”

“You too, Ms. A.”

He walked away first.

She watched him disappear between the stacks.

Then she turned back to the poetry shelf, picked up a slim volume by Warsan Shire, and opened it at random.

The line that met her eyes:

“i want to kiss you in a way that makes you forget your mother’s name.”

She closed the book gently.

Outside, Lagos roared on horns, hawkers, heat, life.

She stepped into the street, the red pen still in her pocket, the folded note against her heart, and for the first time in years she let herself remember the taste of them not with shame, not with regret, but with the quiet, aching clarity of something that had been real.

And then she kept walking.

Because even ash remembers the fire that made it.

And sometimes, that’s enough.