Chapter 6

# Chapter 6

The flight to Lagos was six hours and twenty-three minutes, and I spent every one of them rehearsing a conversation I would probably never have.

*Hello. You don't know me. Actually, you do know me—you know my name, my city, the broad outline of the life I've been living while you've been living yours. You know me the way a person knows the wall on the other side of the room: always there, defining the boundary, never examined closely. I'm Adunni. I'm Dele's wife. The first one. The official one. The one with the ring and the marriage certificate and the semi-detached in Dulwich and the children whose existence you've been aware of for thirteen years while I've been aware of yours for five weeks.*

*I'm not here to scream. I'm not here to claw. I'm here because—*

Because what? Because I needed to see? Because knowledge acquired at a distance is a different substance from knowledge acquired in the same room, breathing the same air, standing close enough to notice whether the other woman bites her nails or wears her hair pressed or has the kind of face that would make my husband—

No. I stopped myself. I was constructing Yemi from materials I didn't yet possess, building her out of bank statements and school fee receipts and the fragments of Dele's letters the way archaeologists build civilizations from potsherds. I would not do this. I would arrive empty. I would look. I would see what there was to see.

The woman in the window seat was reading a Chimamanda novel—*Half of a Yellow Sun*, the cover worn soft at the corners. She'd fallen asleep somewhere over the Sahara, her head tilted at an angle that would punish her neck for days. I envied her. Not the sleep—I couldn't have slept if I'd swallowed a pharmacy—but the unselfconsciousness of it. The willingness to be vulnerable in a confined space surrounded by strangers. I hadn't been unselfconscious in weeks. Every gesture I made was calculated, every expression curated, every word I spoke to Dele or the children or my colleagues at the gallery weighed and measured and tested for structural integrity before I released it into the world.

I was exhausted by my own performance. And I was only in the first act.

---

Murtala Muhammed Airport smelled the way it always smelled: diesel, sweat, floor polish, and the faintly sweet undertone of a country that refuses to be sanitized. I'd forgotten this. Or rather, I'd filed it away in the part of my memory reserved for things that were real but no longer relevant—the taste of chin-chin from the woman who sold it outside my secondary school, the particular quality of Lagos heat that isn't just temperature but texture, a physical thing that wraps around your skin the moment you step outside air conditioning.

I hadn't been back in four years. Dele came twice, sometimes three times a year for work, and I'd stopped accompanying him long ago—when the children were small, because traveling with toddlers on a six-hour flight is a form of voluntary punishment that no sane person repeats. And later, because Dele's trips had become something separate from our shared life, a compartment I wasn't invited into and had learned not to approach.

Now I understood why.

Immigration was slow. The officer studied my British passport with the measured suspicion of a man whose job is to find fault, turned to the page with my Nigerian visa, looked at my face, looked at the photograph, looked at my face again. I held still. I am good at holding still. Seventeen years of marriage to a man who withheld information as a matter of policy had taught me that the person who moves first is usually the person who loses.

"Purpose of visit?"

"Family," I said.

He stamped the passport. Waved me through. The word sat in my mouth like something I should spit out.

The hotel was exactly as the photographs had promised—modest, clean, on a quiet street in Yaba where the noise of generators and motorcycles was muffled by walls thick enough to have survived decades of neglect and three changes of government. My room was on the second floor. A bed, a desk, a window overlooking a courtyard where someone had hung laundry on a line strung between a mango tree and a satellite dish. The sheets smelled of starch and something floral I couldn't identify.

I sat on the bed. Opened my phone. No messages from Dele—he'd texted that morning, a perfunctory *Safe travels, greet Folake for me*, the kind of message a man sends when he's already moved on to the next item on his agenda. I'd replied with equal efficiency: *Will do. Kiss the children.* Two people exchanging the passwords of a functioning marriage, each one satisfied that the other was exactly where they claimed to be.

I opened the period-tracker app. Reviewed my notes. The address in Epe was forty minutes by car—longer in Lagos traffic, which operates according to laws of physics that don't apply anywhere else on earth. I could go today. I could shower, change, hire a taxi, and be standing at the green gate by late afternoon.

But I didn't move. Not yet. Because somewhere between boarding the flight at Heathrow and sitting on this stiff hotel bed in Yaba, the nature of what I was doing had shifted. In London, the investigation had felt controlled. Clinical. I was a researcher in a library, following footnotes, cross-referencing sources. The subject of my research existed at a comfortable remove—in bank records, in letters, in the careful architecture of Dele's deception. Yemi was an abstraction. The children were numbers on a school fee invoice.

Here, in Lagos, they were forty minutes away. They were eating lunch, perhaps. Doing homework. Watching television. Living the ordinary afternoon of a family that didn't know a woman had flown six hours to stand outside their house and—

And what? What would I do when I got there?

I didn't know. I hadn't planned that far. The investigation had its own momentum, its own logic, and I'd been following it the way you follow a path through unfamiliar woods—trusting that the trail knows where it's going even when you don't. But paths in woods sometimes end at cliffs.

I showered. The water was lukewarm and tasted faintly of rust. I dressed in clothes I'd chosen with absurd deliberateness—nothing too expensive, nothing too casual, a navy linen dress and flat sandals and a headwrap I'd bought on Columbia Road two years ago from a woman who said the fabric came from Aso-Oke weavers in Iseyin. I wanted to look like myself but not my London self. I wanted to look like a woman who belonged here, which was a complicated desire for someone who'd left Nigeria at nineteen and built an entire identity around the leaving.

The taxi driver was called Emeka. He told me this immediately, along with his star sign (Libra), his opinions on the governor (unfavorable), and a detailed account of a property dispute with his brother-in-law that he delivered with the narrative flair of a man who has told this story many times and never tires of it. I gave him the address in Epe and watched his face in the rearview mirror for any reaction—surprise, recognition, the flicker of knowing something about the place I was going. There was nothing. To Emeka, it was just an address. A destination. A fare.

Lagos streamed past the window. The city had changed and hadn't changed—new flyovers arcing over the same impossible traffic, glass towers rising beside buildings that hadn't been painted since the Abacha years, billboards advertising churches and telecoms and skin-lightening creams in that particular shade of aspirational brightness that Lagos specializes in. Everyone was going somewhere. Everyone was in a hurry. The energy of it—the sheer, relentless *forward motion* of twelve million people refusing to be still—was intoxicating and terrifying in equal measure.

I thought about my mother. She'd lived in Lagos until she was sixty-three, in the same flat in Ilupeju where she'd raised me and my sisters, and she used to say that Lagos was the only city in the world that could break your heart and pick your pocket at the same time. She said this with pride. She'd moved to London reluctantly, trailing my father's ambition like a kite trails a string, and she never fully arrived. Part of her was always here, in the noise and the dust and the ungovernable chaos of a city that answered to no one.

I understood her now. Sitting in the back of Emeka's taxi, watching the Mainland unfold in its familiar, unbeautiful sprawl, I felt something I hadn't expected: recognition. Not nostalgia—nostalgia is soft and backward-looking and I had no patience for it. Recognition. The sense of a place that knew me even though I'd spent twenty years pretending I didn't know it.

---

Epe was quieter. The noise of the city receded as we drove—not gradually but in steps, like descending a staircase, each turn removing a layer of sound until what remained was the hum of the engine and the distant bleating of goats and the occasional shout of a child playing in a compound we'd already passed.

The house was on a residential street lined with concrete walls topped with broken glass and razor wire—standard security for a Nigerian neighborhood of this class, which is to say: comfortable but not wealthy, established but not prestigious. The kind of street where people owned their homes and maintained them with the quiet diligence of those who understood that property was the only asset that couldn't be devalued by a change of government.

"This is it, Madam," Emeka said, pulling to the curb.

I looked at the gate. Green, as in the photographs. Wrought iron, with a pattern of leaves or vines worked into the metal—someone had chosen this design with care, with an eye for something beyond mere function. The wall surrounding the compound was painted cream, recently enough that the color was still even. A bougainvillea climbed one corner, its fuchsia blossoms so vivid against the concrete that they looked artificial, like someone had pinned silk flowers to the wall as decoration.

Behind the gate, I could see the upper floor of the house. Concrete block, painted the same cream as the wall. A window with blue curtains, half-drawn. A satellite dish on the roof. An air-conditioning unit humming in a window on the lower level.

This was it. The house Dele had built with eighteen million naira—thirty-five thousand pounds—while standing in our half-finished kitchen in Dulwich telling me to pick whatever she wanted. This was the other life. The parallel structure. The second set of walls within which my husband had constructed a version of himself I'd never met.

"Madam? You are going inside?"

"Give me a moment."

Emeka shrugged. Left the engine running. Turned up the radio—Wizkid, something with a beat that felt inappropriately joyful for the occasion.

I sat in the taxi and looked at the green gate and felt nothing.

This alarmed me more than grief or rage would have. I'd prepared for both—had imagined myself collapsing against the door in a fit of cinematic anguish, or striding up to the gate with the righteous fury of a woman wronged. I'd prepared for tears. For shaking hands. For the kind of full-body response that the situation seemed to demand.

Instead: nothing. A flat, clinical calm that reminded me of the way I'd felt the morning after my mother died—not numb exactly, but operating at a frequency below emotion, in the basement of the self where observation lives, where you can look at a thing clearly precisely because you haven't yet allowed yourself to feel it.

I opened the car door.

The heat hit me—proper Lagos heat, the kind that doesn't just warm you but claims you, wraps around your body like a second skin. I walked to the gate. Up close, I could see the details: a padlock, a bell mounted on the right post, a small sign that read *NO. 14 OGUNDIMU* in hand-painted letters.

Ogundimu. Her name on the house. Not Dele's. Not Owusu-Mensah. She existed here under her own name, in her own house, with her own identity that was not merely an extension of his. I hadn't expected this. I'd imagined—I hadn't known what I'd imagined. A woman in hiding, perhaps. A kept woman, living in the shadow of her benefactor's generosity. But the sign said otherwise. The sign said: *This is my house. I live here. I have a name.*

I reached for the bell. My hand was steady. My pulse was normal. I was about to ring the doorbell of my husband's second family and my body was behaving as though I were arriving for a dinner party.

The door to the compound opened before I could press the bell.

A boy emerged. Twelve, maybe thirteen—tall for his age, with the lanky, unfinished proportions of early adolescence. He was wearing a school uniform: grey trousers, a white shirt untucked on one side, black shoes scuffed to a shade of dark grey. He had a backpack slung over one shoulder and was looking at his phone with the total absorption of a teenager for whom the device is less a tool than an organ.

He glanced up. Saw me standing at the gate. Stopped.

And the nothing I'd been feeling cracked open like an egg.

Because I knew that face. Not the specific features—the nose, the jaw, the set of the eyes—though these too were familiar in a way that bypassed thought and went straight to the body, to some cellular recognition that predated language. I knew the *expression*. The slightly wary assessment of a stranger. The chin lifted a fraction, projecting confidence the eyes didn't quite support. The way one hand adjusted the backpack strap—a self-soothing gesture, unconscious, inherited.

Tobias did the same thing. The exact same thing. Hand on the strap, chin up, eyes calculating.

"Good afternoon," I said. My voice sounded foreign to me. Too composed. Too British.

"Good afternoon, Ma." He was polite. Well-raised. He waited, as children who've been taught to wait for adults to explain themselves wait—patiently, but with an undercurrent of restlessness that said he'd rather be somewhere else.

"Is—" I paused. Recalibrated. "Is your mother at home?"

"She's inside. Who should I say is asking?"

A reasonable question. A normal question. A question I had no reasonable or normal answer to. *Tell her Adunni is here. Tell her your father's wife has come. Tell her the woman on the other side of the wall would like to see what the room looks like from this angle.*

"My name is Adunni," I said. "She won't know me. But I've come a long way, and I'd be grateful for a few minutes of her time."

The boy studied me. Something shifted in his face—not recognition, not exactly, but the stirring of an instinct, the way an animal's ears flatten when a sound is not yet a threat but is no longer quite safe.

"Wait here, Ma," he said. He turned and walked back through the gate, letting it swing half-shut behind him. I heard his footsteps on concrete. The slap of a screen door. A voice calling from inside the house—a woman's voice, low, inquiring.

I stood at the green gate in the late afternoon heat and waited. The bougainvillea rustled. A motorcycle passed on the street behind me, its engine coughing and settling. Somewhere nearby, a generator kicked on with the rattling sigh that is the true soundtrack of Lagos—the sound of a city that has learned to power itself because no one else will do it reliably.

I waited.

I did not rehearse what I would say. I had spent six hours on a plane rehearsing and none of it mattered now, none of the careful sentences I'd constructed would survive contact with the woman who was about to walk through that gate. Language, I had learned over the past five weeks, was unreliable. It said what you wanted it to say, not what was true. Dele had used language to build a wall between his two lives, and I had used it to build a wall between what I knew and what I was willing to feel.

There would be no more walls. Not today.

Footsteps. The gate swung open.

She was shorter than I'd expected. This was my first thought, and I was immediately ashamed of it—as though height were the variable that mattered, the data point that would make sense of the rest. She was shorter than me by several inches, and slighter, with narrow shoulders and the kind of wrists you could circle with your thumb and forefinger. She was wearing a housedress—blue and white *adire*, the indigo dye faded from washing—and her hair was pulled back in a simple knot. No makeup. No jewelry except a thin gold chain that caught the light when she moved.

She looked at me.

I looked at her.

And in the space between us—in that three feet of air separating the green gate from the place where I stood—the entire elaborate fiction of my marriage collapsed. Not with a crash. Not with drama. It simply ceased to exist, the way a soap bubble ceases to exist: one moment it's there, iridescent and complete, and the next it's nothing but a faint dampness on your skin.

Because she wasn't surprised.

She looked at me with the steady, exhausted gaze of a woman who has been expecting this visit for a very long time. Who has, perhaps, rehearsed this moment as many times as I had—lying awake at night in this house my husband built, imagining the day the other wife would come. The *official* wife. The woman with the ring and the passport and the Dulwich address and the children who bore the surname without the stigma.

"You are Adunni," she said. Not a question.

"Yes."

She held the gate open. A gesture so simple and so devastating that I felt the first crack in my composure—not grief, not yet, but something adjacent to it. Gratitude, perhaps. For the absence of a slammed door. For the willingness to stand in the open and be looked at.

"Come inside," Yemi said. "I think we have a great deal to talk about."

I walked through the green gate. The boy was standing in the yard, watching, his phone forgotten in his hand. Behind him, in the doorway of the house, two smaller children peered out—a girl, maybe eight, with braids tied with white ribbons, and a boy, younger still, hiding half his body behind the doorframe.

Three children. Dele's children. My children's siblings.

Yemi followed my gaze. "Adewale you've met," she said, nodding toward the older boy. "That is Temitope. And the small one is Kayode."

I looked at them. They looked at me. And I understood, with a clarity that was almost physical, that whatever happened in this house today—whatever was said, whatever was revealed, whatever new shape my life assumed when I walked back through that gate—these children were not abstractions. They were not line items on a school fee invoice. They were not evidence of my husband's betrayal. They were people. Small, bewildered, watchful people who had done nothing wrong and understood nothing of the architecture that had brought a stranger to their door on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon.

"Come," Yemi said again. "Before the neighbors begin to wonder."

I followed her inside. The door closed behind me. And for the first time in five weeks, I stopped investigating.

I was inside the evidence now. There was nowhere left to stand apart.