EPISODE 2

Dami sat down. He did not reach for the phone. He did not try to explain before she spoke. He just sat across from the mother of his child and waited, which Shade had always both respected and hated about him. He was never reactive. He processed everything from behind glass.

“How long,” she said.

“Two months.”

“While we were discussing trying again.”

“It started before that conversation.”

She looked at him. Shade was thirty-six, tall for a Lagos woman at five nine, with the kind of light brown skin that flushed visibly when she was angry and the dark, sharp eyes of someone who had been too smart for too many rooms for too long. She had loved this man for nine years, married him for four of them, and spent the last two rebuilding herself into someone who did not need him.

She thought she had been doing well.

“She works for you,” Shade said. It was not a question. She had already read enough to know.

“Yes.”

“How old is she.”

A pause. “Twenty-seven.”

Something moved across Shade’s face and then went still. Eleven years. She filed that away.

“I ended it,” Dami said. “When you and I agreed to try again, I ended it. What you read is her responding to something I said when I ended it.”

“You told her it was not the end of the story.”

Silence.

“Dami. You told her it was not the end of the story and then you came back to me and Zara and acted like a man who had made a clean decision.” Her voice was level. Controlled. The kind of controlled that takes years to build. “So which is it. Are you here with me or are you not.”

He looked at her for a long time. “I am trying to be here with you. For Zara.”

“That is not what I asked.”

Outside, a generator hummed. Somewhere down the street a dog was barking at something. Lagos at night doing its usual business, indifferent.

“I don’t know,” he said finally.

It was the most honest thing he had said to her in possibly two years. And it was also, somehow, the worst possible answer

Shade stood up. “I need you to sleep in the guest room tonight.”

He nodded. He got up. He paused at the door. “Shade.”

“Go,” she said. Not cruelly. Just finally.

She sat alone in the kitchen until almost midnight and she thought about a twenty-seven-year-old woman who had texted her almost-ex-husband that she could not stop thinking about him. And she thought about the fact that he had not told the girl it was over. Not really. He had just paused.

And she thought about Zara upstairs and what all of this was going to cost.

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