Chapter 11

# Chapter 11

He came at twenty past six.

I know the exact time because I had been watching Yemi's kitchen clock for nine hours, and by the end of those nine hours I had developed an intimate relationship with its mechanics—the faint catch in its second hand between the four and the five, the barely perceptible lag that meant it ran, by my phone's reckoning, approximately forty seconds slow. Nine hours of sitting and standing and sitting again, of moving between rooms with the restless circuitry of a woman waiting for a verdict. Nine hours during which Yemi and I had assembled, without discussion, a kind of domestic protocol for coexistence—she cooked, I washed up; she tended the baby, I stayed out of the way; she answered the phone twice and both times it was Dele and both times she said the same thing: *We're here. Come.*