Chapter 8 - The First Crack
818 Words
She had been in the house four days when she discovered Emeka Okafor could not sleep.
She knew this because she also could not sleep.
3am on a Thursday and Adaeze was sitting on the window seat in her room with a book she had not been reading for the past hour, watching the flame tree move in the night breeze, when she heard footsteps on the stairs.
Slow. Unhurried. Going down.
She waited.
After a few minutes the smell of coffee drifted up.
She put down her book.
She told herself she was going downstairs for water. That was a reasonable thing. People needed water at 3am. It had nothing to do with the footsteps or the coffee or the fact that she had been alone with her thoughts for too long.
She went downstairs for water.
The kitchen light was on.
Emeka was standing at the counter in a plain white shirt and dark trousers. Not pajamas. Not a robe. Actual trousers at 3am like a man who did not own anything casual. He was reading something on his phone with one hand and holding a mug of coffee with the other.
He looked up when she walked in.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
"Water," she said.
"There is a filter on the left," he said.
She got her water. Stood at the counter a few feet from him. Drank it.
"You cannot sleep," he said. Not a question.
"New environment," she said. "You?"
A pause.
"I do not sleep much," he said simply. Like it was a fact about himself he had long ago accepted and stopped fighting.
She looked at him. At the shadows under his eyes that she was only now noticing properly. At the way he stood at 3am in his own kitchen like a man who had been awake so long that tiredness was just his normal setting.
"How long," she said.
"Since I was seventeen."
She did not ask why. The scar above his eye had already told her enough about the kind of seventeen he might have had.
"My father used to make tea when he could not sleep," she said instead. "Terrible tea. Too strong. He would sit at the kitchen table and read old newspapers. The same ones sometimes. I do not think he was actually reading them."
Emeka was watching her.
"I think he just needed somewhere to put himself," she said. "At 3am when everything feels too loud inside."
The kitchen was very quiet.
"Yes," Emeka said. Just that one word. But something in the way he said it told her he understood exactly what she meant.
She finished her water.
She should go back upstairs. That was the sensible thing.
"Do you have tea," she said instead.
He looked mildly surprised. Opened a cupboard. Inside was an organized row of tins. Earl Grey. Chamomile. Ginger. She almost smiled. Of course even his tea collection was organized.
"Chamomile," she said.
He put the kettle on without being asked.
They stood in comfortable silence while it boiled. She noticed he had stopped looking at his phone. He was just standing there in the quiet kitchen at 3am waiting for the kettle and for the first time since she had moved into this house he looked almost relaxed.
Almost human.
The kettle clicked. He poured water over her teabag and slid the mug across the counter.
"Thank you," she said.
She wrapped both hands around the mug. Felt the warmth of it.
"The newspapers," he said suddenly.
She looked up.
"My grandfather," he said slowly. Like he was choosing each word carefully. "He used to do the same thing. Sit with old newspapers. I thought he was reading them."
He stopped.
She waited.
"He was the only person in my house who made it feel like a home," he said. Very quietly. Like he had not intended to say quite that much.
The kitchen held the words gently.
"He sounds like he was a good man," Adaeze said.
"The best man I knew," Emeka said.
She understood then. The will. The inheritance. The marriage requirement. This was not about money or shares or corporate strategy.
This was about a grandson trying to honor a grandfather.
She looked at him across the kitchen counter at 3am with their respective drinks and the flame tree moving silently outside the window.
"Emeka," she said.
He looked at her.
"I think your grandfather would have liked Mrs Fashola's pepper soup," she said.
Something happened to his face.
Not quite a smile. But the closest thing to one she had seen yet. A softening. A loosening of something he kept very tightly held.
"He would have had three bowls," Emeka said.
Adaeze smiled.
They stood in the quiet kitchen a little longer than necessary.
When she finally went back upstairs she slept almost immediately.
She did not examine why.
- Writer
