THE SPACE BETWEEN US

Ada Okafor woke up at 5:45 every morning, before her alarm, because her body had learned not to need one. She made coffee, checked her calendar, and answered three emails before she even brushed her teeth. By the time the sun was properly up over Lekki, she had already run two kilometers on the treadmill in the building's small gym, showered, and picked out one of six nearly identical work outfits hanging in a row in her closet, organized by color, left to right, like a solved problem she never had to solve twice. Her apartment was clean in a way that made people uncomfortable. Chiamaka, her younger sister, called it "the museum." There was nothing on the counters except a kettle and a single mug. No photos on the walls except one, a framed picture of Ada and her mother at her graduation, chosen because it was tasteful and not because it meant anything in particular. At least that was what Ada told herself, every time she walked past it without really looking at it. She was twenty-nine years old and a senior architect at Origin Studio, one of the better boutique firms in the city. She had made partner track faster than anyone in the office's history, and she had done it by being the person who never missed a deadline, never lost her temper in a client meeting, and never let anyone see her rattled. Her colleagues respected her. Some of them were a little afraid of her. She didn't mind that. Being respected felt safer than being liked, in her experience — liking could be withdrawn, but respect, if you earned it properly, tended to stay put. That week, Origin Studio was two days from a major client presentation, a mixed-use development on the Island that would be the firm's biggest project in three years if they won it, and Ada had been at her desk past ten every night, rebuilding the massing model for the fourth time because the client's brief had changed twice already and would probably change again before Thursday. "You should go home," her junior colleague, Bisi, said on Monday night, pausing at Ada's desk with her bag already over her shoulder. "I'm almost done," Ada said, which she had also said the previous three nights. "You're always almost done," Bisi said, not unkindly. "One day you're going to be almost done with your whole life." Ada laughed it off, the way she laughed off most things that got too close to true, and stayed another hour after Bisi left, alone in the office with the hum of the air conditioning and the glow of her monitor, which was, if she was honest with herself, one of her favorite kinds of quiet. "You work too much," Funke said, most Fridays, over jollof rice at the small restaurant near Ada's office. Funke had known her since university and had given up trying to change her, though she never stopped commenting on it. "I like my work," Ada said, which was true, though it wasn't the whole truth. "You like that it doesn't talk back," Funke said. "It doesn't leave you either." Ada rolled her eyes and changed the subject, the way she always did. The apartment next to hers had been empty for almost two years. The last tenant, an older man who worked for an oil company, had moved out suddenly, and after that the landlord seemed in no hurry to fill it. Ada liked it that way. She liked the quiet on that side of the hallway. She had gotten used to a certain kind of peace, and she had built her whole life around protecting it — a life sized exactly to what she could control, with nothing left over that might one day be taken from her. Her mother called every Sunday at four o'clock, and every Sunday the conversation moved, eventually, to the same place. "Any good men at your work?" her mother would ask, and Ada would say no, and her mother would sigh in a way that carried decades of disappointment in it, though she never said the real thing out loud. The real thing was: I don't want you to end up like me. Ada's father had left when she was sixteen. He hadn't died, hadn't disappeared into some tragedy that could be explained to sympathetic neighbors. He had simply packed two suitcases one Thursday afternoon and moved to Port Harcourt with a woman from his office, and he had never really come back, not even for birthdays, not even the year Ada graduated top of her class and everyone else's father was in the audience. Ada remembered standing in the doorway of the house they used to share, watching him load the car, and thinking, with a clarity that had never quite left her, that she would never again let herself need someone that much. She had been the one who held things together after that. She helped her mother figure out the finances, sitting up late with a calculator and a stack of unpaid bills long before she understood what any of the numbers really meant. She walked Chiamaka to school every morning for two years because their mother was too tired, some mornings, to get out of bed. She learned, very young, that being needed was safer than needing. She had built an entire adult life on that lesson, and it had mostly worked. Mostly. On a Tuesday evening in September, Ada came home from work to the sound of a moving truck idling outside the building, and men carrying boxes and furniture down the hallway toward the apartment that had been empty for two years. She stood in her own doorway for a moment, keys still in her hand, feeling an irritation that was completely out of proportion to the situation. She liked her quiet. Someone was about to take it from her. She did not know yet that quiet was the smallest thing she was about to lose.