SERA
“She made me promise not to tell anyone until it was over.”
Ruth Adeyemi said it the moment Sera sat down. Not as preamble. As the thing she had been holding in her mouth since she woke up and needed to release before anything else.
She was sixty-one and looked like someone who had been carrying a specific weight for a specific number of years and had developed a precise relationship with it. Not broken by it. Shaped. The way wood was shaped by water over time. Something harder underneath the wearing.
She looked at Sera with the directness of a woman who had spent fifteen years learning to read faces quickly because she had needed to know who she could trust and who she could not.
Whatever she found in Sera’s face made her exhale slowly.
“She called me three days before she died
