Folake usually closed at five.

Yetunde had learned this during her first week in the house. Most evenings, sometime between five and half past, the front door would open and Folake would come in from work. At half past five, the door had not opened.

Yetunde stirred the pot and told herself it was traffic.

She was making stew for dinner. Adesuwa was on her back, refusing to sleep. Tobiloba was still at the nursery. The house was quiet except for the sounds of cooking and the occasional hum of a passing car outside.

She checked the clock again.

Five forty-five.

Still nothing.

She wasn’t worried yet.

At six the door still had not opened, and then the bell rang and it was not Folake but the teacher from Tobiloba’s nursery, a young woman in a yellow raincoat who smiled and held Tobiloba’s hand and said she hoped everything was alright.

Yetunde said, “Yes, of course. Thank you,” and took his bag and brought him inside.

Then she stood in the hallway after the door closed.

Folake always collected Tobiloba on her way home.

Always.

“I’m hungry,” Tobiloba announced.

“I know,” Yetunde said. “Come.”

She served him food, then sat opposite him and watched him eat it. Adesuwa fussed as she had been doing since afternoon, restless, wanting to be carried and then wanting to be put down and then wanting to be carried again.

Yetunde took her from her back and balanced her on one hip while washing dishes with her free hand.

She glanced at the clock.

Seven.

Still no Folake.

At eight she checked her phone.

Nothing.

At nine she finally sent a message.

Ma, are you okay? We’ve been waiting for you.

The reply came almost immediately.

I’m okay, I’m fine. I’ll be home soon.

Yetunde looked at the message. Then she put the phone down.

If she’s fine, she thought, then why is she not home?

She had not slept properly the night before. Maybe two hours altogether. The baby had woken at two, and was up till the morning light.

Throughout the day, the baby had needed carrying. Tobiloba had needed things before going to the nursery and when he came back. Meals needed cooking, laundry needed folding, and now it was past nine.

Folake was fine.

Folake would be home soon.

At ten she took Tobiloba upstairs.

This was usually Emmanuel’s job.

She knew this because, on Emmanuel’s first night away, two days after she arrived, Tobiloba had asked where Daddy was.

Yetunde had explained.

Tobiloba had accepted the answer with the ease children sometimes had, as though adults rearranging themselves was simply another fact about the world. Yet it didn’t stop him from asking, “where is Daddy?” every hour.

She ran his bath.

She sat on the edge of the tub while he splashed and told her about a boy at nursery called Marcus who had a red lunchbox. She listened, then helped him into his pajamas.

They sat on the edge of his bed and prayed together, his small hands folded inside hers.

Then she tucked him in and switched off the light.

“Goodnight.”

“Goodnight.”

She returned downstairs.

The baby was asleep in the bouncer chair.

Yetunde changed her diaper carefully, carried her upstairs and settled her into the cot they had moved into Yetunde’s room during the second week she got there.

Then she checked her phone again. No new messages.

So she typed another one.

Sorry to bother you ma. I’m just very worried. I hope you’re truly okay.

A voice note arrived a minute later.

Yetunde sat on the edge of her bed and pressed play.

“I’m fine, I’m fine. I’m just out with friends, you know? It’s been a while. With my husband not around, I decided to catch up a little. Don’t wait up for me, okay? I’ll be home.”

The voice note ended.

Yetunde sat still with the phone in her hand. 

She had been noticing the shift for a while.

Folake coming home and going straight to her room.

Folake sitting at the dining table with her phone in hand, present physically but somewhere else entirely.

Little things that had once felt shared gradually becoming Yetunde’s responsibility.

She wasn’t sure when it had started.

Only that she had started noticing.

Usually she would try to file this ‘not coming home’ away, but she wanted to tell Folake about Jide. About the man she had met on the plane who had somehow become one of the closest people in her life at the moment, and the fact that he was coming to see her.

It felt silly now that she thought about it. She was a grown woman. Yet, here, she needed permission to go out.

She reached for her phone again to check the time.

Three missed calls.

Her heart jumped.

Jide.

And a message beneath them: Hope you had a good day? I’m sure you’re sleeping. You’ve had a long day. I’ll sleep too. Good night.

She called him.

He picked up on the first ring. “Hey.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It was just a lot at the same time. Their parents are not around, so I had to give Tobiloba food and take him to bed, and then there was the baby. I completely abandoned my phone.” She exhaled. 

Jide sighed. “I just don’t understand the arrangement over there. Why would they leave the children with you like this?”

“Because they trust me. They know I’ll manage.”

“And are you managing?”

She thought about Funmi’s wedding dress on Sister Bisi’s table in Lagos. The message Shade had sent last week: Girl, your customers are asking for you o.

“My customers are telling me they can’t wait to have me back,” she said.

“And you want to go back?”

She looked at the ceiling. The lampshade slightly too large for the fitting. The curtain that didn’t quite close and let in a thin line of orange from the street.

“I don’t even know,” she said. “I like being here. I like this country. There’s abundance here, food, everything, but I miss my work because I love it, but it seems all I have been doing here is work too. The children need me, and it’s beginning to feel like their parents brought me here because they needed someone. And I can’t reconcile that part. Not because I wouldn’t have come, I would have come, I would have been happy to help. They didn’t say what this actually was. I was not given an option.”

Jide was quiet.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

Yetunde lay back on the bed and pressed the phone to her ear.

For the first time all day, she let herself be still.

The stress of the day eased a little as she closed her eyes and listened.

“Thank you.”

 “You know you can leave. If you want to.”

“The flight is difficult to change. Or that’s what they’ve said.”

“Changing a flight is not difficult. And if it is, they can buy you another one. From what you’ve described, they’re not poor.”

“That would be a waste of money. I can’t endorse that.”

He didn’t push. She figured he decided not to and felt something for it.

She yawned.

“The baby is sleeping,” she said. “I should sleep too while I can.”

“When Folake gets back, take the baby to her.”

“She’ll be tired.”

“Yetunde,  you’re tired.”

She almost laughed. “I’m the maid. The maid is not supposed to be tired.”

He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke his voice was steady.

“You’re not the maid. You’re the guest. If you don’t treat yourself with respect, you leave the door open for other people to decide what you’re worth. The way you see yourself matters.”

She didn’t answer. She lay back against the pillow, the phone against her ear, the room quiet, the baby breathing in the cot.

“Call me first thing tomorrow, before doing chores and carrying babies.”

“First thing tomorrow morning I will pray,” she said.

“After God,” he said, “talk to me. Before I go to work.”

“Okay, I will.”

She meant to say something else. She didn’t. The pillow was soft and the baby was breathing and his voice was on the line, and somewhere between one thought and the next she was gone.

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

Jide should have ended the call.

Yetunde had fallen asleep mid-thought, her voice going soft and then gone, and now there was nothing on the line but her breathing, slow and even, with the small catch at the end that was almost a snore. He should have hung up. He didn’t. He put the phone on speaker and set it on the bed beside him and listened.

He sat there in the dark of his Birmingham flat and thought about the family in Coventry. He didn’t think they were cruel people. That was the thing, they probably didn’t even know they were doing it, but they had to know. On some level, they had to know that what they were taking from her was more than she had agreed to give. And she would keep giving because that was who she was, and they would keep taking because the arrangement had made it easy to.

He felt something he didn’t have a clean name for, not quite anger, but closer to frustration, from watching something happen that he couldn’t yet stop.

He looked at the ceiling.

God, why am I this attached to a woman I met on a plane? Why can’t I stop thinking about her?

He turned it over. The Nigeria trip. The prayer before he boarded: fix my relationship, put me in right standing with my woman. And then he had landed and found Elizabeth, and he had met Yetunde, and now here he was in Birmingham listening to a woman he had known for one month breathe herself to sleep.

Is there a correlation? Are you trying to tell me something?

And then the scripture came, the way it had been coming since the plane.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct your paths.

He sat up.

Lord, is this You directing my path? Is this woman meant for me?

His eyes went to the journal on the nightstand. He picked it up.

He had kept it since his first year in England, not a diary, not exactly. It was just a place where he wrote specific things only, leadings, dreams, and instructions that came clearly enough that he wanted to have a record. He turned the pages slowly.

He found the Birmingham entry. He had come to England and landed in Kent, and one morning in prayer it had come to him with a clarity that wasn’t his own: your future is in Birmingham. He had not known anyone in Birmingham. He had gone anyway.

He kept turning.

He found it. The dream.

He had been twenty-six years old and had woken one morning with a certainty that settled on him like a hand on his shoulder, ‘a girl in Nigeria, twenty years old, she is yours.’ He had written it down the same morning. He had the date.

He looked at the date.

Then he did the calculation.

The years folded over each other in his mind as he counted backward. Slowly, almost reluctantly, the realization began to take shape.

He checked it again.

Then again.

He sat very still.

Four years ago, when he had that dream, Yetunde had been twenty years old too.

His pulse quickened.

He simply stared at the page.

Then he closed the journal.

The reaction surprised him.

Four years earlier he would have taken this as confirmation. He would have built an entire conclusion around it before stopping to ask another question.

That was what he had done with Elizabeth.

He had seen something that fit. Elizabeth had been twenty too. He had wanted it to be true. And somewhere along the line he had stopped seeking God and started seeking agreement with what he had already decided.

Looking back, he could no longer tell where God’s voice had ended and his own assumptions had begun.

He stood and walked to the window.

“Lord,” he said quietly, “I don’t want to do that again.”

The room was silent.

He rested a hand against the glass.

“I don’t want to see what I want to see.”

He stood there thinking about the last four years. The relationship. The plans. The ring. The certainty he had once carried.

Then he returned to the bed and opened the journal again.

The date had not changed.

The dream had not changed.

But he was no longer interested in forcing an answer out of it.

Instead he allowed himself to consider something he had not considered before.

What if the dream had been right?

What if the mistake had not been hearing God but assuming he knew exactly what God meant?

His eyes drifted to the phone beside him.

Yetunde was still asleep.

He could hear her breathing softly through the speaker.

Perhaps that was why meeting her had unsettled him so completely, why he could not stop thinking about her. Maybe that was also why every attempt to dismiss her as a coincidence seemed to fail.

But he refused to turn a possibility into a certainty.

Not tonight.

“Lord,” he said quietly, “if this is You, I’ll follow. And if it isn’t, help me not to get ahead of You.”

The scripture came again, the way it had been coming since the plane.

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct your paths.

Jide closed his eyes.

Perhaps that was the lesson.

Not that he needed all the answers.

Only that he needed to keep listening.

And underneath that thought, quieter and warmer than the rest, was gratitude.

“Thank you.

For the plane.

For the jacket.

For the seat beside hers.

For not letting me miss whatever this is.”

He picked up his phone. He had one more thing to do.

He called Elizabeth.

She answered on the second ring. “Oh thank God. Thank God, I had a feeling you would call tonight, I almost put my phone on DND. I’m sorry, Jide, have you forgiven me? Is that why you’re calling?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve forgiven you.”

“Thank you. I’m so sorry. It was the first time, I’ve never done anything like that before, I just–”

“And you’re still lying,” he said. It wasn’t harsh. Just tired. “That man looked too comfortable in that flat to be there for the first time.”

“He’s gone,” she said. “I sent him away the same day. The moment you left.”

“You were wearing my shirt to sleep with another man.”

“I’m sorry. Jide, I’m sorry. Let’s start again. We can start again. I’ll marry you. I’ll come to the UK, we can just start over–”

“Elizabeth.” He said her name gently. “I called to tell you it’s over. That’s why I’m calling. Not to come back. To close this properly.”

“But we can fix it. God would want you to forgive me and give me another chance.”

“I have forgiven you. That’s real. But forgiveness doesn’t mean we go back. You’re not the woman God has for me. I thought you were. I was wrong. What you did didn’t make me wrong about that, it just helped me see it clearly.”

She was quiet. Then: “Maybe you’ll change your mind.”

“I won’t.” He said it without anger. “Goodbye, Elizabeth. Please don’t call me again on this.”

“I won’t give up on us,” she said. Her voice had changed, smaller now, the performance gone out of it.

“Your rent,” he said. “It expires next month. I’ll pay one more year. After that it’s done. I don’t want you to be stranded.”

She didn’t say anything.

“I forgive you,” he said. “Genuinely. I wish you all the best.”

He ended the call.

“Thank you, Lord,” he said. “Thank you for not letting me miss it completely.”

He set the phone down. He lay back.

And in that same stillness, somewhere between the gratitude and the morning that was still hours away, he too finally slept.