The Blog
967 Words
She saw it at 6:47 in the morning.
She had not even made it to the kitchen yet. She was still in bed, phone in hand, doing the half conscious scroll that happened before her brain fully committed to being awake. A notification from a friend. Then another. Then three in quick succession from numbers she barely recognised.
She opened the first one.
A link. No text. Just the link.
She clicked it.
The blog was one of those Lagos gossip accounts that had no byline and no accountability and an audience of two hundred thousand people who consumed its content with the specific appetite of people who needed other people’s lives to be worse than theirs.
The photographs were grainy. Shot from a distance. A parking lot she recognised immediately because she had been in it twelve days ago.
Her. And Yetunde.
They were not touching in the photographs. They were not doing anything that was objectively incriminating. They were standing beside Adunola’s car talking. Yetunde had her hand on the car door. Adunola was leaning against it.
But the angle. The way the photographer had framed it. The caption underneath.
Lagos businesswoman Adunola Adesanya and close friend spotted in private meeting. Sources say the friendship is closer than her new husband knows.
Close friend.
The words were doing exactly what they were designed to do. Saying nothing that could be legally challenged. Implying everything that could not be taken back.
She sat up in bed.
Her phone rang.
Kola.
She picked up.
“Do not read the comments,” he said before she could speak.
“I already did,” she said.
A pause. “How many.”
“Enough.”
“I am coming to your room.”
He knocked thirty seconds later. She said come in. He was already dressed which meant he had been awake before she had seen the blog which meant he had known before he called her and had spent some time deciding how to handle it before picking up the phone.
He sat in the chair by the window. He did not sit on the bed. He maintained the distance that the rules of the house required even now when the walls were pressing in.
“It was deliberate,” he said. “The angle. The caption. Someone paid for those photographs to be taken.”
“Tunde.”
“Most likely.”
“He does not know what he photographed,” she said. “He thinks he is implying an affair.”
“Which is damaging enough on its own,” Kola said. “To the arrangement. To the appearance we have been building.”
She looked at her phone. Then she put it face down on the nightstand.
“How is Yetunde,” he asked.
She looked at him.
“I do not know yet,” she said. “I have not called her.”
“You should.”
“I know.”
“Adunola.”
“I know, Kola.”
He was quiet. He looked at his hands. Then at her. His face was doing the thing it did when he had already worked through several options and was now delivering the conclusion.
“Whatever you need to do today to make sure she is alright,” he said. “Do it. I will manage everything on this side.”
She looked at him.
“The arrangement,” she said.
“Will survive a blog post,” he said. “Yetunde is a person. She comes first.”
She sat with that for a moment.
“Thank you,” she said.
“Do not thank me,” he said. “Call her.”
He left the room.
She picked up her phone.
Yetunde answered on the first ring.
“Ada,” she said. Just that. Her voice had the specific quality of someone who had been awake for hours already and had been waiting for this call and was relieved and frightened simultaneously.
“I am here,” Adunola said. “Talk to me.”
Yetunde talked. Adunola listened. The morning light came through the window and moved across the floor and Adunola sat in her bed in the Adesanya house in Ikoyi listening to the woman she loved process the specific terror of being seen in a country that punished being seen.
When Yetunde finished Adunola said: “You are not alone in this. I need you to hear that clearly.”
“I hear it,” Yetunde said.
“Do you believe it.”
A long pause.
“I am working on it,” Yetunde said.
“That is enough,” Adunola said.
She stayed on the phone until Yetunde sounded like herself again. The real version. The one that existed before fear arrived.
Then she got dressed.
She went downstairs.
Kola was at the dining table with his laptop and two phones and the focused energy of a man managing several things simultaneously.
He looked up.
“She is alright,” Adunola said.
He nodded. “Good.”
“What are you doing.”
“Finding out who paid the photographer,” he said. “And preparing for what comes next.”
“Which is.”
He looked at her steadily. “You deciding how you want to respond. Because you will need to respond. And when you do it needs to be on your terms not theirs.”
She sat down across from him.
“Tell me what you know so far,” she said.
He told her.
They worked through it together at the dining table while Lagos woke up outside and the blog comments multiplied and the world moved the way it always moved. Fast and merciless and completely indifferent to the people inside the story it was consuming.
- Writer
