Writers 
CHAPTER TWO: Ijebu-Ode Mornings
By the time Ada dragged herself home, the rain had thinned to a drizzle, and the compound smelled of wet earth and firewood smoke.
Mama Folasade was already up, as she always was, hunched over a mortar in the backyard, pounding pepper for the stew she would sell later at Itamerin market. Seventy-one years old, and her arms still moved like a woman half her age.
"Ekaaro, ma," Ada greeted, toeing off her wet shoes at the doorway.
"Ekaaro." Mama Folasade didn't look up. "You just dey come back now? Wetin happen?"
"Bad night for the ward." Ada rubbed her eyes. "Complicated delivery. Almost lost the baby."
"Almost." Mama Folasade grunted, the sound she made when she wanted the last word without spending more breath on it. "Thank God say almost no be die. Go and bathe. You smell like hospital."
Ada managed a tired smile and went inside, but her grandmother's words followed her — almost no be die — because that was the whole of it, wasn't it. The whole ten-year weight of what she'd been carrying. Somebody had almost died. Somebody hadn't. And Ada had been the one standing between the two.
She didn't sleep well. By eleven, she gave up trying and sat on the veranda with a cup of Bournvita going cold in her hands, watching Bisi hang wrapper cloths on the line, humming some Afrobeats tune under her breath.
"Ada, aunty you never sleep?" Bisi called over.
"Couldn't." Ada replied.
Bisi came and dropped down beside her on the bench, smelling of Robb and cheap perfume. Nineteen years old and restless in the particular way of a girl who had grown up watching Lagos on other people's phone screens and decided her own town was too small to hold her.
"I dey go Lagos," Bisi announced, like she was reporting the weather.
Ada turned to look at her properly. "Go Lagos and do what?"
"Segun get one contact. Businessman. Big man for Lagos. E say make I come, e go connect me with modeling work, hairstyling work, anything I like." Bisi's eyes were bright with hope of.
"Segun." Ada said the name flatly. "The boy wey dey ride okada for Chief Odukoya's boys?"
Bisi's chin lifted, defensive. "E don change work now. E be like errand man for one company for Lagos."
"Errand man for who, Bisi?"
"I no know now, why you dey vex?" Bisi stood, gathering the empty basin under her arm. "Not everybody go stay for this small town dey wait wait wait for better life to fall from sky like you, Ada."
The words landed harder than Bisi probably meant them to. Ada watched her cousin march back into the house, and she felt the old, familiar tightness settle in her chest — the fear of a woman who had learned, the hard way, exactly how quickly a girl's future could be decided by other people, in one bad night, without her consent.
"I will not let that happen to you" Ada thought, though she said nothing out loud. "Not while I still have breath."
She found Tunde later that afternoon, at the workshop his father had built with his own hands twenty years before Tunde grew up. The signboard — ADEWALE & SONS AUTO WORKS — was faded now, one corner peeling like a scab.
He was under a battered Toyota Corolla, only his legs visible, when Ada's shadow fell across the doorway.
"If you don come to collect debt," Tunde's voice came muffled from underneath, "the queue dey outside."
"E be like say you know my voice too well," Ada said, smiling.
Tunde rolled out from under the car, grease streaked across his forearm, and when he saw her properly, something in his face opened — the way it always had, since they were children chasing lizards behind the church hall.
"Ada Fashina." He wiped his hands on a rag and stood, taller than she remembered. "Long time. Since when una nurses dey get free time?"
"I no get free time. I dey run away from wahala." She glanced around the half-empty workshop — one car, no apprentices in sight, tools arranged too neatly for a busy man. "How business?"
Tunde's jaw tightened, just slightly. "Business dey."
"Tunde."
"I said business dey, Ada." His voice had an edge now, quickly smoothed over. "You want tea? I get sachet water, at least."
She let it go, for now, though she filed the tightness in his jaw away.
They sat on two overturned crates outside the workshop, and for a while it was easy, the way it used to be — Tunde teasing her about the hospital gossip, Ada teasing him about the girl from the provisions store who clearly wanted his attention and clearly wasn't getting it.
Then a motorcycle pulled up across the road. Two men. One of them didn't get off. He simply looked at Tunde, long and unhurried.
Tunde's whole body changed. Straightened. Stilled.
"Who be that?" Ada asked quietly.
"Nobody." Tunde stood, brushing dust off his trousers that wasn't there. "Ada, make you dey go house. Rain fit come back."
"Tunde"
"Please." The word came out rougher than he meant it to, she could tell, because he softened immediately after. "I go see you soon, okay? I promise."
She left, because there was nothing else to do, but she carried the image of that motorcyclist the whole walk home — the stillness in it, the patience, the way it had watched Tunde the way a debt watches a debtor.
Ijebu-Ode was a small town. Everybody's business belonged to everybody eventually.
Ada had a feeling, cold and certain as the rain that had followed her home from the hospital, that two storms were gathering over people she loved — and she didn't yet know they were about to become one and the same.
