The Woman Who Stayed
She sat down across from Adaeze without speaking immediately.
They looked at each other.
Adaeze had thought, in the imagined versions of this moment, that looking at this woman would produce something overwhelming — rage, perhaps, or grief, or the particular devastating recognition of seeing in concrete human form the thing that had cost her so much. What she felt instead was something quieter and stranger than any of that. Something almost like curiosity. The particular need to understand something by looking at it directly that she had always had, the same quality that had made her pick up the phone that first morning and scroll through the messages even tho