The Arrangement

Yetunde

The studio smelled like take away jollof and expensive equipment and something that was just Yetunde. Warm. Specific. The smell of a place where someone has been genuinely themselves for long enough that it soaks into the walls.

Adunola took her shoes off at the door.

She only did that here.

Yetunde was behind the glass when she arrived. Headphones on. Eyes closed. Listening to something back through the monitors with the focused privacy of someone who had forgotten the rest of the world existed. Her assistant let Adunola in and disappeared with the discretion of someone who understood the situation without it ever having been explained to him.

Adunola sat on the couch. She waited.

This was one of the things she loved about Yetunde. That she could enter this space and not need to immediately be something. She could just sit. She could just be a person who had driven across Lagos with a decision pressing against her ribs and needed a moment before she had to say it out loud.

Yetunde came out of the booth seven minutes later. Pulled the headphones down around her neck. Looked at Adunola the way she always looked at her which was directly and without the performance of looking anywhere else first.

“You signed it already,” Yetunde said.

“I have not signed anything.”

“But you are going to.”

Adunola looked at her hands.

Yetunde sat beside her. Not across from her. Beside her. Close enough that their shoulders nearly touched.

“Tell me,” she said.

So Adunola told her.

All of it. The funeral. The mothers. The call in the car. The restaurant in Lekki. The folder. The terms. Clause Seven.

She told it the way she did everything. Clearly. In order. Without the kind of emotional embroidery that made stories longer than they needed to be.

Yetunde listened the way she always listened. Completely. Her eyes on Adunola’s face. Not planning her response. Just receiving.

When Adunola finished Yetunde was quiet for a moment.

Then she said: “Two years.”

“Yes.”

“And the clause means we cannot see each other.”

“Not openly. Not in any way that creates risk.”

“What does that mean exactly.”

“It means,” Adunola said carefully, “that I cannot be photographed with you. Cannot have you at the house. Cannot give anyone a reason to connect your name to mine in a way that becomes a story.”

Yetunde nodded slowly.

She got up. Went to the small kitchen at the back of the studio. Came back with two bottles of cold water. Sat. Opened hers. Drank.

Adunola watched her.

Yetunde had a way of processing things that other people did not have. She did not react immediately. She took the information somewhere inside herself and she sat with it and when she spoke she had already moved through the first layer of feeling to something underneath it that was more true.

“What does he get,” Yetunde said. “From this arrangement. What is his secret.”

“He did not say directly.”

“But you know.”

“I have a strong suspicion.”

“And if you are right,” Yetunde said, “you both have something over each other. Which means neither of you can use it.”

“That is the point of the structure.”

Yetunde looked at her. “He is smart.”

“Yes.”

“You respect that.”

“I respect useful things.”

Yetunde almost smiled. Then it faded.

“Ade,” she said. Just that. Her name in Yetunde’s voice. The specific version that meant: I am about to say something real and I need you to hear it as real.

“I am listening,” Adunola said.

“If you sign this,” Yetunde said, “I need to know that you are coming back from it. Not the contract version of you. Not the version that has spent two years performing a life for other people. You. The person who takes her shoes off at my door.”

The studio hum filled the quiet.

“I am always coming back to you,” Adunola said.

Yetunde looked at her for a long moment.

“Okay,” she said.

But her eyes said something more complicated than okay. Her eyes said I love you and I am afraid and I know you believe what you are saying and I am not sure that is the same as it being true.

Adunola saw all of it.

She did not look away from it.

“I will protect you,” she said. “That is what this is for. Anything that comes for me comes for you too. This puts a wall around that. Around us.”

“A wall I cannot be inside of.”

“A wall that keeps the wrong people outside.”

Yetunde nodded. Once. She picked up her water bottle. Put it down.

“Does he know about me,” she asked. “Adesanya.”

“He suspects something. He does not know it is you.”

“Will you tell him.”

“If I trust him enough.”

“And if he turns out to be someone you cannot trust.”

“Then I will not have told him your name,” Adunola said. “And there is nothing to find.”

Yetunde was quiet for another moment.

Then she reached over and took Adunola’s hand.

She held it.

She did not say anything else about the contract or the clause or Kọláwọlé Adesanya or two years or what comes after.

She just held her hand in the studio that smelled like jollof and music and the specific safety of being truly known by one person in a world that required you to be unknown.

Adunola closed her eyes.

When she left an hour later she sat in her car and called her lawyer.

“I need you to review a contract tonight,” she said. “And I need conditions added before I sign. I will send it now.”

“Tonight?”

“Tonight,” she said.

She sent it.

She drove home through Lagos traffic.

She did not look at her phone again until she was inside.

Yetunde had sent one message.

whatever you decide. I am here.

Adunola read it three times.

Then she opened her laptop and got to work.