Writers 
"One more day," I told Teni, for maybe the fourth day in a row.
"You said that on Monday too."
"I know. Things kept happening."
"What things?"
I didn't have a clean answer for that, because the real answer was embarrassing. Things like Daniel remembering, three days later, that I liked my suya extra spicy — something I'd mentioned once, without thinking, and he'd actually held onto it. Things like him arguing with me for twenty minutes about Afrobeats versus highlife like it genuinely mattered to him. Small things. The kind of things that shouldn't mean anything, except somehow they did.
"His family likes you," I told her instead. "Or — likes me, pretending to be you. Teni, this is already messier than I thought it would be."
"Then stop."
"I can't just stop. He thinks we've been talking all week. If 'you' suddenly go quiet on him, he'll notice."
What I didn't say — what I was only just admitting to myself, standing barefoot in my sister's kitchen, wearing her perfume because somewhere along the way I'd started doing that without deciding to — was that I didn't actually want to stop. I wanted Thursday to come. I wanted to hear him laugh at something I said, and mean it.
Thursday, Daniel came to pick me up himself instead of sending a driver, which apparently wasn't something he usually did.
"You've seemed different this week," he said, somewhere into a drive that didn't really have a destination. "Lighter. I don't know a better word for it."
"Different how?"
"Like someone who actually wants to be in the car, instead of counting the exits." He glanced over at me. "I like this version of you. I just can't always tell if it's really you, or if you've only just gotten comfortable enough to stop performing for my sake."
I laughed, a little too fast, the way you do when a question gets closer to the truth than you're ready for.
We kept talking, easy and unplanned, until his phone rang and his whole mood shifted reading the screen.
"My mother." He answered anyway, on speaker, mouthing an apology at me. "Say that again, Mum. I didn't hear you properly."
"The wedding," she said, bright and certain, like she was announcing good news that nobody would dare argue with. "Both families agreed this morning. We're bringing it forward. Two weeks, Daniel. Two weeks, and you'll finally be a married man."
The car went quiet in a way that felt loud.
Two weeks. That was all the time I had left to keep being someone I wasn't, in front of a man I was starting to genuinely want to be honest with. I didn't have a plan for what happened after that. I hadn't let myself think that far ahead, because thinking that far ahead meant admitting what I actually wanted — and that wasn't something I was ready to say out loud, not even to myself.
Daniel dropped me — dropped "Teni" — back home a little after seven, and for a long moment before I got out of the car, neither of us said anything. He just looked at me the way people look at something they're trying to memorize before it's gone.
"Two weeks will go fast," he said finally, quiet, almost to himself.
"Yeah," I said. "It will."
I meant it two different ways, and only one of them was something he was supposed to hear.
I walked into my sister's flat that night and found her waiting up, worry written all over her face before I even opened my mouth.
"They moved the wedding up," I told her. "Two weeks."
She went very still. "Two weeks? Tari, I need months, not—"
"I know."
Neither of us said the next part out loud. We didn't have to. We both already knew that somewhere in the last four days, this had stopped being a harmless favor between sisters, and turned into something neither of us had any idea how to stop.
