The search

There was a version of Mercy Mensah's life that existed long before she lived it. It lived in the pages of a thick cream notebook she had owned since she was thirteen, the one with the gold clasp that never quite shut properly because she had filled it past its limit. Sketches of gowns spilled across its pages. Fabric swatches taped carefully beside colour theory notes. A hand-drawn timeline along the inside back cover that read, in her own neat handwriting: Graduate top of class. Study fashion design. Build something that lasts. Do not settle. Not for anything. Mercy had always been that kind of girl. The kind teachers called focused when it comes to what she is passionate about in class but not soo much of a top of the class type. The kind her mother called "an old soul in a young body." . She grew up in Abensi — a small town that smelled like red dust and rain and somebody's meal always cooking somewhere nearby , and even there, even in a place where most people's biggest dream was simply to leave, Mercy had always had a plan that stretched further than leaving. She wanted to arrive somewhere. Specifically. Deliberately. On her own terms. She was eighteen when she got into Crestfield University in the city. Fashion design programme. Full merit scholarship due to hardwork. Her mother cried at the kitchen table. Her father stood in the doorway with his arms crossed and his jaw tight because that was how he cried too .quietly, where nobody could see it. Mercy held the letter and felt something she could only describe as the sensation of a seam finally holding. Everything is going according to plan... The city hit her differently than she expected. Not badly. Just loudly. Abensi had prepared her for ambition but not for the sheer volume of everything ,the traffic that did not sleep, the campus that felt like its own country, the fashion department building with its glass walls and industrial sewing machines and the faint permanent smell of dye and coffee and something creative always in progress. She loved it immediately and found it overwhelming in the same breath, which was a feeling she quietly tucked away because Mercy Mensah did not do overwhelmed. She did adjust. She did adapt. She moved through the first semester like she had always been there. She made one real friend in those early weeks. Dami — a textile arts student from the east with paint perpetually somewhere on his hands and a laugh that arrived before she did. Dami was the opposite of a plan. He was spontaneous and completely unbothered by the future in a way Mercy found both baffling and, honestly, a little bit freeing to be around. They sat next to each other in a shared arts theory module on a Tuesday morning, and by Thursday they were eating lunch together every day. "You sketch while people are talking to you," Dami observed one afternoon, watching Mercy's pencil move across her sketchpad during a free period. "Do you even hear anything anyone says?" "I hear everything," Mercy said. "I just process it differently." Dami laughed . "Differently. Right." It was Dami who introduced her to Kofi. He came to pick Dami up from the arts block one Friday evening his older cousin, visiting for the weekend, tall and unhurried in the way of someone who had long since decided the world could wait for him. He had a easy smile that he aimed at Mercy like he had been saving it. He noticed the sketchpad under her arm and asked what she was working on. She told him. He asked a follow-up question. A real one, not the polite kind people asked when they were actually thinking about something else. Mercy noticed that. She noticed most things. "He seems nice," she told Dami afterward, in a tone she kept carefully level. Dami gave her a look that said he was not fooled. "He asked me for your number on the way out." Mercy said nothing. But that night, alone in her room with her notebook open on her desk, she found herself not sketching. Just thinking. She picked up her pen eventually and wrote something small in the margin of a page. He asked good questions... For Mercy, that was practically a declaration. Kofi moved fast, and at the time it felt like momentum. He texted her the same night ,not something forgettable but a continuation of the conversation they had started outside the arts block, as if no time had passed at all, as if they were still mid-thought. She responded. They talked until past midnight. He told her she was interesting in a way that did not sound like a line, and she believed him because she was good at reading people and nothing in her read him as dishonest. Within two weeks he was sending her good morning messages before she woke up. Within three he was showing up at her campus with food because she had mentioned once .once ! that she forgot to eat when she was deep in a project. He remembered things. Small things. The name of the designer she admired most. The fact that she took her tea without sugar. That she got quiet when she was unsettled rather than loud. "He pays attention," she told Dami. "Mm," said Dami, in a tone Mercy filed away and did not examine until later. She had a rule , one she had written down and meant. Whoever she gave her heart to, she intended to keep. She was not interested in practice relationships or temporary feelings dressed up as something serious. So when she felt herself falling toward Kofi she did not take it lightly. She examined it from every angle the way she examined a new design. She looked for weak seams. She looked for places where the structure would not hold. She found none. Or rather she told herself she found none. Because here is the thing about a well-constructed illusion. If someone builds it carefully enough, with enough warmth and enough detail and enough of exactly what you did not know you were waiting to hear, you do not see the construction. You only see what they wanted you to see. And Kofi had built something that looked, from the outside, almost exactly like everything on Mercy's list. She told her mother about him on a Sunday call in her third month of university. She kept it brief. Her mother, who had not raised a careless daughter, asked two questions: Does he make you better or just happy? And: Does his life have direction? Mercy answered yes to both with full confidence. She believed it when she said it. The first c***k was so small she almost missed it. It appeared not in anything dramatic ,no argument, no obvious cruelty, nothing she could have pointed to and named clearly. It appeared in a Tuesday evening when she had an important portfolio submission due the following morning and he called, not to check on her, but to tell her about his day. At length. And when she mentioned the deadline, gently, he said you're always working in a tone that was light but landed somewhere heavy. She laughed it off. She submitted the portfolio. She got a commendation from her tutor. She did not mention the comment again. But she remembered it. The second c***k came a week later. He made a plan with her and cancelled it the day of , not the cancellation itself, which happened, life happened ,but the way he cancelled it. Breezy. Unbothered. No real explanation, just a reschedule offered like a favour. She said it was fine. She sat with her sketchpad that evening and found herself drawing shapes that had no softness in them. All angles. All sharp lines. She stared at the page for a long time. She picked up her notebook , the cream one with the gold clasp and turned to the timeline on the inside back cover. She read her own words back to herself. Do not settle. Not for anything... She closed it. She did not do anything with the feeling yet. But she stopped ignoring it. It was a small moment that finally made something shift behind her eyes. They were sitting in a café near campus .her, him, two of his friends she had met only once before. The conversation moved to futures, to ambitions, to the kind of talk young people have when they are half-showing off and half-genuinely figuring it out. One of his friends asked Mercy what she wanted to do with her degree. She told them. Clearly, the way she always spoke about it , the design label she wanted to build, the intersection of West African textile art and contemporary fashion, the kind of work that would mean something beyond a price tag. She watched their faces as she spoke. Kofi smiled. But it was the smile he wore when he was waiting for something to be over. She had never seen it directed at her before. But she recognised it immediately because she was good at reading people and she had, without realising it, been reading him very carefully for months. She finished her sentence. The conversation moved on. She picked up her cup and took a sip and looked out of the window at the city moving past in the grey afternoon light. And somewhere underneath everything underneath the warmth she had built toward him and the plans she had begun, quietly, to rearrange around his presence something in her went very still. Not loud. Not dramatic. Just still. This is not right. She did not say it out loud. She did not do anything at all, that afternoon, except finish her tea and laugh at the right moments and walk back to campus beside him as if everything were exactly as it had been an hour ago. But Mercy Mensah had always been the kind of girl who noticed things. And she had noticed. She just didn't know yet what she was going to do about it...