Writers 
Teni was sitting on her kitchen floor when I got to her flat, holding a paper bag to her mouth like it could save her life.
"Tari, I can't do this." Her voice was shaking. "I can't go sit across from a man I've never met and pretend I'm happy about it. Daddy and his father arranged this whole thing like we're still in the 1960s."
I sat down next to her on the tiles. "Breathe first. Talk after."
She breathed. Then she talked anyway, because that's who my sister is — she's never once in her life waited for permission to panic out loud.
"It's tonight, Tari. The first dinner with the Okafors. I haven't even met him and I already feel like I'm being handed over." She wiped her face with the back of her hand. "I need time. Just a little time to think, before I sit in front of this man and have to smile like my whole future isn't being decided for me."
"So tell your father you're not ready."
"You know I can't do that. Not with how much is riding on this merger for him." She grabbed my hand, and I already knew, from the way she held it, what she was about to ask. "Go for me. Just tonight. Just the first dinner. Nobody will know. We've fooled teachers, aunties, even Mummy once. One dinner is nothing."
"Teni, this isn't borrowing your hairbrush. This is your fiancé."
"Please." Just that. One word, and the way she said it undid me completely, because underneath all her panic was something I recognized — real fear, the kind you can't talk your way out of.
So I went. I wore her dress, answered to her name at the door, and walked into that restaurant with my heart going faster than I wanted to admit.
He stood up when I reached the table. I wasn't expecting that — a grown man actually standing for a woman he'd never met — and for one strange second, I forgot I wasn't supposed to be there as myself.
"Teniola." He said my sister's name slowly, carefully, like he'd practiced it. "I was told you didn't want to be here tonight."
"Who told you that?"
"Your father. His exact words, actually." He almost smiled. "I appreciated the honesty, even secondhand."
I sat down before my nerves could talk me out of it. "And where would you rather be, Mr. Okafor?"
"Here, it turns out." He looked at me a little too long, the kind of look that makes you aware of your own face. "You're not quite what I expected."
"What did you expect?"
"Someone quieter. Sadder, maybe. My father's office sent over a whole profile before tonight. It didn't mention you'd be this easy to talk to."
I laughed before I could stop myself, and something in me relaxed that I didn't know had been tense.
We talked for almost two hours. Not about business, not about families or mergers — about small things. The music he liked. The food I pretended, badly, not to love too much. He told a story about his little cousin that made me laugh so hard I had to put my fork down, and for a while I forgot I was supposed to be performing at all.
By the time his driver brought the car around, he had my sister's number saved in his phone, under a name that wasn't really going to the person he thought it was. And I had already told myself a small, dangerous lie — that one dinner had been harmless, that nothing real had happened, that there was no reason at all why I shouldn't go back tomorrow and do it again.
