Her Last Breath of Love

Chapter 7: An Offer She Cannot Refuse

The idea came to Favour on a Wednesday afternoon.

Not in the dramatic way that ideas sometimes arrive — fully formed, blazing, announced by some internal fanfare that makes the person receiving them feel chosen and illuminated. No. It came the way most of Favour's best ideas came, which was quietly, sideways, in the middle of doing something else entirely, slipping into her thoughts between one thing and another like a letter pushed under a door.

She was sitting outside on the low concrete step at the back of the school building, eating the small lunch she had packed for herself — rice and a modest portion of the leftover stew that Deborah had not managed to take all of, wrapped in a plastic container and slightly warm from spending the morning in her bag. It was the twenty-minute break between her third and fourth periods of the day, and she had learned years ago that the staffroom during break time was not a place of rest but a place of complaint — a room in which underpaid, overworked teachers gathered to remind each other, in considerable detail, of how underpaid and overworked they were, which Favour found on most days to be an activity that left her feeling worse rather than better. She preferred the back step. The open air. The particular quality of silence that existed at the back of the school building, away from the noise of the playing field and the staffroom and the general clamor of four hundred children in various states of educational engagement.

It was here, on this step, in this silence, eating slightly warm rice, that the idea arrived.

She had been thinking about Princess.

This was not unusual. She thought about several of her students during the day — the ones who were struggling, the ones who were coasting on potential they were not using, the ones who needed a different approach, more patience, a different angle of entry into the material. It was the part of teaching that nobody paid her for and that she did anyway, because not doing it would have meant being a different kind of teacher than she was, and she had never been able to manage that.

Princess was, academically speaking, a problem she had been rotating in her mind for weeks. The girl was exceptional. There was no other word for it. On the rare occasions when Princess chose to engage — when something caught her interest or when the competitive instinct in her was activated by a classmate answering incorrectly — she was operating at a level that made Favour want to set down her marker and simply watch. She had the kind of mind that grasped things whole rather than in pieces, that made connections between concepts without being shown the connections, that asked questions that went beyond the curriculum in ways that were inconvenient for lesson planning and deeply satisfying for everything else.

And she was repeating JSS2.

It was, when Favour thought about it plainly, a waste so significant it bordered on a tragedy.

The solution, when it came to her, was not complicated. Extra lessons. Private tutoring. One teacher, one student, away from the classroom and its forty distractions and its social dynamics and the particular performance that Princess put on in front of her peers. In a different environment, with focused attention and material calibrated specifically to the way her mind worked, Princess would not just catch up. She would fly.

The only question was who would pay for it.

Favour looked at her rice. She thought about the black SUV. She thought about the five thousand naira that had come out of a wallet so thick and so confident that the transaction had barely registered on the man's face. She thought about what Deborah had said — city man, expensive car, come back for his daughter.

She thought about three months of unpaid salary and a pair of shoes that needed replacing and a wig that was holding up through sheer willpower and the kind of gel that was increasingly hard to find in this market.

She ate the last of her rice.

The idea settled into something solid.

She found Princess after school that afternoon, sitting alone near the back of the compound on a low wall, her school bag beside her, not doing anything in particular in the deliberate way of a child who was thinking hard and using inactivity as cover for it.

Favour sat down beside her. Not too close. Just close enough.

They sat in silence for a moment. A mild wind moved through the compound, lifting a few dry leaves and depositing them a short distance away with the indifferent efficiency of something that had somewhere to be.

"Why are you not out playing?" Favour asked. "You usually love to play."

Princess looked at the ground. "I am tired of repeating class," she said. "I want to be a doctor in the future. But if I keep repeating class, I will not be able to achieve that dream."

Favour looked at her steadily. This was more than Princess usually gave away voluntarily, and she received it without reaction, without the kind of enthusiastic affirmation that would make the girl shut down immediately. She waited.

"Why do you think you keep repeating class?" she asked.

Princess was quiet for a moment. Then, with the particular courage of a self-aware person admitting an uncomfortable truth, she said, "I am playful. I am unserious. I don't read my books. I take everything too lightly."

"That is good," Favour said.

Princess looked at her. "That I am unserious is good?"

"That you know it is good," Favour said. "Self-awareness is the beginning of change. A child who does not know what is wrong cannot fix it. You know what is wrong. So that is good." She paused. "How do you think you can improve?"

"I know I can fix it by reading," Princess said. "But I don't understand. Nothing ever seems to get into my head. I am so distracted. Maybe I am not as intelligent as I thought."

"Don't talk like that," Favour said immediately, and with a firmness that surprised both of them slightly. "Don't ever talk like that. Your intelligence is not in question. Do you hear me? Not once, not ever. The issue is not your head. The issue is the environment. Forty children in a classroom, noise everywhere, and a teacher who is — " she paused, choosing her words with the diplomacy of someone who was also the teacher in question, "— managing many things at once. That is not the best condition for a mind like yours."

Princess looked at her with the expression of someone receiving information they wanted very badly to believe.

"That man," Favour said, shifting direction with the practiced naturalness of someone who had planned this turn in advance. "The one who came to your grandmother's house. Is he your father?"

Princess's expression closed slightly. "He says he is."

"Is he your father or is he not your father? Which one is it?"

A long pause. "He is my father," Princess said finally. "But I don't like him."

Favour nodded, as though this were a perfectly reasonable and complete answer, which in her estimation it was. She looked across the compound for a moment, at the school building with its fading yellow paint and its broken gutter and its notice board that had not been updated since the previous term.

"He looks like he has money," she said.

Princess blinked at the directness of this. "Money is all he has."

"Angel — Princess, I mean." Favour shook her head slightly at the slip — she had been about to use a different name, something she sometimes thought privately, though she would not have been able to say why. "Let me tell you something. You are young and I have experienced life, so I know these things. In this life, some of us also want a father that is alive and present but we don't have that." She said the last part evenly, without drama or self-pity, in the tone of someone stating a fact about the weather. "So the one that you have — make the best use of it. Do you understand what I am talking about?"

Princess looked at her. Favour met the look without blinking.

"I have an idea," Favour said. "You see, I think that if you want to really go to medical school and become a doctor, what you need is extra lessons. Private tutoring. Just you and one teacher, away from this madness." She gestured at the school building behind them. "And if you look around this school, you know that I am the best teacher available to you. How many subjects am I taking right now? Four. Four subjects. You think it is easy to do that and do it well? You have to be brilliant. So." She folded her hands in her lap with the manner of a woman presenting a business proposition. "You should go and tell your father that you have a teacher who can give you extra lessons. Tell him you need it. Tell him it will help you get back on track to become a doctor. I can help you. I know I can help you."

Princess studied her with the sharp, assessing eyes of a child who was not easily fooled. "How much will you charge?"

"That is between me and your father," Favour said, with the smooth composure of a woman who had not yet decided but would certainly be deciding in the very near future. "Your job is just to go and tell him. Can you do that?"

Princess thought about it. Favour could see her thinking — could see the layers of it, the calculation of whether this was something she wanted, which it clearly was, and the separate calculation of whether accepting something that required her to make a request of Samuel constituted a concession she was prepared to make.

"Think about it," Favour said, standing up and brushing invisible dust from her skirt. "You don't need to make a decision right now. Just think about it." She picked up her bag. "But while you are thinking, let me show you something."

She sat back down, reached into her bag, and pulled out Princess's most recent Physics paper — returned, marked, with Favour's neat red corrections throughout. She opened it to a question that Princess had gotten wrong and began to explain, not in the labored way of someone teaching a struggling student, but in the quick, stimulating way of someone engaging an equal.

Within three minutes, Princess had grasped the concept. Within five, she had extended it into a question that went beyond the original problem entirely. Within ten, Favour had stopped explaining and was simply listening, responding, matching the pace of a mind that, once engaged, moved fast.

When Favour stood up again to leave, they had been talking for twenty-five minutes and neither of them had noticed.

"Think about it," Favour said again, adjusting the wig — which had, during the course of the conversation, developed a slight lean to the left that she corrected with the automatic efficiency of long practice. "About the extra lessons."

Princess watched her go. Then she looked down at the Physics paper in her hands. At the red corrections that had been made not harshly but helpfully, each one accompanied by a short note that explained rather than simply marked.

She folded the paper carefully and put it in her bag.

She was going to talk to her father.

She had not decided she was going to do this consciously, exactly. It was more that the decision had made itself while she was busy thinking about Physics, and by the time she noticed it, it was already settled.

That evening, walking home along the dusty road with the sun going low and orange behind the trees, Favour did her own version of the calculation.

Twenty thousand naira a month, she thought. That is what I will charge. Not one term. One month at a time. Twenty thousand naira, which is more than this school has paid me in three months combined, for lessons that I can do in my sleep.

She thought about new shoes. She thought about the specific brand of gel that had been out of stock at Mama Chisom's stall for six weeks. She thought, with a warmth she allowed herself only briefly, about the bone-straight wigs she had seen in the display window of a shop near the market, expensive and gleaming, the kind of wig that commanded respect before the person wearing it had said a single word.

She thought about what a man with that wallet would say when she named her price.

She walked faster.

For the first time in three months, Teacher Favour felt something approaching optimism.

It was a modest feeling. Carefully proportioned. She did not trust large feelings — they had a tendency to cost more than they promised. But this one, small and specific and grounded in a concrete plan, felt manageable.

She could work with manageable.

She went home and told Deborah nothing, which meant that by morning, through mechanisms that defied rational explanation, the entire street would know something had shifted in Teacher Favour's life.

That was just how it worked.