Jide was standing outside the Bullring with four bags and a receipt that was longer than he wanted to look at. It was raining, which in Birmingham was not news.

James had been with him for two hours and had the expression of a man who had watched something happen that he felt he should have prevented.

“I’m just saying,” James said. He had been saying this since the third shop.

“You’re always just saying.”

“Because somebody has to.” James took one of the bags, not to help, Jide understood, but to look at it, to make the point physical. “Zara. Before that it was the perfume. Before that it was the thing she asked you to send from Selfridges last month.” He handed the bag back. “Since when do you shop at Selfridges?”

“It wasn’t expensive.”

“That’s not the point I’m making.” James put his hands in his pockets, which was what he did when he was preparing to say something he had been holding for a while. “Since you and this girl started, you have never shown me one thing and said, look what she got me. Not one thing. But every time I see you, you are coming from somewhere or sending something or paying for somewhere she is eating in Lagos.” He paused. “I’m not telling you what to do. I’m just asking you to look at the pattern.”

“If you love a woman, you take care of her,” Jide said.

“Taking care of a woman is not always about buying her things.” James said it simply, without heat. “I’m sure you know that.”

Jide knew that so he said simply: “I know that.”

“Okay,” James said. And left it there, the way he left things, cleanly, without pressing, trusting that the words he had said would do their own work.

They parted at the car park. Jide put the bags in the trunk and sat in the driver’s seat for a moment before starting the engine.

Taking care of a woman is not always about buying her things.

He sat with it.

The truth was, and he did not like looking at this directly, in fact he had been not looking at it for some time. He was the one on the giving end, and it had been that way since the beginning. He thought about it now with the specificity he had been avoiding: the restaurant bills paid from Birmingham for a table he was not sitting at. The perfume, the clothes, the money sent during her final year of university because she had said she needed it, because he was her man and her man provided. The Selfridges order last month. This month’s Zara bags sitting in his trunk for a woman who was three thousand miles away and who, he realised sitting in the car park, had not asked him recently how he was doing. At least not in a way that waited for an answer.

He started the engine.

She was twenty-four now. She had been twenty when he found her, when God had led him to her, he corrected himself. That was the right way to say it. He had been twenty-six, just settled in Birmingham, and he had woken from a dream with a certainty that was unlike anything he had experienced before, the kind of certainty that did not argue with you, that simply was. A woman in Nigeria. Twenty years old. His wife.

He had not told many people this. James did not know. It was the kind of thing that sounded strange outside of the space where you had received it, the way dreams always sounded smaller in the telling, but inside him it had not been small. It had been the clearest thing God had ever said to him, clearer than the job, clearer than Birmingham, clearer than anything.

So when he had walked into that birthday party in Lagos, and seen her across the room, laughing, present in herself in a way that moved through the crowd and found him, he had been attracted. She was beautiful and had a body you would expect from a beauty queen. He wanted to ignore her, to avoid falling for a stranger, but then they had talked, and at some point she had mentioned her age, twenty, and something in him had gone still.

Twenty. In Nigeria.

It was her.

He had been certain. He had remained certain. He was certain now, sitting in a Birmingham car park with four bags of things he had bought for a woman he had not seen in eight months.

And yet.

James’s voice in the car with him: “Since you and this girl started, you have never shown me one thing….”

He pulled out of the car park.

Maybe it was the distance. Maybe she needed him to prove himself across the miles, to make the love visible because she could not feel it physically. That made sense, he had told himself this before and it had made sense. Long distance asked things of a relationship that proximity did not. You had to work harder to be present. You had to be deliberate.

But as he joined the motorway and Birmingham opened up around him, the thought that came was quieter and less comfortable than the ones he had been managing: the dream had said twenty years old, in Nigeria. It had not said this would be easy. It had not said she would love him back in the same volume. It had said she was his wife and he had built four years on that foundation but he had not, in those four years, felt the peace and the joy that the dream had promised would come.

He had been waiting for it to come.

Maybe if she were here. Maybe if the distance closed, if he went to Lagos, if he brought her back, maybe then the fullness of what God had shown him would begin.

He drove home with the bags in the boot and the receipt he still had not looked at and the thoughts, arriving for the first time with enough force that he could not move past it. He had been telling himself maybe for four years.

He turned on the radio. He did not want to complete the thought.

He completed it anyway: four years of maybe was a long time to be waiting for a promise to start feeling like one.

———————————————————————————————————————

The Adebiyis were good people. Yetunde had not expected that.

They were in their early thirties, just married, living in a flat in Lekki that smelled of fresh paint and newness. Mr. Adebiyi was quiet and fair. Mrs. Adebiyi, whose name was Folake, though Yetunde called her Madam, was the kind of woman who organized her emotions efficiently, who did not waste warmth but did not withhold it either. She was pregnant when Yetunde arrived ad by the time the baby came, Yetunde had learned the household so completely that she could have managed it with her eyes closed.

She did everything with her might.

She cooked and it was good, not because she was showing off but because she had her mother’s understanding of how food worked, and the patience for it. She cleaned and the flat was clean in a way that had dignity. She took care of the baby, Tobiloba, with the same total attention she gave a difficult neckline.

About three months in, Madam Folake had come into the kitchen one evening while Yetunde was finishing the dishes and stood at the counter watching her for a moment.

“Where did you learn to cook like this?”

Yetunde kept her hands in the water. “My mother, ma.”

“She taught you well.” Then she paused before starting again. “The pepper soup you made on Sunday, my husband has been asking about it since.”

“I can make it again, ma. Any time.”

Madam Folake was quiet for a moment. Then she said: “You are not just a housegirl, are you?”

Yetunde said nothing. Madam Folake nodded slowly, as though the silence had confirmed something she had already decided.

After that she began to talk to Yetunde differently. Not as a housegirl but as someone who was present, capable and worth consulting. When they were redecorating the sitting room she held up two curtain samples across the doorway and turned to Yetunde.

“Which one?”

Yetunde looked at both. “The left one, ma. The other will pull too much light from the room.”

Madam Folake looked at the curtains again. Then at Yetunde. “You have an eye.”

It was a small thing, but Yetunde understood it was not nothing.

In the second year, Madam Folake found her one Saturday morning in the back room, bent over a repair on one of her own blouses, the stitching small and careful.

“How long have you been sewing?”

“Since I was nineteen, ma. Properly but before that, I had learned to stitch by hand.”

“Did you train somewhere?”

“One year with a tailor in my town, Iya Bimpe. And I taught myself some things.”

Madam Folake sat down on the edge of the bed, which she did not usually do, which told Yetunde this was not a passing conversation. “There is a programme on the island. Fashion construction and pattern making. It’s for four months, Saturdays only. I want to send you.”

Yetunde set down the blouse. “Ma?”

“It will come from your salary but you can pay it back slowly.” She paused, looked at the blouse in Yetunde’s hands, then back at her face. She stood as soon as Yetunde dropped to her knees in gratitude, “Thank you ma, I will not disappoint you.”

Yetunde went every Saturday for four months and came back different each time.

By the third year of living and working with the Adebiyi’s, she was sewing for Madam Folake’s friends. She bought a good machine with her savings, set it up in her bedroom and was  making ready-to-wear clothes in the night when the whole house had slept, just as she did in the kitchen back in Osi. The clothes she made were good, good enough that neighbours and family friends of the Adebiyi’s bought them,  and word went around to bring her more customers. She was saving money with a discipline that was also a form of prayer, a portion from every payment, set aside, untouched. She was not saving for anything she could name yet. She was saving because she believed that saved things accumulate into something God can use.

Then one evening Madam Folake asked her to come and sit at the kitchen table after dinner, which was where the serious conversations in that house always happened. Mr. Adebiyi was already there. He had his hands folded on the table in the way he folded them when he had something to say that he had been thinking about for a while.

Yetunde sat.

“We have something to tell you,” Madam Folake said. “Daddy has been offered a position in Coventry. In the UK. We have been working toward this for a long time and it has come through.”

Yetunde looked at her. Then at Mr. Adebiyi. Then at her own hands on the table.

“We are leaving in three months,” he said. “And we want you to know that we have thought carefully about what this means for you.”

“You will be free to focus on your passion. We know you have been thinking of leaving, but didn’t know how to tell us. We will save you the stress,” Madam Folake said. “You were never just a maid and it’s time for you to stand on your own and excel but we are not leaving you with nothing.”

They told her what they had arranged. The half of her full salary for three years, which had been going to her father, will be repaid to her. This would help her with renting a shop where she could also live for half a year.

She sat at the kitchen table and listened to them dismantle her fear, item by item and she kept her face still.

“You have been faithful,” Mr. Adebiyi said. “We see you.”

She held herself together until she got back to her room that night. Then she sat on the edge of her bed and cried, but not from sadness. From the overwhelming sensation of being seen, which could be as devastating as being invisible, just differently.

She opened Yetty Creations the Monday after they left, and assumed that her life would now continue without woes. She was wrong.

———————————————————————————————————————

The day her father died, she had been unpicking a seam.

She thought about this sometimes, the specifics of the ordinary moment that was happening on her side of things while the extraordinary thing was happening on his. She had been sitting at her machine with her stitch ripper, opening the side seam of a skirt that a customer had brought in for adjustment.

“Let it out by two inches,” the woman had said that morning, patting her hip with the cheerful unembarrassment of someone comfortable in her body. “I have added a little weight. You know how it is.”

“I know how it is,” Yetunde had said, and they had laughed together, and the woman had left the skirt and gone.

That had been in the morning. Now the radio was playing, the afternoon was slow and through the window she could see the corner of the bread seller’s stall, the leg of a plastic chair and a slice of the street that was doing nothing unusual.

At that moment, in Osi, her father had been sitting in the compound.

He liked to sit there in the mornings, on the wooden chair with the raffia seat that her mother had repaired twice and nobody had repaired since. He sat with his tea and watched the compound wake up. It was Mayowa who told her this afterwards,  who had pieced it together from what Mama Risi said. That he was having his tea, because the cup was still warm when they found it. That he had simply put his hand to his chest and made a sound she could not describe, and then he was on the ground, the tea had spilled but the cup had not broken, which Mama Risi mentioned for some reason. The cup had not broken.

Mayowa was her step brother, Mama Kike’s second son, six years younger than Yetunde. He had been fourteen when she left for Lagos and she had watched him grow up through phone calls and photographs. This boy who shared her father but not her mother, had grown into a quiet and careful man who remembered birthdays and called on Christmas and had never once, in all the years, treated her as anything other than his full sister. She did not take this for granted. She knew what it had cost him, navigating between his mother’s opinions and his loyalty to her.

He called at half past two.

She saw the name on the screen and set down her stitch ripper. She sat for one moment, just one, in the knowledge that this was the kind of call you could not unknow after you received it. Then she stood to pick it up.

“Aunty Yetunde.”

“Mayowa. What happened?”

He told her. She listened standing in the back room of the shop, the curtain between her and the customer’s skirt still on the machine, the afternoon light coming through the small window, everything ordinary.

“His heart,” Mayowa said. “It was fast. They said it was fast.”

“Okay,” she said.

A silence opened between them, the kind that had too much in it for either person to cross.

“Aunty Yetunde,” Mayowa said quietly. “I’m sorry. I know it was complicated between you two. I just… I wanted you to hear it from me first.”

She pressed her hand flat against the wall. The plaster was cool. “Thank you,” she said. “I will call you this evening.”

She went back and finished the skirt. She did not know why. The customer came at four, paid, thanked her and left. Yetunde swept the floor. She organized the cut fabric on the shelf, the pieces waiting to become things. She unplugged the machine the way she always did, checking the plug twice. She turned off the light.

She sat down on the floor in the middle of her own shop, the room dark now, the sound of the street coming through the walls, and she let the day catch up with her.

Her father was dead.

Her mother had been dead for seven years now. This made her an orphan in the complete sense, the sense that has no softening, both parents returned to the ground, the two people who had put her in the world now out of it. There was a word for a child whose parents had died. She was twenty four years old and the word applied to her.

She sat in the dark and thought about her father.

He had not been a good father in the ways she had needed him to be. When her mother died he had not known how to hold his daughter’s grief because he was drowning in his own, and he was not a man who knew how to say that. He had worked the farm, sat in his chair and let the household arrange itself around his absence without apology. When Mrs. Adebiyi came, he had taken the money before Yetunde had finished unpacking her own feelings about leaving.

She had forgiven him for it. She was certain of this. She had taken it to God in the night prayers, had laid it down deliberately, had felt the bitterness loosen its grip slowly, the way a fist unclenches after long tension.

But she had never told him.

She had rehearsed the conversation many times. “Baba, I want you to know that I understand. I hold nothing against you.” But there had always been a reason to wait. The next visit. The next phone call. She had believed, with the casual confidence of someone who did not know they were wrong, that there would be more time.

There was no more time.

She got up because there was nothing else to do. She warmed the rice she had left from the afternoon and ate it standing, tears streaming down her face. She was eating, not from hunger, but from a need to do something. She dropped the plate when the food refused to go on. Then she called Mayowa back.

“The burial,” she said, “When will it be?”

“We are thinking about Friday.”

“I will send money. Who needs to be called?”

“Uncle Biodun. Aunty Morenike. The church will handle their own.”

“I will call Uncle Biodun tomorrow morning.”

She could hear him deciding something on his end.

“Aunty Yetunde,” he said. “He kept a photograph. The one you sent with your shop signboard when you first opened. He showed it to people. He would say, “That is my daughter, she built that herself.” He paused. “I thought you should know.”

She looked at the water stain on the wall. It had been there since she moved in, shaped like nothing she had ever been able to identify.

“Thank you, Mayowa,” she said. “Goodnight.”

She called Tunde when she was done.

——————————————————————————————————————–

He picked up on the third ring. At the background, she heard the sound from the television, a football match, the crowd rising on some almost-goal. The sound of an ordinary evening on his end, which felt strange and correct at once, the world continuing, everyone inside their own ordinary evening while she stood in her one room with her father four hours dead.

“Baby, how na?” The warmth in his voice was automatic, easy. He did not know yet.

“Tunde.” She sat on the edge of the nearest chair. “Something happened.”

The television went down. “What happened? Are you alright?”

“My father died.”

She heard him take it in. The silence of a person receiving news, reorganising.

“Ah, Yetunde.” A long breath. “My God. When?”

“This morning. Mayowa called me this afternoon.”

“His heart?”

“Yes. He was sitting in the compound.”

“Eya. Okay. Okay. At least he didn’t suffer.” He said it the way people say it, the comfort that is offered because there is no better one. “He is with God, Yetunde. He is resting.”

“Yes.”

She waited. She was waiting for something she could not have named. Not words, she had words, she could collect them from anywhere. What she wanted was underneath words. The sense of another person coming to sit with her in the room of this thing, even over a phone line.

“You need to come for the burial,” Tunde said.

“I know. But Mayowa said it’s on Friday, there is not enough time to plan, besides, I hear there are kidnappers on the road. I am scared.”

“You know how our people are. If you don’t come, you are a bad child, that’s how they will see it.”

“I will try to come. I will pray about it.” She looked at the water stain on the wall. “I just wanted to hear your voice.”

“I’m here, and no need to pray. You have to come.” he said. “Yetunde, I have been thinking. Even before this, I have been wanting to talk to you about something.”

She went still.

“I think it might be time to come home.”

She said nothing.

“Not just for the burial. I mean come back, come back to Osi and let’s build something here. I have been looking at what Kunle is doing, you know Kunle is now into poultry, and there is real land available, real opportunity. You can sew anywhere…”

“Tunde.”

“I’m not saying this has to be forever, I’m saying give it a chance, give us a chance to actually be in the same place.”

“Tunde.” Her voice came out smaller than she intended. “My father died today.”

Silence.

“I know. I know. I’m sorry.” He paused for a bit. “I just… I’ve been sitting on this and I thought… I’m sorry. We don’t have to talk about it now.”

But the thing had already entered the room and was standing there between them and she could feel its shape clearly, even if she could not yet name all of it. She pressed her fingers to her eyes. She was not going to cry but she was not going to cry on this call.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Goodnight, Tunde.”

“Yetunde…”

“I’ll call you tomorrow.”

She set the phone face down on the table, sat in the dark and let herself feel it, not the clean, organized grief she had been managing all day but the other kind, the kind with no shape, the kind that does not know which loss it belongs to, then cried, allowing the loneliness to sip in properly. The loneliness of being the person who always holds herself together because there was no one else to do the holding.

She opened her Bible but she did not read. She held it.

“Lord,” she said. Just that, to the dark. “Lord.”

She did not sleep well. She woke twice in the night from dreams she could not remember but dreams that left her feeling as though she had been walking a long time and had not arrived anywhere.

——————————————————————————————————————

She did not go for the burial. She had simply sent money, because she was too afraid of the dangers of the road, and because apart from Mayowa, no one there cared about her. Even Tunde was putting her under too much pressure. The conversations that followed, over the next weeks and months, were versions of that first one she had with him.

He wanted her to come back to Osi, permanently, or as permanently as he was ever specific about anything, which meant indefinitely, which meant “until things looked different to me.” He spoke about it reasonably, with the tone of a man presenting sense. He said Osi was changing. He said Lagos was no place for a woman building a real future. He said her people were in Osi, her roots were there, her father had just been buried there.

“My father was just buried there,” she said once. “And before him my mother. Tunde, everything I have lost is in Osi. How is that an argument for going back?”

He said she was not thinking clearly.

She said perhaps not. Her boyfriend was telling her to abandon her business and return to a town she had spent part of her adult life building away from, so perhaps clarity was not available to her right now.

He said she was being defensive.

She was quiet for a moment. Then she said: “I am not against Osi. I am not even against leaving Lagos. There are other cities. Ilorin is three hours from there. Ibadan is not bad too. Abuja if the opportunity came. I need a city with a market and people who can pay for what I make. I don’t need Lagos specifically. But I need—”

“What you need,” he said, “is to stop chasing something and come back to reality.”

The line went quiet between them.

“Chasing,” she said.

“I didn’t mean it like that.”

“How did you mean it?”

He did not answer. She heard him shift, the creak of a chair, and she waited.

“I just think,” he said finally, “that you have been running since you left Osi. And at some point you have to stop and ask what you are running toward.”

“I know what I am running toward,” she said. “I have always known.”

“Then why can’t it be here? Why does it have to be somewhere else? Why can’t it be where I am?”

She heard what he was not saying, that a girl from Osi who had worked as a housemaid in Lagos should have arrived somewhere by now and stopped. That the always building, the always looking forward, was a kind of restlessness that reflected badly on her. She had heard versions of it before. From her stepmother. From women in the market who watched her expand her customer base and said; “this one, she is too serious.”

She did not say any of that. She said: “Let me think, Tunde. I will call you in the week.”

She called him in a week. The conversation was shorter and covered the same ground and ended the same way.

The last conversation was on a Thursday evening. She had closed the shop, called him and sat on the floor with her back against the machine, the way she always sat when she needed to think, and said simply: “I think we want different things.”

“Don’t do that,” he said. “Don’t make this into a philosophy.”

“I’m not. I am telling you what I see.”

“Yetunde. Four years. You are going to walk away from four years because I asked you to come home?”

“You asked me to come home and stop building. Those are not the same ask.”

“If you are ending things, say so clearly.”

She looked at the wall of her shop, the fabric samples pinned there, the color swatches, the photograph of Tobiloba that Madam Folake had sent from Coventry, the small evidence of the life she had constructed. She looked at all of it.

“I’m ending things,” she said. “I want good things for you. I mean that.”

He said she was making a mistake. She said she had heard him. He said goodbye with the flatness of a man who wanted her to know that she had hurt him, and she received this without argument because it was true, she had hurt him, even when the hurting was the only honest thing to do.

She set the phone down but she did not pray immediately. She just sat on the floor of her shop in the quiet and let herself feel that it was over, this particular life she had been living alongside his, and that she did not know what came next, and that not knowing was its own kind of grief, different from the others but related to all of them.

After a while she lay face-down on the mat with her arms out at her sides and talked to God.

“Four years,” she said. “Lord, four years. I am not asking for an explanation. I am telling you that I am tired. I am telling you that I had a picture of my life and the picture keeps changing. I am tired of holding a frame with no picture in it. I need you to see me. I need to know that you are doing something.”

She stayed on the mat until the prayer became silence and the silence became sleep. She woke at two in the morning with the mat’s texture printed on her cheek and her arms stiff. She got up and lay in the bed properly, looked at the ceiling for a long time before she slept again.

———————————————————————————————————————

She heard about Tunde’s marriage on a Thursday afternoon in September.

She knew it was a Thursday because she had just finished a particularly difficult set, a French-lace blouse with a structured collar that had required her to unpick and redo the neckline three times before it lay the way she wanted, and she had been feeling the quiet satisfaction of something completed, the specific pleasure of a problem finally solved. She was about to make tea when Sade’s name came on the screen.

“Yetunde, how are you?”

“I’m fine, Sade. You?”

“I’m well.” There was a pause, the kind with something waiting behind it. “I wanted to tell you something before you hear it from somewhere else.”

Yetunde put down the kettle.

“Tunde has married.”

She heard it. She stood in the small back room of her shop when she heard it and looked at the shelf where she kept her extra thread, the bobbins organized by colour, the way she liked them, and waited to feel what she was going to feel.

“A girl from his mother’s side. The introduction was last month, something small, and quiet. Mama Risi said it was fast, and that the girl was pregnant. They are saying the introduction is the wedding because she has moved in with him.”

“Okay.”

“Yetunde—”

“I heard you. Thank you for telling me. I’ll call you this weekend.”

She ended the call. She stood in the back room for a moment. Then she went back to her machine and sat down. She found the next item in her queue, a simple ankara skirt, nothing complicated, and began to mark the fabric.

She thought she was fine. She marked the fabric, cut it and threaded the machine. It was only when she started to sew that she realized her hands were not steady, that the line she was sewing was not straight. She stopped and looked at her hands as though they belonged to someone else.

She sat with it.

It was not him she grieved. She had known, when she said ‘I’m ending things’, that it was done. She had laid it down the way you lay down something heavy, with relief underneath the ache. What she grieved was the years. Four years of his evening calls, the sound of his voice at the end of her day, the easy rhythm of someone who knows you and does not need you to explain yourself. She had given him the version of herself she showed no one else, the uncertain version, the one that was afraid. And he had taken all of that and married someone else in the space of six months. 

She thought about the pregnant girl. She hoped the girl was treated well. She genuinely hoped this, and was surprised to find that she meant it.

She tried the seam again. Her hands were steadier this time.

At closing, she turned off the lights and locked the stiff padlock she kept meaning to replace, and walked home. 

She warmed water on the stove, had her bath, sat on the mattress and opened her Bible to Ecclesiastes, because that was where her thumb went now, the pages worn soft at that section, and she read the verse she had read so many times she could have spoken it in her sleep.

“Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.”

She read it and read it again and said out loud, to the room: “Lord, I am doing it. I want you to know that I am still doing it. What my hands found, I am still doing it.”

She made tea, drank it, and slept.