THE MARKET

It was a Saturday in March, which in Birmingham meant the sky couldn't decide and the wind meant business, and Ada had come to Digbeth for ogiri because the corner shop near her flat had been out for two weeks and she was making egusi soup and she refused to compromise.

She had her bag over one shoulder and her headphones in   Fela Kuti, which was her thinking music and also her crowd-navigating music  and she was reading the label on a container of ground crayfish when she heard someone say her name.

Not Ms. Okonkwo. Ada.

She turned.

Daniel Osei was standing two stalls down with a paper bag in one hand and an expression of mild surprise that she suspected matched her own.

She pulled one headphone out. Daniel.

I wasn't sure it was you, he said, walking over. Without the lanyard.

I'm not always at work.

I know. I'm sorry  that came out wrong. He looked genuinely awkward for a moment, which she hadn't seen from him before. In the care home he had been contained, professional. Here he was wearing a dark green jumper and carrying what appeared to be a bag of egusi and looking like a man who shopped for groceries on Saturday mornings, which was somehow more disarming than his professional competence had been.

Are you shopping?  she asked.

Trying to. He held up the paper bag. My mother is visiting next week and she will check my cupboards and then she will look at me with the particular expression that means she is calculating how I have survived without her.

Ada laughed  proper and sudden, the kind she sometimes forgot she was capable of. "My mother does the same. Except by phone. She asks me to describe what's in my fridge."

And do you tell the truth?

I describe the fridge I aspire to have.

He grinned. It changed his face significantly  opened it up, made him look younger and less careful.

They fell into walking together without either of them suggesting it. He stopped at a stall selling dried fish and studied the options with the seriousness of a man who did not want to get this wrong.

The ogiri is behind you, Ada said. Second shelf.

He turned, found it, picked up a container. "Do you always know where things are?"

I grew up in a house where my mother could find anything in the dark. I think it's inherited.

Like a superpower.

A domestic one. Very unglamorous.

He bought the ogiri. She noticed he didn't know how much to buy and considered telling him and then decided it wasn't her business. Then he said, "How much should I get?" and she told him, and he looked relieved in a way that suggested he'd been silently hoping she'd say something.

They had jollof rice from a stall at the far end of the market, standing up. The conversation moved without effort — his work, her work, how different the NHS felt from the independent sector, what Birmingham had that London didn't.

Canals, he said, with unexpected conviction.

She agreed.

He was from Accra originally, he told her. Came to the UK at nineteen for university, stayed for reasons that accumulated.

What reasons?  she asked.

At first, work. Then  inertia, maybe. Then it started to feel like home in the way that happens slowly, without announcement.

Ada understood this completely.

They stood outside the market afterwards, both slightly reluctant for reasons neither named.

Can I text you? he said. About the market, or the egusi situation, or something not related to Mr. Patel's care plan?

Ada was quiet for precisely three seconds.

Yes, she said.

She gave him her number. He sent her a text immediately that said only: for the record, the jollof here is better than the place near my office.

She was still smiling in the car, and she did not examine it, and she drove home and made egusi soup that turned out very well.

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