Professor Adeyemi discovered the problem with his wife’s lover on a Tuesday afternoon while grading differential equations in his office at the University of Lagos. The lover was sending her poetry. Bad poetry. This was significant. The quality mattered. He knew this because Ngozi had left her laptop open on the dining table, the screen still glowing with its blue reproach, and he wasn’t above reading other people’s emails when those people were married to him, and the laptop sat there like an invitation to minor betrayal.
The poem compared Ngozi’s eyes to “twin moons over the Bight of Benin.”
Adeyemi sat down at the table. He read the poem three times, noting its rhythms, its failures of syntax. The metaphor was imprecise. This was what bothered him most. Not the affair, he had suspected the affair for weeks, maybe months, but the imprecision.
Moons were cold and distant. Ngozi’s eyes were neither of these things. They were brown and direct, and had a way of looking at you that made you feel like you were being calculated, assessed, and found either adequate or wanting, depending on the day and the light, and her mood and factors he had never been able to graph successfully.
The lover’s name was Chukwuma Okafor. The name appeared seventeen times in her inbox. Adeyemi counted. He taught sociology. He taught the construction of social meaning. The irony wasn’t lost on Adeyemi, though he suspected it was lost on Okafor. He had met him twice at faculty mixers, both times holding wine glasses at odd angles, as if the stemware itself was making a theoretical point. Okafor wore linen shirts and talked about postcolonial discourse while drinking too much South African wine, which seemed to Adeyemi like a failure of political commitment.
Adeyemi had found him insufferable. Now he found him worse than insufferable. He found him dangerous in the way that people who confuse eloquence with wisdom were always dangerous.
He closed the laptop. The screen went black. The email vanished but continued to exist somewhere in digital space, in server farms in distant countries, replicated endlessly across backup systems. This was the nature of electronic communication. Nothing ever truly disappeared. It only migrated to new locations, became invisible but permanent, like trauma or debt.
He went back to grading. The students had done poorly on question seven. They always did poorly on question seven. He had been teaching this course for eleven years, and question seven defeated them every time with a kind of statistical inevitability that he found almost beautiful. It was about the rate of change. The rate at which things moved away from other things.
They never understood that the answer was right there in front of them if they would just slow down and look at what was actually on the page instead of what they hoped would be on the page.
A student, named Olumide, had written, “The derivative represents the instantaneous rate of change at a given point.”
This was correct. This was completely correct. But then Olumide had failed to apply this understanding to the actual problem. Knowledge and application were different things.
Adeyemi understood this. He understood it more clearly now, sitting in his office with the afternoon heat pressing against the windows and his wife’s infidelity fresh in his mind like a headline he couldn’t stop reading.
Ngozi came home at six. She taught literature at the same university. Nineteenth-century British novels and contemporary African fiction. She could talk for forty minutes about the use of free indirect discourse in Middlemarch. She could make undergraduates care about narrative distance and unreliable narration.
They had met at a conference in Abuja twelve years ago. She had been presenting a paper on Soyinka and the performance of language. He had been in the audience, sitting in the back row, initially planning to leave early.
Her paper was brilliant and contentious. Afterwards, they argued about methodology in the hotel bar until three in the morning, ordering Star beer and later switching to gin as the argument became more animated, more intimate.
They were married eight months later. His mother had objected. Ngozi’s father had objected. They had married anyway. This had seemed romantic at the time.
“How was your day?” she asked.
She was standing in the doorway. She did this now. Stood in doorways instead of entering rooms fully. As if she were always preparing for departure, keeping her options open.
“Fine,” he said. “Yours?”
“Long. The second-years are doing Anthills of the Savannah. Half of them haven’t read it. The other half have read it but don’t understand that Ikem is Achebe’s mouthpiece, his theoretical stand-in. They think it’s just a novel.”
“It’s just a novel.”
“You know what I mean.”
He did. He knew what she meant. This was the problem. After twelve years, they knew what the other meant. They had learned each other’s systems of meaning, their private languages, their particular ways of avoiding the obvious.
She set her bag down. A leather bag she had bought in Kano four years ago. The strap was fraying. He had noticed this but hadn’t mentioned it. Why? What was the calculus of marriage that made you notice your wife’s fraying bag strap but say nothing? He didn’t know. There should be equations for this. Someone should develop them.
She went to the kitchen. He heard her opening cabinets, running water, and the sounds that meant dinner was being prepared. The usual sounds of her coming home.
These sounds had become a kind of music, a soundtrack to their evenings. He wondered if she made the same sounds in Okafor’s apartment. Did Okafor have an apartment? Or did they go to hotels? He pictured them in a Lagos hotel, somewhere in Ikeja or Victoria Island, the air conditioning set too high, bad art on the walls, Okafor reciting his terrible poetry while Ngozi pretended not to notice how terrible it was.
“I’m making egusi soup,” she called from the kitchen. “Are you hungry?”
“Yes.”
He wasn’t hungry. He couldn’t remember the last time he had actually been hungry. Hunger was something from childhood, from before he had learned to eat on schedule regardless of appetite. But this was what you said. This was how marriage worked. You said you were hungry and then you ate the food your wife prepared, and then you said thank you, and then the day continued in its prescribed arc until it was time to sleep, alone or together, depending on factors neither of you could name.
She cooked. He sat at the table and pretended to read a journal article about topology and manifold theory.
The article was dense and brilliant, and said nothing he could use. The laptop sat between them like a third person at the table, like a child they had never had, silent and accusatory. She didn’t look at it. He didn’t look at it. It sat there anyway, emitting its faint electronic hum, storing its secrets, its seventeen emails from Chukwuma Okafor, its terrible poetry about moons and nights.
They ate. The soup was good. It was always good. Ngozi was an excellent cook. This was one of the things his mother had approved of. His mother had approved of very little about Ngozi, her education was too Western, her manner too direct, her family not prominent enough, but she had approved of the cooking. “At least she can feed you properly,” his mother had said, as if marriage were primarily a nutritional arrangement.
“Did you call your mother?” Ngozi asked.
“Not yet.”
“She called me. She wants to know if we’re coming for Easter. She’s planning the menu. She needs to know how many people.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her we would talk about it.”
“What’s there to talk about?”
“Whether we’re going.”
“We go every year.”
“That doesn’t mean we have to go this year. Precedent isn’t an obligation.”
He looked at her. She was eating her soup methodically, the spoon moving from bowl to mouth in regular intervals. Her face gave nothing away. This was something she had gotten better at over the years. In the beginning, everything showed on her face. Joy, anger, frustration, love, desire. It had all been right there, readable as text, clear as syntax. Now her face was like a book in a language he had forgotten how to read. Or a language that had changed its grammar rules without notifying him.
“Do you not want to go?” he asked.
“I’m asking if you want to go.”
“I asked you first.”
“That’s childish.”
“You’re right. I apologise.”
“Don’t apologise if you don’t mean it.”
“I mean it.”
“Do you?”
Did he? He wasn’t sure.
Apologies had become automatic, reflexive, divorced from actual remorse. They were just sounds you made to keep the conversation moving, to avoid the silence that waited beneath every exchange like a trapdoor.
She set down her spoon. The spoon made a small sound against the bowl. A minor percussion. She looked at him properly now, making eye contact, holding it.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“You’re being strange.”
“I’m always strange. You’ve said so yourself. Many times. It’s one of your recurring themes.”
“Strange in a different way. A new taxonomy of strangeness.”
“I’m tired. That’s all. The students. The heat. The usual things.”
She studied him for another moment, then went back to her soup. They finished eating in silence.
He washed the dishes while she marked essays in the living room, the red pen moving across paper in violent strokes, crossing out failures of logic, failures of expression. This was their routine. It had been their routine for years. Routines were important. They were the skeleton that kept a marriage from collapsing into formless flesh, into the chaos of unstructured time.
He dried the last plate. A white plate with a blue pattern around the rim. They had bought these plates at a market in Ibadan six years ago, haggling with the seller, feeling like they were participating in something authentic, something that connected them to the place they lived. Now they were just plates. Objects that held food.
Through the doorway, he could see her on the sofa, red pen moving across paper. Her reading glasses were sliding down her nose. She pushed them back up absently, automatically, a gesture so familiar it had become invisible to him until now.
She had had those glasses for five years. The frames were scratched. He had offered to buy her new ones, but she had said these were fine, they still worked, new glasses seemed wasteful when these functioned adequately. This had seemed admirable at the time. Now it seemed like evidence of something else. A refusal to accept gifts. A way of maintaining distance.
“I read your email,” he said.
The words came out casually, as if he were mentioning the weather or tomorrow’s schedule. This surprised him. He had expected his voice to sound different. Wounded or angry or something. But it sounded normal. It sounded exactly like his voice always sounded.
She didn’t look up. The pen kept moving. “Which email?”
“The one from Chukwuma Okafor. The poem. The one about moons and the Bight of Benin. Though actually there were seventeen emails. I’m specifically referencing the most recent one. The one with the poem.”
The pen stopped moving. She set it down carefully, deliberately, as if the placement mattered, as if she was solving a small problem of spatial arrangement. She took off her glasses. She folded them and placed them on top of the essays she had been marking.
Then, she looked at him. “I see.”
“That’s all?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know. Something. Anything. Denial. Confession. Justification. The usual things people say in these situations.”
“I’m sleeping with him.”
The words sat in the air between them. They had weight. They had mass. They occupied space.
Adeyemi found himself noticing irrelevant details. There was a water stain on the ceiling above her head, shaped vaguely like Madagascar. The curtains needed washing. They had needed washing for weeks. The clock on the wall was three minutes slow. It had been three minutes slow for two months. He kept meaning to fix it but never did.
“How long?” he asked.
“Four months.”
“Four months.”
“Yes.”
“I see.”
He sat down in the chair across from her. His legs felt strange. Not weak exactly. Just not quite solid. Like they were made of something less substantial than bone and muscle and ligament. Chalk, maybe. Or compressed air. Or the foam that people used for packaging fragile items.
“Are you going to leave me?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not a definitive answer.”
“I don’t have a definitive answer.”
“Does he want you to leave me?”
“He says he loves me. He says this frequently. In emails. In text messages. In person. He has a high rate of declaration.”
“Do you love him?”
She was quiet for a long time. The silence stretched. Outside, someone was playing music. Gospel music. The Redeemed Christian Church of God. It was always gospel on Tuesday nights. The neighbour was very religious, or very loud, or both. The music was about salvation and grace, and being washed clean. These concepts seemed distant to him.
“I don’t know,” she said finally. “Maybe.”
“Maybe.”
“Yes.”
“That’s not a real answer. Maybe it’s a failure of commitment. It’s an evasion.”
“It’s the only answer I have. I’m not lying to you. I could lie. Would you prefer that?”
He thought about this. Would he?
There was something to be said for lies. They provided clarity, false clarity. But still they allowed you to proceed with decisions. Truth was murky, provisional, subject to revision.
“No,” he said. “I wouldn’t prefer that.”
She nodded. She looked tired. He realised he hadn’t noticed how tired she looked. When did that happen? When had she started looking this way? Or had she always looked this way, and he had stopped seeing it?
“The poetry is terrible,” he said.
“I know.”
“Twin moons over the Bight of Benin. What does that even mean? There’s only one moon. The metaphor collapses under the slightest scrutiny.”
“I know. It doesn’t mean anything. Or it means something, but not what he thinks it means.”
“You’re a literature professor. You teach people to analyse metaphors, to understand how language constructs meaning. Doesn’t it bother you? The bad metaphors? The sloppy syntax?”
She almost smiled. A ghost of a smile, there and gone.
“Yes. It bothers me. It bothers me significantly.”
“But you’re sleeping with him anyway.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because he looks at me like I’m someone worth writing bad poetry for. Even terrible poetry requires effort. It requires attention. He pays attention.”
“And I don’t?”
“You look at me like I’m a problem you’re trying to solve. Like, if you just find the right equation, the right formula, everything will make sense. Everything will resolve into something clean and comprehensible.”
“That’s not true.”
“Isn’t it? You’re a mathematician. Everything is an equation for you. Everything is systems and proofs and elegant solutions. But I’m not an equation. I’m not something that resolves.”
He wanted to argue. He wanted to explain that she was wrong, that he loved her, that he had always loved her. That love itself was the problem because love was irrational, and he had spent his entire adult life trying to understand irrational things through rational means, and maybe that was the failure, maybe that was where the system broke down. But the words wouldn’t come. Or they came, but they felt like lies. Not complete lies. Partial lies. Approximations of truth that missed the essential thing, the thing beneath the thing, the meaning that existed before language.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want me to fight for you? Is that what this is about? Is this a test of some kind? A way of measuring my commitment?”
“No. I’m not that calculating.”
“Do you want a divorce?”
“I don’t know.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore. All my certainties have leaked away. I used to know things. Now, I don’t.”
She stood up. She gathered her papers, the essays with their red corrections, their failures of argument and evidence. She left the room. He heard her in the bedroom, moving around, opening drawers, closing them. Then the bathroom. Water running. The shower. The sounds of her washing the day away, washing him away maybe, preparing to sleep or not sleep in the bed they had shared for twelve years.
He sat in the chair. The gospel music had stopped. Now it was quiet, or what passed for quiet in Lagos. The city hummed. Generators, traffic, and human voices. The sound of millions of people living their lives, making their decisions, conducting their affairs. He was part of this. They were all part of this. Interconnected systems. Networks of cause and effect.
He thought about Chukwuma Okafor. Linen shirts and postcolonial discourse. Bad poetry. Seventeen emails. He tried to imagine Ngozi with him. Tried to picture her laughing at his jokes, lying next to him in whatever bed they used, doing all the small intimate things she did with him or used to do, or maybe still did.
He had lost track of their physical life.
When did that happen? The image wouldn’t form.
It was like trying to visualise a four-dimensional object. His mind couldn’t hold the shape of it. The geometry was wrong.
He slept in the living room that night. The sofa was too short for his frame, and the cushions smelled like the coconut oil Ngozi used in her hair, the oil she had been using for years, the aroma that used to arouse him and now just made him sad. He lay awake until three in the morning, watching the clock that was three minutes slow, thinking about rates of change, about derivatives and functions, and the mathematics of departure.
Then he slept badly until six. When he woke up, she was already gone. Her keys were gone from the bowl by the door. Her phone charger was gone from the outlet by the bed. These absences were like negative space in a photograph, defining what remained by showing what had been removed.
He didn’t see her for three days. She stayed with her sister in Surulere, in a flat above a pharmacy store. He knew this because her sister called him on Wednesday to say that Ngozi was fine and needed time to think.
Time to think. As if thinking was the answer. He said he understood. He didn’t understand.
On Thursday, he taught his classes. The students were doing better with the equations. Question seven still defeated most of them, but a few were starting to get it. A girl named Blessing stayed after class to ask about the rate of change, about how to think about motion and time, and about how to understand that everything was always moving even when it appeared to be still. He explained about derivatives, about limits, about approaching a value asymptotically without ever quite reaching it.
The girl nodded. She took notes. She thanked him and left.
He sat in the empty classroom. The chalkboard was covered with equations he had written during the lecture. Numbers and symbols that meant something, that described reality, that predicted behaviour. He thought about erasing them, but didn’t. Let the cleaning staff erase them tonight or tomorrow. Let someone else make the erasure.
His phone rang. Unknown number. He answered.
“Professor Adeyemi?”
A man’s voice. Unfamiliar.
“Yes.”
“This is Chukwuma Okafor. I think we need to talk.”
The audacity was remarkable. Adeyemi felt something like admiration.
“Do we?” Adeyemi asked.
“I think so. Yes. I think it would be productive. A dialogue.”
“A dialogue.”
“Yes. I believe in direct communication. In transparency. These are values I try to live by.”
“You’re sleeping with my wife.”
“Yes. I am. I love her. I wanted you to know that. I’m not just… This isn’t casual for me. I need you to understand that.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you need me to understand that? What difference does it make? Whether it’s casual or serious, whether you love her or you don’t, the result is the same. You’re sleeping with my wife.”
Okafor was quiet for a moment. Then, he said, “I think Ngozi deserves better. I think she deserves someone who sees her. Really sees her. Not as a function or a problem to solve. As a person. As a woman. As herself.”
“And you see her this way?”
“I do. Yes. I see her.”
“You write her terrible poetry.”
“What?”
“The poetry. It’s terrible. ‘Twin moons over the Bight of Benin’. Do you even know what that means? Have you even thought about the metaphor? There is only one moon. Your central image collapses under scrutiny.”
Okafor laughed. Actually I laughed.
“Is that what bothers you? The quality of my poetry?”
“Yes. Among other things. But yes, that bothers me. If you’re going to seduce my wife, at least have the decency to do it with competent verse.”
“You’re an interesting man, Professor Adeyemi. I can see why she married you. But I also see why she’s leaving you.”
“She hasn’t left me.”
“Not yet. But she will. You must know that. You’re a smart man. You see the patterns. You understand rates of change.”
Adeyemi hung up. His hand was shaking. Not trembling exactly. Just unstable. Lacking its usual precision. He put the phone on the desk.
He looked at the equations on the board. They still meant something. The meaning hadn’t changed. Numbers were reliable. Numbers didn’t betray you.
He drove home through traffic that didn’t move, that existed in a state of permanent congestion, a living metaphor for modern urban existence. Okadas wove between cars. Hawkers sold phone cards, plantain chips, and small electronics of dubious origin. A man on the roadside was repairing shoes, working with careful concentration, fixing what could be fixed, discarding what couldn’t be saved.
The apartment was empty. He had known it would be empty, but still felt surprised by the emptiness, by the way silence occupied space, filled rooms, became almost tangible.
He made instant noodles. Indomie. The noodles of bachelor life, of broken domesticity. He ate them standing at the counter, looking at nothing.
His phone buzzed. A text from Ngozi: “Coming by tomorrow to get some things. Around 2 p.m.”
No greeting. No endearment. Just information.
He texted back: “OK.”
He wanted to write more. Wanted to say something that would change the trajectory, that would alter the rate of change, that would solve for x, where x was their marriage and the equation was impossibly complex. But what? What were the right words? He didn’t know. Mathematics had no answer for this. There was no theorem for heartbreak, no proof for love, no elegant solution to the problem of two people who had promised forever and now couldn’t manage tomorrow.
She came at two the next day. Exactly two p.m. She was always punctual. This was one of the things they had had in common. Respect for time. For schedules. For the organising principles that made life manageable. She had a suitcase. Not a large one. Just a carry-on, the kind you could take on domestic flights. This seemed significant. Not a full departure. Just a partial one. A trial separation. A beta test of living apart.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello.”
They stood in the doorway. The geography was wrong. She should come in. She lived here. But she stayed in the doorway, half in, half out, existing in a liminal space between married and not married, between staying and going.
“I need some clothes. Books. My laptop charger. A few other things.”
“Of course.”
He moved aside. She came in. She went to the bedroom. He stayed in the living room.
He didn’t want to watch her pack. Didn’t want to see her selecting items, making decisions about what to take and what to leave, about what mattered and what didn’t. He heard drawers opening. Hangers sliding on the rack. The small sounds of dismantling a shared life.
He thought about Okafor’s phone call. Should he tell her? What would be the point? To prove that Okafor was arrogant? She probably knew that already. To prove that he, Adeyemi, was hurt? She probably knew that too.
She came back out carrying a bag. Not the suitcase. Just a tote bag. Less than he had expected. Maybe she would come back for more later. Maybe this was just the first wave of departure.
“Chukwuma called me,” he said.
She stopped. “When?”
“Yesterday.”
“What did he say?”
“That he loves you. That you deserve better. That I don’t see you.”
“What did you say?”
“That his poetry is terrible.”
She laughed. A real laugh, sudden and surprised.
“You told him that?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s the most you think I’ve ever heard.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you’re you. You’re so completely yourself that it’s almost beautiful. In a strange, impossible way.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
She set down the bag. She sat on the sofa. He sat in the chair. The usual positions. The familiar configuration. They had sat like this a thousand times. Having normal conversations about normal things. Now they were having this conversation, this abnormal conversation, in the same positions, as if the furniture could impose order on chaos.
“Are you in love with him?” he asked.
She thought about this. He appreciated that she thought about it instead of answering immediately. Immediate answers were suspect. Too clean.
“I think I’m in love with the idea of him,” she said. “Or in love with how I feel when I’m with him. Which, maybe, isn’t the same as being in love with him. I don’t know. Does it matter?”
“I think it does. Yes. I think it matters significantly.”
“Why?”
“Because if you’re in love with him, actually in love with him, then this is simple. You leave. You go be with him. But if you’re in love with an idea, with a feeling, then that’s different. That’s something we could potentially work with.”
“Work with. Like a math problem.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
“But that’s how you think. Everything has variables and solutions. Everything can be worked out if you just apply the right method.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Isn’t it?”
He wanted to argue, but couldn’t. She was right. Or partly right. Or right enough that arguing would be pointless.
“Do you remember when we met?” she asked.
“In Abuja? At the conference?”
“Yes.”
“We talked for six hours. Seven hours. I don’t even remember. It was the longest conversation I had ever had. About everything. About books and mathematics, politics and family, and what we believed and what we doubted. And I remember thinking, this is what I want. This is exactly what I want. This person who can talk like this, who can think like this.”
“We still talk.”
“Do we? Really?”
“We’re talking now.”
“Only because I’m leaving. If I hadn’t slept with Chukwuma, would we be having this conversation? Or would we just keep going the way we’ve been going? Parallel lives. Same house. Different worlds.”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t know the answer. Or he knew the answer but didn’t want to say it out loud, because saying it would make it true in a way that not saying it didn’t.
“I’m not happy,” she said. “I haven’t been happy for a long time. Maybe two years. Maybe longer. I can’t even pinpoint when it started. It just crept up. Like water rising. One day, I looked around and realised I was drowning, and I didn’t know when the drowning had started.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I tried. Not directly, maybe. But I tried. Do you remember last year? When I asked if we could go away for a weekend? Just the two of us? And you said yes, but then there was always something. A conference. Grading. Your mother’s birthday. Something. Always something.”
He remembered. He remembered saying yes and then finding reasons to postpone. But they had legitimate reasons. Or had he made them legitimate because he needed them to be legitimate?
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“Don’t apologise. That’s not what I want. Apologies don’t solve anything. They are just words. Just sounds you make to fill space.”
“Then what do you want?”
“I don’t know. I keep saying that. I know it’s frustrating. But it’s true. I don’t know what I want. I just know what I don’t want. And I don’t want this. This life we’ve been living. This careful, scheduled, polite life. Where everything is fine, and nothing is real.”
“It’s real to me.”
“Is it? Is it, really? Or is it just comfortable? Safe? The known quantity?”
He thought about this. About the difference between real and comfortable. About whether there was a difference. About whether it mattered.
“Can I ask you something?” he said.
“Yes.”
“When did you stop loving me?”
She looked at him. Her eyes were wet. Not crying exactly. Just wet.
“I don’t think I stopped. That’s the problem. If I had stopped loving you, this would be easier. I could just leave. Clean break. But I still love you. I just don’t like who we are together anymore. Or who we’ve become. Or who I’ve become.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“I know. Love doesn’t make sense. You of all people should know that. It’s not rational. It doesn’t follow rules. It’s not an equation.”
“Everything is an equation.”
“No. That’s where you’re wrong. That’s where you’ve always been wrong.”
She stood up. She picked up her bag. She looked at him for a long moment, as if she was trying to memorise his face, or trying to remember why she had loved him in the first place, or trying to decide if she still did.
“I’ll call you,” she said. “In a few days. When I’ve had time to think.”
“Time to think. Everyone keeps saying that. As if thinking is the solution.”
“What else is there?”
“Feeling. Deciding. Acting.”
“I’m acting. This is action. This is me leaving.”
“Temporarily.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“No. I don’t. For the first time in my life, I don’t know anything. And maybe that’s not a bad thing.”
She left. The door closed behind her. He heard her footsteps in the hallway. Then the elevator. Then nothing.
He sat in the chair. The apartment was silent again. He looked at the clock on the wall. Still three minutes slow. He should fix it. He should have fixed it months ago. But he didn’t. He sat there and let time pass, incorrect time, three minutes behind the rest of the world.
A week passed. Then another. Ngozi didn’t call. He didn’t call her either. He taught his classes. He graded papers. He ate poorly and slept worse.
His mother called and asked about Easter again, and he said they weren’t coming. She asked why not. He said because Ngozi had left him. There was a long silence, and then his mother said, “I see,” in a tone that meant she had been expecting this all along, that this confirmed all her original doubts about the marriage, about Ngozi, about his ability to choose appropriately.
On a Wednesday evening, three weeks after Ngozi left, he drove to Surulere. To her sister’s flat above the pharmacy. He didn’t call ahead. He parked on the street. The pharmacy was still open.
He went upstairs. Knocked on the door. Ngozi’s sister, Chioma, answered. She was surprised to see him. Or not surprised. Maybe just resigned. As if his arrival was inevitable, as predictable as the equations he taught.
“She’s not here,” Chioma said.
“Where is she?”
“At the university. She’s teaching a late class.”
“Can I wait?”
Chioma looked at him for a moment, then stepped aside. “Come in.”
The flat was small. Smaller than he had imagined. A living room with a sofa and a TV. A kitchen visible through a doorway. He could see Ngozi’s things. Her books on the coffee table. Her shoes by the door.
“Do you want tea?” Chioma asked.
“No. Thank you.”
She sat down. He sat down. They looked at each other. Chioma was younger than Ngozi. Twenty-eight. She sold real estate. Luxury apartments for oil company executives and government contractors. She was good at it. Made more money than both Adeyemi and Ngozi combined. She was also married with a child. A boy named Chidi. He was at his grandmother’s tonight.
Lucky for Adeyemi. He didn’t think he could handle a child right now.
“She’s confused,” Chioma said. “In case you were wondering. She doesn’t know what she wants. She thinks she does, but she doesn’t.”
“Did she tell you that?”
“She didn’t have to. I know my sister. She’s always been like this. Ever since we were children. Decisive about small things. Paralysed by big ones.”
“I’m a big thing?”
“You’re the biggest thing. You’re her whole life. Or you were. And now she doesn’t know.”
Akinwande Jordan is a Nigerian writer and critic interested in literature, film, and the everyday textures of contemporary life. He writes with a focus on close reading, ideas, and how storytelling responds to social reality. His work has appeared in The49thStreet, What Kept Me Up, Poetry Column, and Screen in Transit. He is particularly drawn to questions of form, time, and artistic responsibility, bringing a thoughtful, idea-driven approach to both literary and film criticism.