The lost soul

TheWomanWhoSawHer

Amara worked at that canteen for almost a year before Mama Ngozi noticed her.

She was the woman who owned the place, a big, loud woman with a laugh that could fill the whole street, and for most of that year she didn't look at her twice.she was any other girl, just another girl washing plates. One of three she'd hired, Mama Ngozi only sees them as girls she would replace the next day if they didn't show up.

But Amara didn't realize that Mama Ngozi was watching closely.

One evening, after closing, she called Amara to sit with her while she counted the day's money. Amara had just finished watching plates and her hands were still wet from the water. Amara was afraid that she had done something wrong, because after all this time she knew that being called to sit alone with an adult meant something was wrong, never anything good.

‘’Amara’’she said. She wasn't kind, she just slid a plate of rice toward her before she asked. "How old are you?"

"Seventeen," Amara said. She had turned seventeen two months earlier, alone, with no one to remind her that it was her birthday.

Where is your family?

She didn't answer right away. It’s been a year of living on the street and working for strangers. Amara had learned to be careful with that question, because sometimes the answer brings pity, and sometimes it brought people who wanted to send her "back home" whether she wanted to go or not.

"I don't have a family," Amara said. It felt like it was the correct answer.

Mama Ngozi stared at her, she gave her that look, the kind of look that makes you want to disappear onto the floor. Then she reached under the counter and pulled out an old exercise book, the kind of book school children use, half its pages already filled with her handwriting.

"You read that newspaper on your break every day," she said. "I've watched you. You fold it back exactly how you found it so no one notices you took it."

Amara's face went hot with fear. I didn't know anyone was watching that closely. She said,

"I'm not going to punish you for reading," she said, almost laughing. "I'm asking you a different question. Can you write? Can you count money without a calculator?"

Amara responded’ Yes. My mother taught me letter writing and mathematics.

That was the night Mama Ngozi moved Amara from the sink to the front counter, teaching her how to track inventories, how to note down what came in and what went out, and how to catch the small workers who were stealing from her without her noticing. Amara was good at it. Better than good, Amara had spent a year watching everyone around her lie and steal and cut corners just to survive.

Within six months, Mama Ngozi trusted her with the keys to the shop.

Within a year, she was teaching Amara things no one else had ever bothered to teach her; how to negotiate with suppliers, how to spot a bad deal before it ruined you, how to save even when saving felt impossible. She never asked Amara about her family again. I think she understood, in a way that only people who have survived their own hard things can understand, that some doors don't need to be opened twice.

Amara stayed with Mama Ngozi for three years. Amara would have stayed longer, if things had gone differently.

The trouble started with her nephew, Ugo.

He came to stay with Mama Ngozi the year Amara had turned twenty, freshly graduated from university with no job and a way of looking at her that made her skin crawl the very first day they met him. Amara recognized that look. She had grown up around a man who wore that same expression right before he decided the house was quiet enough, the night was dark enough, that no one would notice.

Amara started locking the storeroom door when she worked alone. She had to make sure she was never the last one to leave. Mama Ngozi noticed the change in me but not the reason for it. Ugo was careful he would only corner me when there were no witnesses. And say things like ‘’ No one will believe you’’

"You're a beautiful girl," he told her one time, while blocking the store door with his body while she tried to carry a box of stock past him. "It's a shame, working like this. I could help you. If you let me."

Amara said nothing. She had learned, in her father's house, that saying nothing was often the safest thing a girl could do.

But Ugo wasn't a man who respected silence.

Three weeks before everything fell apart, Amara found four hundred thousand naira missing from the shop's money. Mama Ngozi and Amara had spent almost two years building up together, meant for expanding the business into a second location. She knew immediately who had taken it.she had seen Ugo near the lock box two nights before, when he thought no one was around.

Amara told Mama Ngozi everything. Not just about the money but also about every other thing Ugo had done, the cornering, the comments, the fear that had been building in her for months.

She believed her. Which meant something to Amara. Even now, even after everything that happened next, she looked at me across that same counter where she'd once slid me a plate of rice, and she believed every word without hesitation.

She confronted Ugo.

She had sent Amara home to have the conversation with Ugo. Amara thought she was trying to protect her from whatever came next. What she didn't know was that by morning, the shop had been broken into, the little cash box was forced open and emptied completely, and Mama Ngozi was in the hospital with injuries. She refused to explain to the police how she got them.

When Amara rushed to her bedside, her face bruised, her hand shaking as she reached for mine, she told her three things she would never forget.

She told Amara that it wasn't her fault.

She told her Ugo ran away with everything they had saved, and she wasn't sure the business could survive. And she held her hand so tight it hurt. She said she had seen businesses die around her over the years.

"Go," she said. "You have something in you, Amara. I saw it the day I gave you that exercise book. Don't let this place bury it.

Amara didn't want to leave her. They fought about it for two full days. While at the hospital, Amara didn't want to leave her alone.

But three days after that conversation, while Amara was out looking for a way to save what was left of the shop, someone came looking for her in Mama Ngozi's hospital room. It was a man, a man she had never seen before, well-dressed, calm, asking careful questions about a girl named Amara who used to live in a house near Ikeja, a house she hadn't set foot in over four years.

Mama Ngozi didn't tell him anything. She sent word to Amara instead, a warning passed through a nurse who found her on the street outside, Amara understood what it meant.

Her father had found out where she was.

And for the first time in four years, Amara understood that running away once had never been enough to keep her safe because somewhere out there, someone from that house was still looking for her, and now, for reasons she didn't understand, they had finally started.

(To be continued in Chapter 3...)