Professional Ghostwriting Services | Fiction & Story Writing

Thoo caught it first the sound of tires again, three houses down, slowing where they shouldn't. Adaeze had told him to stop watching the street. He hadn't listened. From the kitchen window he could see the black gate at the end of Ogunlana Close, and beyond it, the silver Camry that had circled the neighborhood twice today. Once at noon, when the sun made everything look ordinary. Once at four, when the light started dying and the compound generator hadn't been switched on yet. "They're just lost," Adaeze said, not looking up from the rice she was sorting. "Twice." "People get lost twice." He didn't answer. He was thinking about the envelope in his bag the one with the four hundred thousand naira he'd collected that afternoon, rent money from three tenants who paid him directly because he managed the block for his uncle. He was thinking about how he'd mentioned it, carelessly, to a man named Bayo at the betting shop two days ago. Just mentioned it. The way you mention the weather. The Camry's engine cut off. Thoo stepped back from the window before he realized he'd moved. His heart was doing something strange, a stutter instead of a beat. He told himself it was nothing. Lagos was full of cars that stopped for no reason a phone call, a wrong turn, a driver checking his mirror for danger behind him instead of ahead. But the gate creaked. Not opened. Just tested. A hand on iron, the particular sound of someone checking whether a lock will hold before deciding what to do about it. "Adaeze." His voice came out lower than he meant. She looked up then, and whatever she saw on his face made her set down the bowl of rice without a sound, which was its own kind of alarm, because Adaeze set things down loudly, always, a woman who moved through the world like she owned every surface she touched. "Lock the door," she said. He already had. The bolt was old, a relic from when his uncle first built the annex, and it took two hands to force it home. He did it now and felt the small, useless comfort of metal sliding into metal. Outside, footsteps. Not hurried. That was the part that unnerved him most nobody casing a compound walks slowly unless they've already decided nobody inside can stop them. "The money," Adaeze whispered. "Where's the money?" "Under the mattress. Where it always" "That's the first place anyone looks." She was already moving, and he watched her do something he'd never seen her do before: she took the envelope from under the mattress, walked to the kitchen, and dropped it into the pot of rice she'd been sorting, pushing it beneath the dry grains with the flat of her palm like she was burying something in sand. Then she poured more rice on top from the sack by the stove until the pot looked like nothing but dinner, half-prepared. "Adaeze" "Sit down. Turn on the television." "There's a generator problem, we don't have" "Then sit in the dark and act like everything is normal, Thoo, because if they get in here and see two people frozen by a window, they'll know exactly what we're afraid of losing." He sat. His hands wouldn't stop moving, so he laced his fingers together on the table, and even that felt like a performance, an actor unconvinced by his own blocking. The footsteps reached the annex door. A pause. The particular silence of someone listening. Then knocking three knocks, unhurried, almost polite, the kind of knock a neighbor gives when they've come to borrow sugar. It was the politeness that frightened him more than force would have. Force was at least honest. "Who is it," Adaeze called out, and her voice was steady in a way that made him ashamed of his own. "NEPA," a man's voice answered. "Checking the meter readings for the block." Nobody checked meter readings at half past six in the evening. Nobody from NEPA had driven a silver Camry in eleven years. "My husband will bring the reading tomorrow," Adaeze said. "He's not decent right now." A second voice, further back, muttered something Thoo couldn't catch. There was a shifting of weight against the door testing it the way the hand had tested the gate and then, after a stretch of time that felt much longer than it probably was, the footsteps retreated. Unhurried again. Not defeated. Simply postponed, the way a debt is postponed and not forgiven. The Camry's engine started. Tires on gravel. The sound faded down Ogunlana Close and did not return. Neither of them moved for a long time. When Thoo finally exhaled, it came out shaking, and Adaeze crossed the small kitchen and put both hands on his shoulders, not to comfort him exactly, but to steady them both against something that had come close enough to touch. "You told someone," she said. It wasn't a question. "I didn't think" "No. You didn't." She let go of his shoulders and looked toward the pot of rice, where four hundred thousand naira sat buried under dinner. "Tomorrow you give the rent to the bank. Not to your bag. Not to your mattress. The bank." He nodded, and outside, three houses down, the street had gone quiet again the ordinary quiet of Lagos at dusk, generators coughing to life one by one, children called in for the evening, nothing to suggest that a silver car had just measured the distance between what they had and what they were willing to lose to keep it. But Thoo kept his eyes on the window a while longer, and this time, Adaeze didn't tell him to stop.