The Space Between Heartbeats

The chicken was burning. Yewande knew this the same way she knew most things about her life now, too late, and with the faint smell of something ruined. She dropped her phone on the counter and yanked the pan off the burner, waving smoke away from the detector with a dish towel she'd owned longer than she'd owned her dignity. Tuesday nights were supposed to be simple. That was the whole point of Tuesday. Monday had the weight of the week ahead. Wednesday was survival. But Tuesday, Tuesday was hers. Jollof rice from scratch, a glass of red wine she couldn't quite afford, and the particular silence of a woman who had finally, finally, made peace with eating alone. She scraped the bottom of the pan and decided it was salvageable. Mostly. Her phone buzzed on the counter. She didn't look at it. Simi had been trying to set her up again, some friend of a cousin who was "emotionally available" and "really tall," as though height were a personality. Yewande had learned, at considerable cost, that tall men could still leave. That emotionally available was a thing people said about themselves the same way they said they loved to travel or enjoyed long walks, theoretically, enthusiastically, and almost never in practice. She poured the wine. She was just raising the glass to her lips when someone knocked on her door. Not buzzed from downstairs. Knocked. Which meant someone had already gotten through the building entrance. Which meant it was a neighbor, or Simi doing a welfare check, or her landlord, God forbid, about the noise complaint she'd been meaning to respond to for eleven days. She set the wine down and padded to the door in her house slippers, the embarrassing ones, the fluffy cloud-shaped ones her mother had sent from Lagos last Christmas with zero irony and looked through the peephole. The world stopped. Not the dramatic, metaphorical kind of stopping she'd read about in the novels she edited for a living. Not the kind writers described when they were performing emotion on the page. The actual kind. The kind where her lungs simply forgot their instructions. Korede. He looked, God, he looked. That was the only way she could finish that sentence. He looked. Taller somehow, or maybe just broader, the kind of build that came not from a gym but from whatever the last three years had actually been. There was a scar she didn't recognize running jaw-adjacent, half-hidden by a beard he hadn't had when he left. His eyes were cast slightly downward, like he was studying her welcome mat the one that said Home is Where the WiFi Is, which she'd bought as a joke and kept because throwing it away felt like admitting something. He was holding nothing. No flowers. No explanation in his hands. He raised his head slowly, as if he knew she was watching, and looked directly into the peephole. Yewande stepped back from the door. Her heart was doing something medically concerning. Her wine was on the counter. Her chicken was salvageable. Her Tuesday, her careful, constructed, deliberately boring Tuesday, was already on fire. She could not open that door. She absolutely could not. She opened the door. He looked at her the way you look at something you were certain you had lost forever, with a terrible, quiet relief that had no business being on his face, because he was the one who left, and relief was not a thing he had earned. "Yewande." His voice was the same. That was the cruelest part. Three years, a scar, a beard, and a resurrection and his voice was exactly the same. She gripped the door frame. "You're dead," she said. It came out remarkably calm. A woman in her slippers, with smoke still threading the air behind her, telling a ghost a fact. Something moved through his expression. Not quite guilt. Deeper than guilt. "I know," he said. "I went to your funeral, Korede." "I know." "I cried." She said it like an accusation, because it was. Because she had stood in a church in an aso-ebi she never wore again and cried until Simi had to hold her upright, cried the specific way you cry when a person dies before you could finish being angry at them, and that particular kind of grief had taken her years to unknot. He closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them, they were glassy in the light from her hallway. "Yewande, I need…" "Do not," she said quietly, "tell me what you need." He stopped. The hallway hummed between them, her fluorescent light with its faint perpetual flicker, the distant sound of a television from the flat next door, the smell of her almost-ruined jollof. Korede looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked past her, just briefly, at the apartment behind her the life she had assembled in the space he left. The books stacked sideways because she'd run out of shelf. The throw blanket on the couch. The single wine glass on the counter. Something in his jaw moved. "I have nowhere else to go," he said. "Sixty days. That's all I'm asking." Yewande laughed. It came out strange. not quite a laugh, not quite the other thing. "You're asking," she repeated. "You have a grave, Korede. You have a headstone. I planted flowers on it." She paused. "I watered them." He said nothing. He had the good sense, at least, to say nothing. She should close the door. She had a list of everything she should do, and it was a very reasonable list, and close the doorwas at the very top of it. "Sixty days," she said. "Sixty days." "And then you explain everything." His expression shifted, complicated, careful. "Yewande…" "Everything, Korede. Or you sleep in the hallway tonight and every night after it." A pause. He nodded, once. She stepped aside. He walked past her into the apartment, and she caught, just for a moment, the familiar scent of him beneath something new and weathered, oud and something darker underneath, and it hit her somewhere embarrassing and inconvenient, right in the middle of her chest. She closed the door. Her jollof was definitely burned now. She went to pour a second glass of wine, thought better of it, and poured a larger first one instead. From the center of her living room, still standing, still holding nothing, Korede said: "You changed the couch." "You died," she said pleasantly, and took a long sip.