Power Failure

The storm hit Ikoyi at ten at night.

It came off the lagoon in a wall of black cloud, and within minutes the rain was hammering the windows hard enough to make the glass hum. Ada was in bed with a ledger on her knees when the lights went out.

Every light. All at once. The house fell into a darkness so complete she could not see her own hand.

"Mrs. Okafor?" Mrs. Bankole's voice drifted up the stairs. "The generator is down. I am sorry. I have left candles in the hall."

"Thank you!"

Ada found a candle, lit it, and padded down the corridor in her cardigan. The house felt different in the dark, larger and older, full of creaks and long shadows. She told herself she was only fetching water.

She found herself outside the study.

A thread of gold light showed beneath the door. She hesitated, then pushed it open.

Damian sat behind the desk with a single candle in front of him and his sleeves rolled to the elbow. He did not look surprised to see her.

"The storm will not last," he said.

"I did not say anything."

"You were about to apologise for intruding." He nodded at the sofa. "Sit. I have been sitting alone in the dark for two years. It is not as romantic as it sounds."

Ada sat. The leather was cold through her cardigan. Thunder rolled somewhere far out over the water.

"Mrs. Bankole says you do not sleep."

"Mrs. Bankole says a great deal."

"Is it true?"

He turned the candle a quarter inch on the desk, a small, careful movement.

"After my mother died," he said, "I found that sleep came with dreams. So I mostly stopped."

"Tell me about her."

He did not speak for so long that she thought he would refuse. Then, very quietly, he began.

"Her name was Ngozi. She was an auditor. A proper one, in the old style. She read everything twice, even menus." The corner of his mouth lifted. "She would have liked you. You have the same way of looking at a page as though it is lying to you."

Ada smiled before she could stop herself.

"She taught me to count before I could read. She said numbers were the only honest language. Everyone else could be bought." His voice dropped. "She was wrong about that, in the end."

"What happened?"

"She fell." He said the word flatly. "Down the east staircase. In the dark. My father said she must have been looking for something."

The candle flame bent in a draught.

"You do not believe him."

"I have not believed one word he has said in seven years."

Ada drew her knees up and wrapped her arms around them. She wanted to say I'm sorry, but the sentence felt too small. So she said the true thing instead.

"My father used to read the same way. Double-entry, he said. Every debit has a credit. Nothing disappears, it only moves." Her throat tightened. "He said if you looked long enough, you could always find where it went."

"Did you?"

"No." The word cracked. "I could not find it."

"You will."

"How do you know?"

"Because you do not stop."

The storm roared. Somewhere upstairs a window banged. Ada realised, with a slow, strange warmth, that she was not afraid. She had spent three months afraid of everything, of bills and silence and mornings, and tonight, in a dark room with the man she had sworn to destroy, she was not afraid at all.

Without quite deciding to, she lay down on the sofa.

A moment later something heavy settled over her. A blanket, or a jacket, warm and smelling of rain on stone.

"Sleep," Damian said softly. "I will keep watch."

She meant to answer. She did not.

* * *

She woke to grey light and a silence so deep it rang.

The storm was gone. The candle had burned down to a stub. She was alone on the sofa under Damian's jacket, and across the room, in the leather chair that she had never seen anyone use, he sat with his head tilted back and his hands loose in his lap.

Asleep. Properly, deeply asleep.

Ada held very still.

"He has not slept like that in two years," Mrs. Bankole whispered from the doorway, her eyes bright. "Not once. Thank you, madam."

"I did nothing."

"No," the old woman agreed, with a small, knowing smile. "That is exactly why."

Ada crept out and left him sleeping.

But as she passed the desk, his phone lit up on the blotter. A message from a contact saved only as Father.

Sunday. Tea at my house. Bring your wife. Alone.