Chapter 19 – The Last Page

The rain had stopped by the time Adeyemi left the bookstore, but the streets still shone wet under the streetlights. Lagos never really slept it just slowed down enough for people to breathe. She walked slowly toward her car, the slim Warsan Shire volume tucked under her arm, Chidi’s folded note still warm against her palm inside her bag.

She didn’t drive straight home.

Instead she took the long way past the old school gates (now repainted, the sign slightly crooked), past the street where her Bourdillon flat used to be (new tenants, lights on in what had been her bedroom), past the quiet corner near the lagoon where she used to sit sometimes after late marking sessions, listening to the water lap and trying not to think too hard about what she wanted.

Tonight she let herself think.

She parked near the water, cut the engine, and sat with the windows cracked. The air smelled of salt and diesel and wet earth. A night heron called somewhere in the dark. She pulled the note out again, unfolded it under the dashboard light.

The handwriting hers was so young. So certain.

Don’t ever let anyone make you feel small for feeling deeply.

She traced the words with her fingertip, feeling the faint ridges where ink had pressed into paper years ago.

Chidi had kept it.

Carried it through medical school, through night shifts, through every time someone asked why he never talked about his secondary school days.

He’d traced her signature again and again, like a ritual to keep the memory alive.

She thought about the others too.

Khalid, probably still writing late into the night, turning sharp observations into quiet essays no one knew came from the same boy who once knelt at her feet and looked at her like she hung the moon.

Tobi, sketching impossible buildings, leaving one page unfinished because finishing it would mean letting go.

Yusuf, somewhere under Canadian snow, learning how cold the world could be and remembering how hot hunger felt when it was shared.

And her.

She’d spent years telling herself the story was over terminated, banned, erased.

But stories don’t end when someone locks a door or signs a paper.

They just change shape.

She looked at her thighs under the steering wheel covered now by loose linen trousers and smiled to herself. No visible marks anymore. No paint. No proof.

But the memory was still there, faint and warm, like a handprint that never quite fades.

She folded the note one last time, slipped it back into her bag beside the red pen, and started the car.

The drive home was quiet.

No radio. Just the hum of tires on wet asphalt and the soft patter of late raindrops on the roof.

When she got inside she didn’t turn on the lights right away.

She stood in the dark living room, listening to the city outside distant horns, a generator coughing to life somewhere, the low murmur of a neighbor’s TV.

Then she walked to her desk, opened the drawer, and placed the note beside the framed blackboard photo.

She didn’t need to reread it.

She already knew the words by heart.

She poured herself a small glass of wine, sat on the balcony, and watched the lights of Lagos flicker like scattered stars.

Somewhere out there, four men were living their lives carrying pieces of her the way she carried pieces of them.

Not as shame.

Not as regret.

Just as something real that had happened once, in a classroom that no longer existed, between people who were brave enough (or foolish enough) to want it.

And that, she decided, was the truest thing she’d ever taught.

She raised her glass to the night.

“To feeling deeply,” she whispered.

Then she drank.

And the city kept breathing around her.