Writers 
CHAPTER THREE: The Debt
The men came back that evening, just as Tunde was pulling down the workshop's rusted shutter.
He heard the okada before he saw it — that particular cough of an engine that needed servicing and never got it, because its owner didn't pay for things, he simply took them.
"Adewale." The thick-necked one swung off the bike without hurrying. Kazeem, his name was, though Tunde had never once said it out loud, as if naming him might give him more power than he already had. "You dey run from me now? Even lock your shop dey run?"
"I no dey run from anybody." Tunde kept his hands steady on the shutter's padlock, though his heart was beating fast. "I just close for the day."
"Chief send me." Kazeem said. "E say make I come collect."
"Tell Chief I go bring am end of the month. Like we agree."
"Chief no send me to hear 'end of month' again." Kazeem stepped closer, close enough that Tunde could smell the cheap cologne under the engine oil smell of the man's jacket. "Na three months now, Adewale. Your papa borrow the money, your papa don die, but the debt no die with am. You sabi that."
"I know," Tunde said quietly, because there was nothing else true to say.
His father, Baba Segun Adewale, had borrowed four hundred and fifty thousand naira from Chief Odukoya six years ago, when the workshop nearly folded after a bad rainy season flooded the pit. He'd paid back maybe a third of it before the stroke took him, on a Tuesday morning over his breakfast akara.
Tunde had inherited the workshop. He had inherited the debt too,
"How much you get for me today?" Kazeem asked.
Tunde reached into his pocket and counted out what he had and brought out eleven thousand naira, folded small, the profit from two jobs that week. Kazeem took it without counting it, which was somehow worse than if he had. It meant the amount didn't matter. It meant this was never really about the money changing hands. It was about Tunde understanding, every week, exactly where he stood.
"Chief dey ask of you," Kazeem said, tucking the notes away. "E say make you come see am Sunday, after church. E get one work wey fit help you clear the whole debt quick quick."
"Which kind work?" Tunde asked carefully.
Kazeem only smiled, climbing back onto his bike. "Come Sunday, you go see. Chief no like to repeat himself." The engine coughed to life. "E say greet Ada Fashina, sef. E see una together this afternoon."
The bike pulled away before Tunde could ask what that meant, why Chief Odukoya; a man who owned three houses and half a church committee would trouble himself to notice who Tunde sat outside his workshop with.
Tunde stood in the gathering dark for a long moment, the padlock cold in his palm, and felt the particular fear of a man who realizes the walls of his life are smaller than he thought, and someone powerful has just shown him exactly where they end.
He didn't call Ada that night. He told himself that it was late, because she had night shift again, because there was nothing to say that wouldn't frighten her for no good reason.
The truth was simpler and more shameful: he didn't know how to tell the woman he was slowly, foolishly, hopelessly falling back in love with, that he was drowning in a debt to one of the most dangerous men in Ijebu-Ode and that the man had just made it clear he was watching her too.
Ada, unaware of any of it, spent that night in the hospital's records office, waiting until the night porter dozed off at his desk before she slipped into the file room.
She found the folder thin. SIMILOLUWA. Age 16. No surname recorded. Guardian contact: none provided. Next of kin: none provided.
Ada's fingers trembled as she turned the page to the admission notes, written hastily by the resident on call.
Patient reports she does not know her biological parents. States she was "given" to a family in Epe as an infant, raised as house help, not formally adopted. Ran away from guardian's home six months ago after becoming pregnant. Father of child unknown. Patient delivered baby alone at the roadside with assistance of an okadaman who transported her here.
Ada closed the file slowly, her hand flat on the cover, as if she could hold the words still, keep them from rearranging themselves into the shape she already feared.
Given to a family in Epe as an infant.
Ten years ago, on a rain-soaked night that Ada had spent a decade trying to bury under work and silence and prayer, a nineteen-year-old apprentice midwife had held a newborn girl in her arms while the child's mother bled out on a mattress on the floor and had made a decision, alone, in the dark, about what would happen to that baby next.
She had told herself, all these years, that the child had gone somewhere safe.
She had never once let herself imagine the child growing up unwanted, unclaimed, passed hand to hand like something borrowed until she arrived at Ada's own hospital, sixteen years old and pregnant herself, carrying a baby with no name and a mother with no family.
Ada sat alone in the records room long after the porter's snoring had settled into a steady rhythm, and for the first time in ten years, she let herself cry.
She could keep pretending the past was a closed door. Or she could open it, and face whatever was standing on the other side, waiting for her, patient as rain.
