The plane touched down at Birmingham International at seven forty-three in the morning, English time, and the landing was not gentle.

The wheels found the runway with a firmness that sent a shudder through the entire cabin, a shudder that started at the floor and moved upward through the seats and through the bodies sitting in them. Yetunde’s hand found the armrest before she knew she was reaching for it, gripping it the way you grip something when the world becomes uncertain beneath you.

She was not afraid. She had prayed for this flight from the departure gate in Lagos to the final descent into Birmingham, had prayed specifically for the landing, asking God to bring the pilot’s hands down steady and sure. She believed her prayers were heard and she believed in the God who heard them, still gripping the armrest with both hands.

The plane slowed. The engines reversed with a sound like the world objecting to something. The shuddering continued, diminished and then stopped. The cabin lights came on and the crew made their announcements. Around her the passengers began the particular organized chaos of two hundred people simultaneously remembering they had things to collect and places to be.

She released the armrest and looked at her hands. They were shaking slightly, a fine tremor, the kind the body produces when it has been holding something and has now been told to let go. She pressed them together in her lap.

Beside her, she felt rather than saw Jide’s hand come over hers. Not holding, just resting, briefly, the weight of a steadying. Then he removed it.

She looked up at him.

“It’s my first time,” she said. Simply, without embarrassment, the way she said everything. “Flying. This is my first time.”

He looked at her with something that was not quite a smile and quite not one. “I know.”

“Ah.” She laughed, the same laugh from earlier, short, bright and surprised at itself. “Is it that obvious?”

“A little,” he said. “You did well.”

She looked back at her hands, which had stopped shaking. She had done well. England was outside this window, grey and present and real.

She had arrived.

——————————————————————————————————————-

They came off the plane together without planning to.

The aisle filled in the way it always filled, from the front, slowly, people retrieving bags from overhead lockers and the whole shuffling forward movement of disembarkation, and they were adjacent in the aisle the way people are adjacent when they have been sitting next to each other for six hours and the geography of the plane has made them temporarily a unit.

The air in the jetway was the first thing. Cold, not the cold of a Lagos night, which was cool, familiar and occasionally pleasant, but a different cold, a wet cold, a cold that came for you. She walked through it and felt it find her immediately. 

Jide looked at her. “Do you have a jacket?”

“Jacket?”

“A coat. Something warm.” He gestured at the jetway windows. Outside, the Birmingham morning was the color of an apology, grey and thoroughly wet, the tarmac shining with rain that had clearly been at this for some time. “It’s cold out there.”

“I have a sweater,” she said. “In my bag.”

“A sweater will not be enough.”

“But it’s not harmattan,” she said. “It’s not even December. Why is it cold?”

He looked at her. “Do you know about the seasons?”

“Seasons?”

“Winter. Summer—”

“Summer!” She said it with the recognition of someone greeting an old friend. “Summer I know very well. That’s when all the Nigerians with money visit abroad. Every year without fail, June, July, and August, then they come back, showing off new accents. Summer I know.”

He almost laughed. “Right. So summer is one of four seasons. Think of the weather as four moods.”

“Four moods,” she repeated, as though she was going to use this exact phrasing for the rest of her life.

“Winter is the darkest mood. December, January, February. Very cold, very grey, the sun sets at four in the afternoon—”

“Four?” She stopped walking. “The sun sets at four o’clock?”

“Sometimes three-thirty.”

She stared at him. “Three-thirty in the afternoon?”

“Yes.”

“And then what? People just sit in the dark?”

“They go home. They put on lights,”

“But three-thirty is not even evening yet. Three-thirty is when children are closing from school. Three-thirty,” she shook her head slowly with the expression of someone who has been told something that requires a moment of genuine reckoning. “England is a serious place.”

He was definitely not smiling, even though it was hard not to. “Summer is the opposite. June, July, and August are warm, and bright. The sun can stay up until nine, ten o’clock at night.”

“Ten o’clock at night?” She said it at the same volume as the three-thirty, which was to say: loudly enough that two passing passengers looked at her. “The sun is still up at ten o’clock at night?”

“Yes.”

“And people are just outside? In the sun? At ten o’clock at night?”

“Yes.”

She thought about this for a moment. “So in the winter they are sitting in the dark at three o’clock and in the summer they are in the garden at ten o’clock and this is normal?”

“This is very normal.”

“Hmm.” She absorbed the full strangeness of England. “Okay. And the other two?”

“Spring is between winter and summer, March, April, May. The cold is leaving but it hasn’t decided to go yet. Like someone who has said goodbye but is still standing in the doorway.”

She looked out at the wet tarmac. 

“And autumn is September, October, November. Between summer and winter. The warmth is leaving, the cold is coming back, the leaves turn yellow and red and fall off the trees.”

She turned to look at him. “The leaves fall off?”

“All of them.”

“All of the leaves?”

“All of the leaves, yes.”

“From all of the trees?”

“Most of the trees.”

She was quiet for a moment. “And in spring they come back?”

“In spring they come back.”

She looked at the wet grey world outside the terminal windows, the bare-limbed trees at the edge of the car park, a few green shoots visible if you looked for them, the stubborn English evidence of a season turning. “So right now,” she said slowly, “the leaves are coming back.”

“Right now the leaves are coming back.”

She looked at the trees for another moment with an expression he could not quite read, something between wonder and the particular satisfaction of a person who has just understood something they were not expecting to find beautiful. Then she turned back to the walkway and kept walking.

“I still think the sun setting at three-thirty is too early,” she said.

He took off his jacket, and laughed. 

It was a dark navy bomber, the kind he had grabbed in the hotel room that morning because it was what he had. He held it out to her.

She looked at it. Then at him. “But what will you now use?”

“I’m fine. I’m used to the weather.”

“You will be cold—”

“I promise you I won’t.” He said it with the patience of a man who has lived through six English winters. “You will be cold. Take it.”

She took it. She put it on and it was large on her, the sleeves past her wrists, the shoulders wide, and she looked down at herself wearing it and then up at him with an expression that was trying to stay practical and was not fully succeeding. “How do I give it back?”

“I’ll find you.”

“Ah.” She looked uncertain. “I don’t know if I’m allowed visitors. I’m going to someone’s house—”

“You’re on vacation,” he said. “It won’t be a problem.”

She looked at the jacket sleeves. She pushed them up slightly. “Okay.”

Just that. The way she agreed to things, without ceremony, without the performance of deliberation. She had considered it, accepted it, said okay and that was the whole of it.

They walked on through the terminal. He showed her where to go, the signs were unfamiliar and the airport was larger than anything she had navigated before. She followed his direction without pride, without pretending she knew, because she did not know and pretending would be a waste of both their time. He walked her through to arrivals and then he stopped.

“This is where we separate,” he said. “Birmingham for me. Your people will be meeting you here?”

“Yes.” She looked around the arrivals hall, the people waiting, the signs with names, the particular energy of a space full of people expecting someone. “They said they will be here.”

“Good.” He looked at her. She was still wearing his jacket, swum in it, the navy against her dark blue, her face above the collar doing what her face did, open, present, without management. “Safe journey to Coventry.”

“Thank you,” she said. “For the jacket. For the bag at the airport. For—” She paused, and he thought she was going to list more things but instead she said: “For the conversation.”

“It was a good conversation,” he said.

She smiled. Turned. And then, because she was who she was, she turned back once and said: “Jide, thank you.”

He watched her go into the crowd. The navy jacket moved through the arrivals hall until it was one of many coats and he could no longer distinguish it from the rest.

He stood for a moment.

Then he picked up his carry-on and went to find his connection to the city center, glad that in his pocket, his phone had her number.

He told himself he would wait at least a day, before calling her.

He lasted six hours.

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

Emmanuel Adebiyi was a tall man with the particular ease of someone who has lived in England long enough to have absorbed some of its unflappability, and he was holding a sign that said YETUNDE in large letters that he had clearly made himself, printed and laminated, which made her laugh when she saw it.

Beside him was Tobiloba.

She had last seen Tobiloba when he was not yet three, when he was the weight she had carried on her back, the small warm body she had rocked, fed, sung to sleep, carried to clinic appointments and wiped down after meals. He was almost four now, and was standing next to his father holding his hand. He looked at her with the particular expression of a child who was processing a recognition that was coming from somewhere very deep in his memory, from somewhere before language.

Then he let go of his father’s hand and ran.

She dropped to her knees without thinking about the airport floor, caught him and he buried his face in her neck. She held him and closed her eyes for a moment with the weight of him in her arms, this child she had helped bring into knowing the world, this child whose first steps she had watched, whose first words she had heard, who was now four years old and running to her in a Birmingham airport.

“Aunty Yetunde,” he said, into her neck. “You came.”

“I came,” she said. “I’m here.”

Emmanuel was smiling when she stood up, Tobiloba’s hand back in his. “He has been asking about you since we told him you were coming. He woke up this morning at five o’clock to get ready.”

“I was ready,” Tobiloba said, with dignity.

She laughed. She had forgotten this, the specific comedy of a nearly-four-year-old with opinions. “You were ready. You did very well.”

Emmanuel took one of her bags. They walked to the car and she looked at England going past the windows, the motorway, the grey sky, the green on either side that was a different green from Lagos green, a cooler green, a green that had been rained on recently and often. She looked at it all with the attention of someone who knows they are seeing something for the first time and wants to hold it correctly.

“Folake has been counting down,” Emmanuel said from the front. “She almost came herself but the baby had a bad night.”

“The baby?” Yetunde looked up.

Emmanuel glanced at her in the rearview mirror. “Did she not tell you? We have a new one. Eight months ago.”

She had not known. Madam Folake had not mentioned it in the voice note or the messages. She sat with this information, an eight-month baby, a nearly-four-year-old, a house in Coventry, and a woman who had said ‘we want to see you’ and booked her a ticket. She sat with it and did not yet add it up into anything.

“Congratulations,” she said. “Boy or girl?”

“Girl,” Emmanuel said. He was smiling. “Her name is Adesuwa.”

“That’s beautiful.”

“Folake chose it.” He said it with the contentment of a man who lets his wife choose things and has learned that this is correct.

Tobiloba fell asleep against her arm before they reached Coventry.

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

The house was a semi-detached on a quiet street with a small front garden that had been meaning to be tended but hadn’t been, the grass slightly long, a pot by the door with a plant that needed water. She noticed these things the way she always noticed the condition of a house, not with judgment, with information. The house was telling her something about the last few months.

Folake Adebiyi opened the door before they reached it.

She was thinner than Yetunde remembered, and there was something around her eyes, not tiredness only, but the look of a woman who has been managing too many things for too long and has gotten used to it without getting comfortable. She was holding the baby on her hip, this small eight-month creature who regarded Yetunde from her mother’s arms with the absolute seriousness of a person who has not yet learned to pretend.

“Yetunde.” Folake’s voice had relief in it, genuine, unmanaged relief, the kind that arrives before you can decide whether to show it. She opened her other arm.

Yetunde walked into it. Folake held her with the arm that was free and Yetunde felt the thinness of her, felt the tiredness in her body, and understood without words that the house had not been the only thing that had been struggling.

“You’re here,” Folake said.

“I’m here, ma,” Yetunde said.

——————————————————————————————————————-

The house was the way houses are when a woman with two small children, a husband and no help has been running it alone for longer than she has the energy for. It was not dirty, Folake was not a dirty woman, but it had the particular look of a space where everything was being maintained at the minimum viable level, where the deep clean kept getting deferred, where things were put down in approximately the right place rather than the exactly right one. Yetunde saw all of this in the first five minutes and said nothing about any of it.

Emmanuel set her bag down in the hallway and said he was going to take Tobiloba upstairs to wash his hands.

Folake, who was now at the kitchen counter doing something to the stove, said without turning around: “I was trying to cook. I haven’t been able to finish. I’ve been on my feet all morning with Adesuwa and I—” She stopped. Started again. “I have started some things. The chicken is defrosted. I just—”

“Let me continue,” Yetunde said.

She set her own bag down. She found the kitchen and she looked at what was there, the defrosted chicken, the onions, the peppers, the tomatoes, the crayfish on the shelf, the palm oil, the stock cubes, she understood what needed to happen and she began.

She cooked the way she did everything: with total attention, without rush, each step given what it required. The chicken went in first with its seasonings. The pepper was blended. The stew base went down with the onions and the tomatoes. The heat was managed carefully because a stew that is rushed is a stew that lies about itself, it looks done and it is not done, it tastes like the surface of the thing and not the thing itself. She cooked and the kitchen filled with a smell that was not England, that had nothing to do with England, that was entirely and completely home.

She heard Tobiloba before she saw him, the particular sound of a small person running toward a smell they recognize.

“Egusi!” He appeared in the kitchen doorway with the authority of someone making an announcement. “Aunty Yetunde is making egusi!”

She laughed. “Go and wash your hands. Both hands, properly.”

“I already washed—”

“Do it again.”

He went.

Emmanuel came down, looked into the kitchen, looked at the pots and looked at his wife, who was sitting in the living room with the baby finally sleeping against her chest, and he said, quietly, in the voice of a man who has not eaten a real meal in longer than he is willing to admit: “Yetunde. How long?”

“Thirty minutes,” she said.

He sat down at the kitchen table to wait.

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

They ate together, Emmanuel,Folake, Tobiloba and Yetunde around the kitchen table, the pounded yam she had made from the yam flour she had found in the cupboard, the egusi soup, the chicken. Tobiloba ate with the focused intensity of a child who has been waiting for this specific food for a specific amount of time and is not going to waste it with conversation.

Emmanuel ate and said nothing for a long time and then said: “I don’t know the last time—”

“Emmanuel,” Folake said.

He was quiet.

Folake looked at Yetunde. Something in her face, a gratitude that was also an acknowledgement of something she was not going to say directly at the dinner table, with her husband and her son present.

Tobiloba looked up from his food, his face serious. “Aunty Yetunde.”

“Yes.”

“Please tell me you are not going again.”

The table went quiet.

She looked at this child, nearly four, face earnest, egusi at the corner of his mouth, and felt the complicated thing that his question had asked her. “I’m here for two months,” she said. “I’m visiting.”

His face began to do what children’s faces do when news arrives that is not acceptable. His chin moved. His eyes changed.

“Two months,” Emmanuel said quickly, with the voice of a father redirecting. “That is a long time, Tobi. Come on. Finish your food.”

“It’s not long,” Tobiloba said, with complete authority. And then he cried, quietly, with the unselfconsciousness of someone who has not yet learned that crying is something you do privately.

Yetunde reached over and wiped his face with her hand. “Eat,” she said. Gently. “I’m here now. Eat.”

He ate.

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

Emmanuel took the children upstairs. The kitchen was quiet. Folake sat at the table with her hands around a cup of tea she had made but not drunk, and Yetunde washed the dishes not because the dishes needed washing but because she needed something to do with her hands.

“About the months,” Folake said.

Yetunde turned off the tap. She did not turn around immediately. She stood at the sink for one moment with the water off, the kitchen quiet, then she dried her hands on the kitchen towel and turned around.

Folake was looking at her cup. Not at her. At her cup.

“We made a mistake with the booking.” She said it carefully, with the specific carefulness of someone who has chosen every word in this sentence in advance and is now delivering it. “The return ticket, it seems the travel agent booked five months and three weeks instead of two. We only realized when we tried to—”

“Five months,” Yetunde said.

“Almost six, technically. I’m so sorry, Yetunde. We tried to change it, you know how these international tickets are, the fees, the restrictions—”

She stopped because Yetunde had looked at her.

Not with anger. There was no anger in it, which somehow made it more difficult to receive than anger would have been. There was simply a woman looking at another woman with clear eyes, and in those clear eyes was the full knowledge of what five months and three weeks meant, the shop, the customers, the order book, Sister Bisi who had a key for two months, the wedding dress that had been in progress since January, the business she had built with her own hands that was now going to be unmanned for almost half a year.

Yetunde wanted to say: ‘you could have told me before I got on the plane.’

She did not say it. Folake was her madam. Was the woman who had sent her to fashion school. Was the woman who had said ‘you have been more than a housegirl to this family, you have been faithful.’ You did not say everything you wanted to say to a person like that, not because the things were not true but because some things, once said, live in a room forever.

And she was going to be in this room for almost six months.

“I have a customer,” she said instead, “whose daughter’s wedding is in four months. The dress has been in progress since January. She trusted me with it.”

“We will compensate—”

“It’s not about the money for her.” Yetunde said it quietly. “She chose me. She could have gone elsewhere but she chose me. If I am not there for four months she will have to go elsewhere and she may not come back. And then the next customer hears she went elsewhere and—” She stopped. Folake’s face had done something, and what it had done was enough.

“I know,” Folake said. It came out smaller than she had intended.

“And Sister Bisi has a key for two months,” Yetunde said. “Not six. The arrangement was two months.”

The kitchen was quiet. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere upstairs Tobiloba was talking, his voice going through the ceiling in the particular continuous way of a child who has opinions about bathtime.

Folake looked up from her cup. “Yetunde. I know what we are asking. I know it isn’t — I know.” She paused. “We will pay you for every month you are here. Full pay, above what you would earn in the shop, we will make it worth your while financially. And you can use the Wi-Fi to manage your customers from here, to communicate, to study free YouTube training. I don’t know your business the way you do, but whatever we can do to help you manage it from here we will do.”

Yetunde looked at the window above the sink. The English night outside, dark and wet, the reflection of the kitchen in the glass, herself standing in someone else’s kitchen in a country that was not hers, in a season that was between two other seasons, the cold leaving but not yet gone.

She thought: they need me. Not as an accusation, as a fact, plain, the way you state the weather. Tobiloba’s tears at the dinner table. Emmanuel’s face when he smelled the egusi. Folake’s thinness, the look around her eyes, the way she had said you’re here at the door with the relief of someone who has been holding something alone for too long. They needed her, found a way to make the need extend itself, and they had dressed it in the language of a mistake. She was standing in their kitchen having just fed their family and she was going to be here for almost six months.

She thought of what Sade had said. They just want to use you, Yetunde. You think they invited you for sightseeing?

Sade was right, and it made her think about rich people. They throw money at someone and think that settles it. They think money means a person can pause their whole life for them. As if their time is less valuable. As if their livelihood is something you can compensate with a number.

She thought all of this and she said none of it, because Folake was looking at her with genuine remorse.

“Okay ma,” she said.

Not it’s fine. Not don’t worry. Just okay, which was the word for ‘I have heard you. I am choosing not to say the rest of what I am thinking and I am going to need tonight to make my peace with this.’

Folake understood this. She stood up and picked up her cup and said: “Let me show you your room.”

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

Folake led her up the stairs.

The house was quiet now, except for their footsteps on the stairs, and the particular sound of silence of two women who have just had a difficult conversation and are now moving through the space after it.

“I didn’t know about the baby,” Yetunde said, on the stairs. “You didn’t mention it.”

“I meant to.” Folake said it simply. “Everything has been, a lot.”

“Eight months, Daddy said.”

“Eight months last week.”

They reached the landing. Folake turned toward the spare room and Yetunde followed.

“I would have thought the grandmothers would come,” Yetunde said. “For a new baby.”

Folake made a sound that was almost a laugh. “They came.”

“They came?”

“Both of them. At the same time.” She pushed open the bedroom door and reached for the light. “My mother from Lagos. His mother from Ondo. Three days apart. We thought, wonderful. All the help in the world. Two experienced women, one new baby.”

She turned on the light.

“Yetunde, I cannot even begin to describe what happened in this house.”

“What happened?”

“My mother wanted to bathe the baby one way. His mother wanted to bathe her another way. My mother cooked and his mother said it needed more pepper. His mother cooked and my mother said it needed less. They were perfectly pleasant in front of us and a complete disaster when they thought we couldn’t hear.” She set Yetunde’s bag down inside the door. “I was eight weeks postpartum and two grandmothers were fighting a cold war in my kitchen.”

Yetunde looked at her. “So what did you do?”

“We sent them home.” Said with the flat exhaustion of a woman who has made a decision she is still reckoning with. “Emmanuel’s mother went first. Mine stayed one more week. And then she went. And since Adesuwa was about three months old it has just been us.”

Yetunde said nothing.

But the thought arrived, quiet and uninvited, and she let it pass through without stopping it: if two grandmothers could leave when things became difficult, if a ticket home could be arranged when the situation required it, then there must be a way for her to go back too. The travel agent story was not the whole story.

She did not say this. Folake was already at the door, pointing out the bathroom, explaining the towels, the Wi-Fi card on the bedside table. Yetunde listened and nodded and the thought folded itself up and went somewhere she could find it later.

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

The room was beautiful.

That surprised her. She had not expected beautiful, she had expected adequate, functional, the spare room of a family that had not been expecting to use it. But Folake had done something to it, fresh linen, white and clean, a small reading lamp on the bedside table, curtains that matched, a rug on the floor. It was a room that said ‘we thought about you coming.’ This made the five months and three weeks sit differently, more complicated, because a person who did not care about you did not do this to a room.

“The bathroom is next door,” Folake said from the doorway. She paused. “Yetunde, I know this is not what you expected. I know. But we missed you. We genuinely missed you. Thank you for coming and we are sorry for the mix up..”

“Good night, ma,” Yetunde said. Gently.

Folake looked at her for a moment. Then: “Goodnight. Rest well.”

The door closed.

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

She sat on the edge of the bed.

She sat in the quiet of the beautiful room and she let herself feel what she was feeling. She was not going to perform acceptance before she had felt the thing she needed to feel.

What she felt was this: she had been brought here under false information. Whether it was a mistake with the travel agent or a decision dressed as a mistake she could not know with certainty. But she knew you did not accidentally book five months when you said two. She knew what this house needed and she knew why she had been brought to provide it. She had been here before. Different house, same arrangement. Her labour in exchange for their ease, a number attached to make it acceptable.

Sade said it, she thought. Sade said exactly this.

She sat with the weight of it.

Then she stood up and went to the window. She opened it, just slightly, just enough to let the English night in, the cool wet air of a Coventry spring. She looked out at the quiet street, the parked cars, the houses across the road with their closed curtains and their lives inside that she knew nothing about.

“Almost six months,” she said. To the room, to the night, to God.

And then, not because she was not upset, not because the anger had resolved itself, but because she knew something about what happened when being upset became the main thing. When you watered it and let it take up all the available space, she knelt down beside the bed.

“Lord.” She pressed her forehead against the mattress. “I’m not ungrateful. I want You to know that first. This room is beautiful and I arrived safely and Tobiloba ran to me. I am in England. I am actually in England, this is special. It is an opportunity I do not take for granted. Thank you.”

She paused.

“But Lord, I prayed. I prayed about this trip. I said yes, I came and now I find out that what I said yes to is not what was arranged and I don’t understand why You allowed me to be deceived like this when I was coming to You with every step. I don’t understand it.”

She stayed with the not-understanding.

“But I know this. I know that You do not waste things. I know that all things, all things, not some things, work together for good for those who love You and are called according to Your purpose. And I love You. I have loved You since I was seventeen years old in a church that smelled of old wood and I have not stopped. So I am choosing to believe that this, even this, is working for my good.”

She lifted her head.

“So Lord, for the next almost-six-months, this is what my hand finds. This house. This family. This child who cried because two months was not enough. Lord, let me serve them well. Let me not behave badly because of what they have done. Let me not become the version of myself that is bitter and small. Let me be what I have always been. Let my hands do good work. And Lord, let this country add something to me. Let it put color in my life. Let me not leave here the same as when I arrived.”

She was quiet for a moment.

“And Lord, thank You. Thank You for getting me here safely. Thank You for the pilot. Thank You for the jacket. Thank You for—”

She stopped.

She sat back on her heels and looked at the navy jacket that she had laid over the chair when she came in. She had only taken it off when Folake was showing her the room, when Folake had said “where did you get this coat?” and she had said “a friend I met on the plane”. Folake had said “a friend?” with the particular inflection of a woman filing information away for later.

She looked at the jacket for a moment longer than was strictly necessary.

Then she got up. She showered, the water hot and generous, the English bathroom quiet and efficient. She changed into her nightclothes. She turned down the bed, lay in it and looked at the ceiling of her room in Coventry. She let herself arrive, fully, into the reality of where she was.

Her phone lit up.

She looked at it, expecting Sade, having sent her a message from the car that she had landed safely. But the number on the screen was not Sade’s. It was a number she did not have saved. A UK number. And even before her mind had finished processing it, something in her already knew who it was.

She looked at the time. Half past seven. Which meant he had waited approximately six hours after they parted at arrivals.

She looked at the screen.

She thought: ‘he didn’t even wait till tomorrow.’

She thought: ‘does he want his jacket back?’

She thought, and this was the thought she did not examine too closely, the one she let pass through without stopping it, that she had genuinely enjoyed sitting beside him. That the six hours had not felt like six hours. That a man who explained the four seasons, gave his jacket to a stranger and said ‘I’ll find you’ with the quiet confidence of someone who meant it was a man she did not yet have a category for, and not-having-a-category was interesting to her in a way she was going to have to think about later.

All things work together for good, she thought, for those who love God and are called according to his purpose.

She looked at the screen.

She picked up the phone.

Author’s Note

Thank you for reading Landing.

This is the first part of a larger story, The Unlikely Pair, which will continue in Longing and conclude in Loving.

If it feels like the story ended too soon, it did. That was intentional.

Because some things are not meant to be understood at the point where they begin.

Sometimes, all you get is a landing. A disruption. A redirection. An introduction that raises more questions than it answers.

And if you are anything like Jide or Yetunde, you may feel the urge to interpret too quickly. To name something God has not yet explained. To decide where something is going before He has finished speaking.

This story is not just about romance.

It is about what happens when you think you have heard God and then realize you added your own voice to His. It is about what happens when you obey God and the outcome does not look like what you agreed to. It is about finding yourself in a place you did not plan, with people you did not expect, and still choosing who you will be.

As you wait for Longing and Loving, I want to invite you into the same posture both characters are learning.

Pause.  

Acknowledge God in all your ways.  

Resist the urgency to define everything too quickly.

Not every connection is a conclusion. Not every beginning is a promise. Not every disruption is a mistake.

Sometimes, it is simply a landing.

And what comes next will require patience, honesty, and a willingness to be led. Not by what you feel, but by what God is saying.

The rest of the journey is coming.

Stay with it.

Bolanle