BEFORE WE WERE FOREVER

Davou Yilkes had not particularly wanted to attend the wedding of a young woman he had met perhaps twice in his life, a cousin of a cousin whose family connection to his own was thin enough that he had needed his mother to explain it to him twice before he properly understood why his attendance was expected at all. “Your Uncle Choji's wife's sister's daughter,” his mother had said, with the particular patience she reserved for genealogical explanations her son rarely retained for longer than the conversation itself lasted. “You will go, you will be polite, and you will not embarrass this family by leaving before the reception has properly concluded, the way you did at your cousin Ruth's engagement ceremony last year.” “That was different,” Davou had protested, though without much genuine conviction. “I had work the following morning.” “You will find a way to survive one afternoon of celebration without your work collapsing in your absence,” his mother said, in the tone that ended arguments rather than invited further discussion, and so Davou had arrived, in his one good suit — borrowed at the shoulders from his older brother, a half-inch too generous everywhere it mattered — at a wedding he considered, walking through the gate, an entirely unremarkable obligation to be endured rather than an occasion worth any particular anticipation. The compound had been transformed for the occasion in the way only a wedding could transform an otherwise ordinary family yard — strings of paper lanterns looping between the mango trees, a canopy of blue and white cloth stretched taut against the afternoon sun, the whole space thick with the smell of jollof rice and roasting meat and the particular dust that rose, fine and golden, every time the drummers struck up another round and the older women rose to dance. Davou found a spot near the edge of things, accepted a plate he had no appetite for, and settled in to wait out the several remaining hours with the patient resignation of a man serving a sentence rather than attending a celebration. He was twenty-three years old that year, employed as a junior clerk in the colonial administration's local records office, a position that afforded him steady, respectable, thoroughly unremarkable employment and considerable free time in the evenings, which he generally spent reading whatever novels he could borrow from the small mission library and playing considerably more football than a man his age was strictly expected to still enjoy. He was not, by his own later frequent admission, an especially confident young man in matters concerning women, though he carried himself with enough natural ease that strangers occasionally mistook this baseline social competence for actual romantic confidence, a misunderstanding he had never previously bothered to correct, since it had never previously mattered. It mattered the moment the wind shifted the lantern light and he saw her. She was standing near the edge of the wedding canopy, half turned away from him, listening to something her younger sister was saying with an attention so complete that she had not yet noticed anyone was watching her at all. And then she laughed — not the practiced, decorative laugh Davou had already heard a dozen times that afternoon from a dozen other young women angling to be noticed, but something unguarded and full-throated, her head tipping back, one hand rising instinctively to catch the edge of her headtie before it could slip. The lantern light caught the line of her throat. The drummers, for one absurd, suspended second, seemed to be playing only for her. Davou did not remember deciding to stand up. He simply found himself standing, his plate forgotten on the bench beside him, some old, animal part of his chest having already concluded something his mind had not yet caught up to — that whatever else happened at this wedding that was not his, he needed, with an urgency that embarrassed him even as he felt it, to know her name. “Who is that?” he asked his cousin, and heard, with some distant part of himself, how strange his own voice sounded. “The bride's sister,” his cousin said, following his gaze with visible amusement. “Talatu. Considerably too serious for you, Davou. She has already refused three respectable proposals that I know of personally, and her father is said to be even more particular than she is.” “I did not ask for a character assessment,” Davou said, though he filed the information away with a thoroughness that suggested otherwise, the name itself settling into his chest with an odd, permanent weight, as though it had always belonged there and was only now being properly claimed. “I asked who she was.” “I have just told you who she is,” his cousin said, laughing. “Whether you listen to the parts of the answer that might actually spare you future disappointment is entirely your own business.” Davou did not, in fact, listen to that particular warning, a failing he would come to view, in later years, as one of the more fortunate refusals of good advice in his entire life. He spent the better part of the following hour engineering increasingly transparent reasons to remain within general proximity of wherever Talatu happened to be standing — refilling a drink he did not want, admiring a corner of the canopy that required no admiration, twice offering to carry chairs nobody had asked him to move — a strategy that produced, by the wedding's third hour, an actual introduction, facilitated by his own cousin with the particular exasperated resignation of a man who had given a fair warning and watched it thoroughly ignored. Up close, she was not simply pretty in the ordinary way the afternoon's other young women were pretty. There was a stillness to her, a way of looking directly at whoever was speaking to her as though the rest of the celebration had quietly agreed to wait, that Davou found considerably more unsettling than any obvious beauty could have managed. Her eyes, when she finally turned them on him, were dark and entirely unhurried, taking their time over his borrowed suit, his hastily straightened collar, the smile he was aware he was holding a half second too long. “You are the clerk,” she said, once the introduction had been properly made. “I am told you left your last cousin's engagement early because of work obligations. I confess I find that a strange thing to be known for, at a wedding.” “I am also known for considerably more flattering things,” Davou said, recovering his composure with some effort, aware of his own pulse in a way he did not remember ever being aware of it before. “Though I confess none of them appear to have reached you yet.” “Perhaps they will, given time,” Talatu said, and there — there, at the corner of her mouth, gone almost before he could be certain he had actually seen it — was the smallest, most devastating hint of a smile, the kind that promised nothing and yet somehow made a man feel he had just been handed something worth keeping. “Though I should warn you, I do not generally form my opinions of a man based on secondhand reputation. I prefer to observe the evidence myself, over time, rather than trust whatever version of a story reaches me first.” She excused herself not long after, called away by some errand of her sister's, and Davou stood at the edge of that canopy watching her go with a peculiar, hollowed-out feeling in his chest, as though something essential had just walked off with her and left him standing there holding only the ordinary, insufficient evening air. He would spend that whole night, and every night for a considerable while afterward, turning over the exact sound of her voice, the exact angle of that almost-smile, with a thoroughness entirely disproportionate to how little of her he had actually been given. It was, he would understand only much later, the first and most honest evidence of everything still to come — that whatever this feeling was, arriving so suddenly and so completely uninvited, it had already decided, on his behalf, that it did not intend to be reasoned with.