CHAPTER 65: Accra

POV: Maya Castellano

Accra arrived before she was ready for it.

That was the thing about new cities. You could know intellectually that you were going somewhere and still be caught off guard by the weight of actually being there. The air was different immediately stepping off the plane. Warm and welcoming.

Kofi moved through the airport like someone who had done this many times.

 He knew which line to join and where the bags came out and the name of the man waiting with a car outside. Maya found that quietly enviable.

She’d been at home in exactly one place her entire life and even that had shifted under her feet more than once.

In the car she watched the city through the window.

Accra in the early evening was not what she’d imagined though she couldn’t have said precisely what she’d imagined. Something more dramatic maybe or obviously foreign. Instead it felt real, the traffic had its own logic, the buildings told stories of different decades existing beside each other without apology. Hawkers at intersections moving between cars with craftiness. She noticed a woman balancing something on her head with a straightness of spine that made her unconsciously sit up slightly.

“What are you thinking?” Kofi asked.

“That I have very bad posture.”

He laughed. 

The hotel was small and well considered.

Not luxurious but elegant. The quality of the sheets, the window that looked out over a courtyard with a tree whose name she didn’t know but whose presence felt important somehow, the silence that existed inside despite the city noise outside.

Kofi had chosen it.

She didn’t say anything about it but she noticed.

They ate dinner at a place he knew, outside, under a canopy with lights strung between poles and food that arrived without her having ordered it because he’d called ahead and she should have found that presumptuous and instead found it entirely acceptable which told her something about herself she noted and set aside for later examination.

The food was remarkable.

“Stop looking so surprised,” Kofi said.

“I’m not surprised.”

“You made a face.”

“I make faces. It’s not commentary.”

“It was very much commentary.”

She pointed her fork at him. “If you spend the next six days telling me what my face means I will genuinely get on a plane home.”

“You won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I know you put the novel back in your bag,” he said.

Maya lowered the fork.

“It’s a good novel,” she said finally.

“What’s it about?”

“A woman who keeps almost doing the brave thing and then doesn’t.”

Kofi looked at her.

“How does it end?” he said.

“I don’t know yet.” She picked up her fork again. “I keep putting it down.”

He didn’t push and just continued eating.

Later she stood at the window of her room.

The courtyard below was quiet, the tree moved slightly and inside the room the sheets were the quality she had noticed when she arrived and the silence was still doing its thing despite the city existing just beyond the wall.

She thought about the woman in the novel.

The one who kept almost doing the brave thing.

Maya had read forty pages of it over two years and put it down each time not because it was bad but because it was accurate.

She picked it up now.

Read for an hour without stopping.

When she put it down she sat on the edge of the bed and thought about Selene on that couch two days ago not filling the silence after he looks at me like I’m real.

Thought about what it meant that the silence had been the most honest response.

Thought about Kofi noticing the novel and not making it into anything more than an observation.

Thought about the woman in the book who kept almost doing the brave thing.

Almost.

She picked up her phone, held it for a moment.

Then put it down and lay back on the bed with the lamp still on and looked at the ceiling which had no stain in the shape of nothing and thought about what it would mean to almost stop.

Her door knocked at 8 AM.

She opened it still in the oversized t-shirt she slept in, hair entirely unsettled, having made no concessions to the fact that she was in a hotel in a foreign city and could theoretically have been anyone.

Kofi stood there with two coffees.

He looked at her with the expression she was beginning to recognize. The one that took her in completely and made no judgment about what it found.

“Construction site at nine,” he said. “You don’t have to come.”

“I’m coming.”

“You look like you just woke up.”

“That’s very correct but—.”

He handed her a coffee.

She took it.

They stood in the doorway for a moment, her in her oversized t-shirt with her unsettled hair and him in his, with his coffee and his unhurried eyes and the Accra morning happening behind him through the corridor window.

“Kofi,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I’m going to finish the novel on this trip.”

He looked at her for a moment.

“Okay,” he said.

She closed the door to get dressed.