HE SHOULD HAVE LEFT

The generator was drawn twice before it started working, and the single bulb over Kel's workbench flickered to life just as the rain started again. Lagos rain never asked permission—it just arrived, hammering the zinc roof of his shop like it had something to prove, drumming so loud it drowned out the traffic noise from the main road for the first time all day. Kel wiped grease off his hands with a rag that was more grease than rag at this point and glanced at the clock mounted above the parts shelf, its glass cracked in one corner from a fall years ago that he'd never gotten around to fixing. It was 8:47 PM. Amara was supposed to have called by seven. She was supposed to have been home for dinner, actually, but dinner had become one of those promises that quietly dissolved most weeknights now, and he'd stopped mentioning it because mentioning it always turned into an argument about how hard she worked and how little he understood the demands of her business. He picked up his phone—an old habit, checking for nothing in particular, the reflex of a man who'd learned to keep his hands busy so his mind wouldn't wander somewhere he didn't want it to go. There was nothing from her. But then he saw it, sitting on the workbench beside a half-stripped carburetor: her phone, forgotten from when she'd stopped by at lunch to drop off soup his mother had sent over, lighting up with a notification. Deliveries: On my way, see you at the usual spot. Kel stared at it the way a man stares at a pothole he's driven past a hundred times, wondering suddenly if it had always been that deep, if he'd simply trained himself not to look directly at it because looking meant slowing down, and slowing down meant admitting something was wrong with the road. "Deliveries." Who saved a person as "Deliveries"? He turned the word over, searching for the version of it that made sense—a supplier, a vendor, someone whose actual name simply hadn't seemed worth remembering. He told himself there was an explanation. There always was, with Amara. She had a gift for making the strange sound ordinary, and he had, over three years, become fluent in accepting it. Maybe it was work—Amara handled vendor logistics for half her events, champagne glasses, and rented flutes included in every wedding package she sold. Maybe "the usual spot" was some warehouse in Ikeja where florists and caterers exchanged invoices over bad coffee and complained about brides. Maybe the emoji meant nothing more than a woman who used emojis for everything, the way she signed off every text to her mother with a little red heart regardless of what the text actually said. He almost believed it. He was good at almost believing things. It was, if he was honest with himself in the rare moments he allowed that kind of honesty, the skill he'd built his whole relationship on top of. The shop door creaked open, and Chidi walked in, shaking rain off his jacket, a takeout bag swinging from one hand, the smell of jollof rice and fried plantain cutting through the smell of engine oil. "Man, I brought you—" He stopped mid-sentence when he saw Kel's face, the particular stillness of it, the way his friend was holding the phone like it might go off in his hand. "What happened?" "Nothing." Kel set the phone down, screen dark now, like putting away evidence in a case he wasn't ready to open, wasn't sure he wanted to open, not tonight, not with the rain coming down like this and the shop already feeling smaller than usual. Chidi's eyes went to the phone, then back to Kel's face. Ten years of friendship meant he could read a lie the way Kel could read a struggling engine—not by what it said, but by the sound it made when it wasn't running right, the small hesitation before the ignition caught. "Kel." "It's nothing, Chidi. Amara left her phone. I saw a notification. It's probably work." He said it fast, the words tumbling out ahead of any real thought behind them, the way people say things they're trying to convince themselves of more than anyone else in the room. Chidi set the food down slowly on the workbench, careful not to disturb the scattered parts. "You've said 'it's probably work' about three different things this year." "Because probably is work." Kel's voice came out sharper than he meant it to, and he heard the fainted voice even as he spoke and hated it a little. He softened, rubbing the back of his neck, suddenly aware of how tired he was, how much of his tiredness had nothing to do with engines. "She's building something for us, Chidi. Every naira she brings in right now—it matters. You know how the shop's been. You know what we're up against." Chidi didn't answer right away. He looked at his friend—a good man, a tired man, wearing the last four months like a coat two sizes too heavy for his frame—and decided, for tonight at least, this wasn't the moment. "Eat something," he said instead, sliding the bag across the workbench, nudging it closer. "You've been out here since six a.m." Kel almost managed a smile. "Since five, actually." "Even worse." They ate in the half-light, rain drumming steady overhead, the generator humming its tired rhythm in the corner, and for a while it was easy enough to let the notification blur back into the ordinary noise of a hard year—generator fuel receipts piling up, unpaid supplier invoices, his mother's phone calls asking when he'd "settle down properly" now that he had a good woman waiting on him. Just one more thing to not think about tonight. He was becoming, he realized without quite wanting to, an expert at that particular skill. His phone buzzed. Amara. "So sorry, babe! The event ran late because of a client emergencies. On my way home now, don't wait up for dinner." Kel read it twice, thumb hovering over the screen. Then he looked at her phone, still sitting dark on the bench beside the takeout containers, the notification banner long gone but not forgotten, not really, not the way things that matter are never really gone even after the screen goes dark. "The usual spot." He typed back: "No wahala. Get home safe." Three words he didn't fully mean, sent to a woman he was choosing, again, not to ask the one question sitting heavy in his chest, coiled and waiting like something he'd have to deal with eventually, on some night when he had less to lose. Chidi watched him do it. Said nothing, not yet. But he made a decision of his own that night, quiet and private—the next time he saw something that didn't add up, he wasn't going to stay quiet about it, no matter how it might land between them. Outside, the rain kept falling, indifferent, the way it always did in this city—on the honest and the lying alike, on men who forgave too easily and women who counted on it, on every small choice that felt harmless in the moment and would look, much later, like the first domino in a very long line.