What she noticed
1162 Words
Thursday was supposed to be simple.
Kamsi opened the pharmacy at eight. Made her tea. Greeted Tolu. The morning was the morning — prescriptions and questions and the elderly man with his blood pressure medication who stayed twenty minutes longer than necessary and today told her about his granddaughter's school prize and she listened properly because he needed someone to listen properly.
Normal. Completely normal.
Except that she noticed things she hadn't noticed before.
She noticed the car that drove past her pharmacy three times between nine and eleven — different car from Monday, different men, but the same quality of attention. The kind of looking that was trying not to look.
She noticed the woman who came in for vitamins and asked one question too many about her hours.
She noticed all of it and said nothing and filed it away and at eleven-thirty she sent one message.
Kamsi: Someone is still watching. Different people. Same energy.
The response came in twenty seconds.
Zion: I see them. Don't change anything. I'm handling it.
She looked at the message.
Kamsi: You're outside again.
Zion: No. I have people outside. Different arrangement.
She looked up from her phone and scanned the street with the casual thoroughness she had been practising since Monday. A woman selling plantain on the corner she recognised. A man reading a newspaper outside the provisions store she did not.
Kamsi: The man with the newspaper.
Zion: Yes. And the woman in the blue top two shops down.
She didn't look for the woman in the blue top. She went back to her counter.
Kamsi: How many people do you have watching my street?
Zion: Enough.
Kamsi: That's not a number.
Zion: Three. Plus Emmanuel rotates past every two hours.
She thought about Emmanuel rotating past her pharmacy every two hours on a Thursday and didn't know whether to be unsettled or grateful. She settled on both.
Kamsi: This can't go on indefinitely.
Zion: It won't. Okafor is scared. Scared people make mistakes. When he makes his we'll have everything we need.
Kamsi: And until then?
Zion: Until then you go to work and come home and live your life and let me handle the parts you can't see.
She looked at the message for a long time.
Kamsi: I don't like not being able to see things.
Zion: I know. You're going to have to trust me anyway.
She put her phone down.
She picked it back up.
Kamsi: I don't trust easily.
A pause. Longer than usual.
Zion: Neither do I.
Another pause.
Zion: And yet here we are.
She stared at the screen.
She put her phone in her pocket.
She went back to work.
---
At closing time Tolu lingered.
This was unusual. Tolu was reliably the first person out of the door at six — she had a life, she frequently reminded Kamsi, unlike some people. So when she was still reorganising the antibiotic shelf at six-fifteen Kamsi looked at her.
"What?" Kamsi said.
"Nothing," Tolu said. Reorganising.
"Tolu."
"I'm just — " she stopped. Turned around. "Ada. Those men who came on Monday. And that man who came on Friday. And the way you've been checking your phone every twenty minutes for three days." She looked at her directly. "What is happening?"
Kamsi looked at her.
Tolu was twenty-three and sharp and loyal and had worked in this pharmacy for two years and deserved better than a non-answer.
"I saw something I shouldn't have seen," Kamsi said carefully. "Some people are unhappy about it. It's being handled."
"By the man who came on Friday."
"Yes."
"The man who is—" Tolu paused, choosing words. "Who people say things about."
"Yes."
Tolu was quiet for a moment.
"Are you safe?" she said.
"Yes."
"You're sure?"
"I'm sure." She looked at her steadily. "He's making sure."
Tolu looked at her for a long moment with the particular expression of a twenty-three year old who was processing several things at once.
"He came to check on you," Tolu said slowly. "After the corridor. He came here himself."
"Yes."
"And he sat outside all day Tuesday."
Kamsi said nothing.
"Ada." Tolu's voice was careful. Almost wondering. "Does he—"
"Go home Tolu," Kamsi said.
"I'm just asking—"
"Go home."
Tolu picked up her bag. Walked to the door. Paused.
"For what it's worth," she said quietly. "The way he looked at you when he came in." She paused. "I've never seen anyone look at you like that."
She left.
Kamsi stood alone in her closed pharmacy.
She thought about a compound with books on the shelves and a photograph of a kind woman. She thought about a man who sat across the street all day in a grey car and said nothing. She thought about nobody looks at me like that and you are exactly what you appear to be and she would have liked you.
She thought about the way he had stood in the driveway watching her drive away.
She turned off the pharmacy lights.
She locked up.
She walked to her car.
Emmanuel was leaning against a car three spaces down. He looked at her, nodded once — professional, brief — and she nodded back and got in her car.
She drove home.
At the first traffic light her phone buzzed.
Zion: Home safe?
She looked at the message.
She thought about I don't trust easily.
And yet here we are.
Kamsi: Just leaving the pharmacy.
Zion: Emmanuel said.
Kamsi: You have him reporting to you about me.
Zion: I have him making sure you're safe. There's a difference.
She thought about that word again. The difference between things. The careful way he drew lines between what things were and what they appeared to be.
Kamsi: Zion.
Zion: Yes.
Kamsi: Thank you. For today. For all of it.
A longer pause than usual.
Zion: You don't need to keep thanking me.
Kamsi: I'll stop when it stops being true.
She put her phone down.
She drove home through the Lagos evening — the traffic and the generators and the particular smell of the city at dusk — and she thought about a man who was cold to everyone and warm to nobody and had spent three days making sure she was safe without being asked.
She thought about Tolu's voice.
The way he looked at you. I've never seen anyone look at you like that.
She pulled into her compound.
She sat in her car for a moment.
She was a practical woman. A logical woman. A woman who had built her life on evidence and clear thinking and not on feelings that arrived without permission.
The feeling that was currently sitting in her chest had arrived completely without permission.
She got out of her car.
She went inside.
She did not examine the feeling.
But she didn't push it away either.
And that — for Kamsi Obi — was everything.
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