THE SPACE BETWEEN US

Chapter Two: The Boy Next Door

The knock came at nine that night, after the movers had gone. Ada opened the door already annoyed, a complaint half formed in her mouth about noise after hours and how she had an early client meeting.

The man standing in the hallway was not what she expected.

He was tall, in a plain gray t-shirt with a faint smear of dust on one shoulder, holding two mugs of what smelled like ginger tea, as if he'd anticipated needing a peace offering. It took her a full three seconds to place his face, because ten years had changed it — the softness of boyhood replaced by something more settled, more certain — but then it clicked, all at once, and the irritation in her chest turned into something else entirely, something she didn't have a name for yet and wasn't in a hurry to find one.

"Emeka," she said.

"I was hoping you still lived on this floor," he said. "The building manager wouldn't tell me which apartment, so I've been standing outside your door for five minutes trying to decide if this was a terrible idea."

Ada didn't move. Ten years ago, they had been inseparable — two kids from the same street who climbed the same mango tree, did homework on the same veranda, told each other things they never told anyone else, not even their own siblings. She remembered him at fourteen, awkward and skinny, forever losing arguments about football to boys twice his confidence. She remembered the two of them at nineteen, sitting on the low wall outside his house until well past midnight, talking about nothing important with the particular seriousness only teenagers can bring to nothing important. And then, three weeks before he turned twenty-two, Emeka had left for the UK without saying goodbye properly. A short message. A promise to call that never quite turned into calls. Silence, eventually, that stretched into years, until the silence itself became a kind of answer she'd stopped waiting to have corrected.

"You didn't call," she said, because it was the first true thing that came to her, and because ten years of composure apparently evaporated the moment he stood in front of her holding tea.

"I know," he said. He didn't try to explain it away, which surprised her. "I'm not going to pretend that's not true. Can I come in, or do you want to have this conversation in the hallway?"

She should have said no. She thought about saying no. Instead she stepped back and let him in, and told herself it was only because Mrs. Adeyemi in 4B liked to listen at doors, and it would be all over the building association group chat by morning otherwise.

They sat at her kitchen table, the one with two chairs though she never had guests, and he told her, in pieces, what the last ten years had looked like. University in Manchester, cold and gray and lonelier than he'd expected. An engineering job that turned into a good one, then a better one. A relationship that had ended two years ago, mentioned briefly and without detail, in the tone of someone stepping carefully around a bruise that hadn't fully healed. His mother's health scare last year, which had made him think seriously, for the first time, about coming home for good.

"And why here," Ada said, gesturing vaguely at the wall between their apartments, "of all the buildings in Lagos?"

Emeka looked at her for a long moment before he answered. "Would you believe me if I said it was a coincidence?"

"No."

"Good," he said. "Because it wasn't."

She didn't ask him to explain that. She wasn't ready for the answer, and some old, careful part of her recognized that if she asked one more question, they would end up somewhere she wasn't prepared to go on the first night. So she let him finish his tea, and they talked about nothing important — his mother's cooking, a mutual friend's wedding coming up in November, whether the building's generator still cut out every time it rained, the fate of the mango tree on their old street, which had apparently been cut down two years ago to make way for a borehole — and when he left, close to eleven, she stood in her kitchen for a long time, unable to explain why her hands were unsteady.

She had spent ten years building a life where nothing could surprise her like this. And in one evening, all of it felt very thin.

That night, unable to sleep, Ada found herself pulling an old shoebox down from the top of her closet, the one she never opened, full of things from a life she'd otherwise packed away with unusual thoroughness. A photograph, creased at one corner, of two skinny teenagers sitting in the branches of a mango tree, both of them squinting against the sun, both of them laughing at something the photograph couldn't preserve. A folded note in handwriting she recognized instantly as younger, less certain, but unmistakably Emeka's — a birthday message from when they were seventeen, half joke and half something more sincere than either of them would have admitted to at the time. Sixteen years old, he'd asked her, only half joking, to promise that whatever happened, wherever either of them ended up, they'd still know each other when they were old. She remembered laughing at him for being dramatic. She remembered promising anyway, because some part of her, even then, had known she meant it.

She hadn't thought about that promise in years. She wasn't sure, sitting on her bedroom floor at midnight with the box open in her lap, whether it counted as broken, given that here he was again, a decade later, one wall away. Or whether this was simply what keeping a promise looked like, when neither person involved had known, at seventeen, how long or how difficult the keeping of it would turn out to be.

She put the box away before she let herself examine the question too closely, and went to bed, and did not sleep for a long time.