Chapter 13

# Chapter 13

Yemi talked to my daughter for twenty-three minutes.

I know because I watched the clock—the same lagging clock I had studied for nine hours the day Dele arrived, the one with the catch between the four and the five. I watched it the way a woman in a hospital waiting room watches the clock above the nurses' station: not because the time matters, exactly, but because tracking it gives the hands something to do while the mind absorbs what it cannot yet process.