Chapter 19

# Chapter 19

The house was quiet when we arrived.

Not the absence of sound—there was always sound in Yemi's house, the compound wall holding in the low hum of the generator and the distant arguments of neighbors and the particular acoustic texture of a household with children. But quiet in the way that houses are quiet when the people inside them are waiting, when the air itself has taken on the quality of a held breath, when the doors are closed and the lights are on and someone is sitting somewhere in the stillness, listening for the sound of a car.