THE MESSAGE
Sinari Daranijo Street
Victoria Island
3:17 a.m.
The neighbourhood was wrong in the way dreams are wrong. Familiar streets bent into shapes that did not quite exist, colours were too saturated, and distances stretched and collapsed without warning.
Tomide walked along a road he half recognised from childhood, the kind of narrow Ibadan street where compound walls leaned towards one another and the air carried the low thrum of distant voices.
The houses seemed smaller than he remembered, their walls weathered by years that had passed without his permission. Somewhere beyond them, a radio played a slow song, its melody drifting in and out of the darkness.
Under a battered umbrella, a group of men sat around a draughtsboard balanced on an upturned crate. Their hands moved with slow, deliberate precision, the wooden pieces clicking against the board in a rhythm older than any of them.
As Tomide approached, the men looked up together.
Every face turned towards him. Every head nodded once, as though they had been waiting for him to arrive and were now satisfied that he had.
He continued walking. A few metres farther on, a little girl stood in the dust outside a low house. She clutched a rag doll whose head hung at an unnatural angle. Her expression was sullen, almost adult in its stillness. She said nothing. She merely raised one thin arm and pointed towards the open doorway behind her.
Tomide hesitated, then stepped inside. The living room was cooler than the street, its walls washed in a soft, honey-coloured light. Seyi sat on a worn sofa, his elbows resting on his knees, his body inclined forward in the familiar posture of someone impatient to begin a conversation. He looked exactly as he had at twenty. His skin was clear, his shoulders strong, his eyes bright with the restless energy of a young man who still believed time was an unending road.
For a moment, Tomide could only stare. Then Seyi looked up, grinned and rose.
They crossed the room and embraced. The solid weight of his cousin’s body, the familiar smell of laundry soap and fresh body spray, struck Tomide with such force that he felt his throat close.
“You look good, Seyi.” His voice came out rough. “You look so fucking good.”
Seyi laughed, that old, easy sound that Tomide had carried in his memory for years without realising how much he missed hearing it.
“You too, Tomi.”
They sat and talked. Words flowed between them: plans, memories, old jokes whose punchlines seemed to change every time they were told. Tomide found himself laughing at things he could not remember being funny, listening to stories he knew he had heard before, reaching for memories that dissolved the moment he tried to examine them.
It was wonderful. It was unbearable. Every few sentences, Seyi glanced towards an open doorway on the right. The movement was quick, almost guilty, and each time Tomide noticed it, his cousin returned his attention to the conversation with exaggerated ease.
“What is it?” Tomide asked eventually.
“Nothing.”
“You keep looking over there.”
Seyi’s smile lingered. “I was checking for something.”
The room changed just as he finished speaking. Tomide’s mother appeared in the doorway as though she had never left it. She was young again, her hair carefully styled, a deep-blue ankara dress fitting her as it once had. For one impossible instant, Tomide was a boy standing in the familiar presence of the woman who had known him before the world began taking things away.
He rose instinctively, surprised and elated.
“Mummy.”
Her face was composed, but her eyes burned with an unnatural brightness, a light that did not belong to the living.
“Tomide,” she said. Her voice moved between English and Yoruba. “KĂ ni o Ĺ„ ṣe nĂbĂ? What are you doing here?”
She shook her head once, then again, as though the sight of him had confirmed a fear she had been trying to suppress.
Then she turned towards Seyi.
“KĂ lĂł dĂ© tĂ o fi pè Ă© wá sĂbĂ? Why did you call him here?”
Seyi said nothing. Tomide looked from one to the other. “I came to see you. Both of you.”
“No.” His mother stepped forward. “You must go back. Your time has not yet come.”
He reached for her. She recoiled as though his touch might burn her.
“Go back,” she repeated, her voice rising. She pointed towards the doorway through which he had entered. “Mo nĂ kĂ o padĂ lọ báyìĂ!”
“Mummy, wait…”
“Go!”
The room seemed to contract around him. Tomide took a step backwards, unwilling to turn his back on either of them.
Behind his mother, Seyi smiled.
It was a broad, ethereal smile, strangely tender, and unlike any expression Tomide remembered seeing on his cousin’s face.
“Tell him I forgive him,” Seyi said.
Tomide stopped.
“You forgive who?”
Seyi’s smile remained, but something in his eyes had changed. His lips moved again, forming words that Tomide could see but could not hear, as though an invisible wall had risen between them.
“I cannot hear you Seyi.”
His mother continued gesturing towards the door. Tomide leaned forward, straining to hear his cousin. Seyi mouthed a name.
The room tilted. Tomide reached for him, but the distance between them widened with impossible speed. The sofa, the curtains, the walls began dissolving into darkness. He felt himself slipping backwards, falling into a vast and silent nothingness.
He tried to hold on to the name. It was there, somewhere on the edge of understanding. He clung to the movement of Seyi’s lips, to the shape of the syllables, refusing to let them disappear with the room, but soon darkness swallowed everything.
Tomide woke with a violent intake of breath. He lay flat on his back, staring at the ceiling, his body rigid beneath the sheets. The bedroom was dark and quiet. For several seconds, he heard nothing but his own breathing.
The neighbourhood was wrong in the way dreams are wrong. Familiar streets bent into shapes that did not quite exist, colours slightly too saturated, distances that stretched and collapsed without warning.
The dream lingered in his mind, vivid in places and elusive in others. He saw shapes of the men beneath the tree, the little girl and her rag doll, Seyi’s arms around him and his mother’s blazing eyes. Most of all, he remembered the desperation with which he had tried to hear his cousin.
He closed his eyes, fighting to remember the name. Minutes passed without any success. Twice, he thought he had it, only to feel it dissolve as he reached for it.
He remained motionless, his mind shutting out distractions. Then, suddenly, it came back.
Alápa.
Tomide opened his eyes. He stared into the darkness, listening to the silence of his room. He had dreamed of the dead before.
Grief had a way of returning people to him in sleep, restoring their faces and voices with such cruel precision that waking could feel like losing them all over again. But Seyi had not merely appeared this time. He had come with a message and Tomide, lying awake in the dark, could not escape the feeling that his cousin had been trying to tell him something.
He got out of bed and went to the kitchen. From a drawer, he took a small white adhesive label, wrote the name across it in black marker and pressed it onto the upper corner of the freezer door.
He stood back to examine it.
The answer was somewhere between paper and ink, as it was with all spelling.
He spent the rest of the morning with the uncomfortable feeling that his cousin had reached across the distance between them for a reason.
*********************
 Primevistaa Advisors
Victoria Island
10:45 a.m.
Mrs Fabiyi had insisted. Her voice on the telephone that morning had carried the bright, unarguable authority of a mother who had waited too many years to show her son the world she had built in his absence. Joshua had returned to Lagos after years in America, and she was determined that he should see the firm in which she had invested so much of her life.
He arrived in a charcoal suit that still smelled faintly of American dry cleaning, the Lagos heat already pressing against the fabric as he stepped from the car.
Sonia met him in the lobby. She wore a fitted navy dress that stopped just above the knee, her hair pulled back into a low knot that left her neck exposed. When she smiled, it was professional and measured, the exact smile she gave clients whose accounts mattered.
Joshua felt the old pull anyway. It had lived beneath his ribs since they were teenagers in Port Harcourt, when Sonia had been two years older and already carried herself like a woman who understood the cost of soft eyes.
“Welcome,” she said, extending her hand.
He took it a moment longer than necessary.
“Thank you. You look nice, as always.”
She laughed lightly and withdrew her hand.
“Your mum asked me to show you around. Come.”
They moved through the open plan floor. Sonia introduced him to directors and associates, explaining the firm’s operations with the calm efficiency of someone who had rehearsed the words.
People rose to shake his hand and offer congratulations on his return. Interns glanced up from their screens. Joshua answered each greeting with the easy charm of a man accustomed to making a favourable impression.
By the time they returned to the lobby, the tour was finished. Mrs Fabiyi appeared long enough to embrace her son and extract a promise that he would bring the grandchildren to the office the following week. Then she was called away by a client, leaving Joshua to depart.
Outside, the light had hardened over Victoria Island. His driver waited near the gate, the black SUV idling in the heat.
Joshua had just entered the vehicle when another car approached from the opposite direction.
It was a silver Toyota Camry, understated and immaculate, moving slowly towards the entrance. The gate was too narrow for both vehicles to pass.
“Reverse a little,” Joshua told his driver.
The SUV rolled back. The sedan advanced.
Behind the wheel sat a tall man wearing glasses. Sunlight struck the lenses, obscuring his eyes, but Joshua could see the breadth of his shoulders and the stillness with which he held himself. His hands rested on the steering wheel, steady and relaxed.
Joshua looked at him. The man looked back. For a second, the world seemed to pause around that exchange. There was no greeting, no visible surprise, no indication that either man had any reason to take an interest in the other. Yet something stirred in Joshua, faint and unwelcome, like a word hovering just beyond the reach of memory.
He searched the stranger’s face, looking for a feature that might explain the sensation. The firm line of the jaw? The set of the shoulders? Something in the way he held his gaze?
The sunlight gave him nothing. The Camry passed through the gate and continued towards the building.
“Sir?” the driver asked.
Joshua turned away. “Let’s go.”
The SUV pulled into the road. He watched the building recede in the side mirror, then faced forward again.
He could not have said what he had expected from the stranger. A nod, perhaps. A flicker of recognition. Something to explain why a brief encounter with a man he had never met should leave him feeling as though he had forgotten an important appointment.
He tried to recall where he might have seen the man before, but every possibility dissolved as soon as it formed.
By the time they reached Lekki, he had almost persuaded himself that it meant nothing.
Almost.
************************
Primevistas Advisors
Victoria Island
11:40 a.m.
The intern office smelled of printer toner and the faint citrus of someone’s forgotten hand cream. Fluorescent light pooled across the long shared desk where Simi sat alone, the other interns scattered to photocopying rooms and coffee runs. Outside the glass partition the firm moved with its usual polished haste.
John leaned against the edge of her desk the way he always did, one hip cocked, a smile playing on his lips with borrowed confidence. He had brought her jollof from the place on Adeola Odeku again. The takeaway bag sat unopened beside her keyboard, still warm.
“You didn’t eat last time either,” he said. “I can get something else. Whatever you like. Just tell me.”
Simi kept her eyes on the spreadsheet. The numbers blurred into neat columns of indifference. She had accepted the rides to Maryland three times, each one ending with him waiting at the kerb until she disappeared behind the gate. She had smiled the way polite girls smile when they want the conversation to die. Nothing had softened. Nothing ever would.
“I am okay, John.”
He opened his mouth to try again when a senior associate appeared in the doorway, voice clipped with urgency.
“John, please come. The server is throwing errors on the third floor.”
John straightened at once. He patted his pockets, found his keys, and left immediately. Simi looked away from the computer to discover that he had left his phone face up on the desk. The screen was still lit and the phone unlocked.
Simi watched the doorway as John’s footsteps faded. The phone glowed softly, a private window left carelessly open. For a moment she simply sat, the decision turning over inside her like a coin. Curiosity pressed harder than caution. She reached across, angled the screen towards herself, and began to scroll.
WhatsApp. Recent chats first, then older ones. She found Sonia’s name half buried in the archive. The conversation was months old but intact.
Sonia: anything yet from your OAU contacts about our big shot?
John: who?
Sonia: who else?
John: Ah Tomide.
The exchange continued in short, careful bursts. There were about old campus ties, names that never quite surfaced, a quiet insistence that felt less like gossip and more like hunting. Simi’s pulse quickened. She scrolled further, memorising the cadence, the implied weight of what Sonia had been seeking.
Footsteps returned, quick and purposeful. She dropped the phone exactly where it had been, unlocked screen still glowing, and lifted her own phone just as John reappeared in the doorway.
Simi looked at John, her phone still in front of her face. The frost that had lived on her face for weeks was gone. In its place was something softer and almost luminous.
“What happened?”
“It was a false alarm jare,” he said, slightly out of breath. “They fixed it before I got there.”
Simi set her phone down and smiled the way women smile when they have decided a man is useful.
“You’re always the one they call,” she said, voice low and admiring. “It is as if the whole firm depends on you.”
John blinked. The change was so sudden he almost looked behind him to see if someone else had entered. Then the surprise melted into pleasure. He stepped closer.
Simi’s smile was inviting and warmer than the humid Lagos afternoon. She reached out a hand to brush his forearm lightly. The touch lasted only a second, yet carried the deliberate promise of more.
“You know what?”
“What?”
“We should meet in your office if you want us to talk. This place,” she stopped to look around the room, “is too open. Anyone can walk in.” She let the words settle, then added, softer still, “your office is more private. At least your door locks.”
For a moment, John could only stare at her. He caught himself quickly, his face breaking into a grin.
“My office. Yes, yes, of course. Anytime.”
At twenty eight, John was handsome in the quiet way of men who spent more time with machines than mirrors. He had the kind of face that pretty girls usually overlooked, and he had long ago accepted that Simi would never be interested in him.
Now she was smiling at him as though he had been the man she wanted all along.
“I’ll come by after lunch,” she said.
“I’ll be waiting.”
She blew him a kiss.
John picked up his phone without looking at the screen and walked out taller than he had entered.
Simi watched him go. Her smile faded.
She opened a blank document and typed three phrases.
OAU contacts.
Big shot.
Tomide.
She studied them for a moment, then saved the document under an inconspicuous filename. Across the glass partition, phones rang, keyboards clicked, and someone laughed at a joke she could not hear. Her attention was riveted on the three lines on her screen.
*************************
Sinari Daranijo Street
Victoria Island
Lagos
8 pm
The apartment retained the day’s warmth despite the air conditioner whispering steadily against it.
They sat together on the three seater, their legs intertwined, bare feet brushing beneath the low table. Their work clothes were still on. Sonia’s navy dress creased slightly from the day, Tomide’s shirt open at the collar, but the formality of the office had begun to loosen around them.
Sonia held a cold can of Coca-Cola between her palms. Tomide drank from a plain bottle of water, condensation slipping into his fingers.
Their conversation had wandered, as it often did when the day’s professional armour began to slip, towards the places they had come from.
“My father was a pastor,” Sonia said. “The strict Pentecostal kind. You know the drill. Full gospel, speaking in tongues, Church services nearly every day Sunday. I was a proper church girl. I was only allowed to make friends with the church members or children of family friends like Joshua.”
She took a small gulp from her can.
“Mrs. Fabiyi’s son. Her husband was with Shell at the time.”
“Are you still religious?” he asked.
She turned the can slowly between her hands.
“Sometimes. When something scares me enough, or when I just miss going to church.”
She glanced at him.
“What about you? Do you go to church?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“So where do you worship?”
“In my temple.”
For a moment, Sonia thought he was joking. A smile tugged at her mouth.
“I see. So how do you go to this temple?”
“I just close my eyes.”
Sonia thought his response funny and laughed.
“Where is this temple of yours?”
Tomide lifted one hand and tapped two fingers lightly against the side of his forehead.
His mildly amused expression and serious manner was a juxtaposition that tickled her. She harrumphed.
“Oh, please. You cannot be serious.”
He lowered his hand, his expression composed.
“You are funny.”
He studied her for a moment.
“If you say so.”
Sonia narrowed hers. “There. That smile. You always do that when you’re hiding something.”
He smiled. “Interesting.”
“Yes. And now you’re going to sit there looking pleased with yourself until I give up asking.”
His smile deepened.
She nudged his thigh with her knee.
“One day, I’m going to get a straight answer out of you.”
“I am sure you’ll try.”
She shook her head and eased her legs free of his. “I need water.”
Tomide lifted his bottle in a silent salute.
Sonia walked into the kitchen. The refrigerator hummed as she opened it. She reached for a bottle of water on the middle shelf, then paused, her hand still inside the fridge.
A small white sticker had been placed near the upper corner of the freezer door. Its edges were beginning to lift. Someone had written a single name across it in black marker.
Alapa.
She leaned closer.
The name meant nothing to her. It belonged to no client she knew, no colleague, no person Tomide had mentioned in any of their conversations. She read it again, silently sounding out the syllables, as though recognition might come if she gave them enough attention.
It did not. She closed the refrigerator slowly. The curiosity she had thought she put away the night she confessed to investigating Tomide’s past stirred again. She had promised herself she would stop looking for hidden meanings in his silences, stop treating the parts of his life he kept to himself as questions she was entitled to answer.
Yet here was a name she could not explain, sitting on the door of his freezer.
She memorised it. When she returned home, she would find out who Alapa was. She took her water and went back to the living room.
Tomide had not moved. He sat in the same relaxed position, one arm stretched along the back of the sofa, his water bottle resting against his thigh.
She settled beside him, and their legs found each other again beneath the table, intertwining without discussion.
“Everything all right?” he asked.
“Of course.”
She opened her can and took a sip, then turned towards him with a smile that felt almost like her own.
Tomide watched her over the rim of his bottle. His expression gave nothing away.
For a moment, neither spoke. The air conditioner whispered above them, and somewhere beyond the windows a horn sounded in the traffic.
Sonia rested her head against his shoulder.
“It’s getting late.”
He rubbed a slow circle on her lower back.
“Spend the night.”
She snuggled deeply into him and sighed, forgetting about the note in the kitchen.
“Now that you have asked.”
**********************
Park View Estate
Ikoyi
9:40 pm
The private living room occupied an entire wing of the mansion, sealed from the rest of the house by double doors of dark wood. Beyond them, the staff moved in practised silence. Inside, only the faint murmur of a concealed speaker and the occasional clink of ice against crystal disturbed the stillness.
Femi Savage sat in a wide leather armchair, turning a glass of whiskey between his fingers. Under the light of a single floor lamp, the liquid caught the glow and cast amber fragments across the polished floor.
He was thinking of Tomide.
The meeting earlier that week returned with unsettling clarity: the calm voice, the precise knowledge of the portfolio, the unflinching eyes that had met his own without the usual deference. Then the handshake, the acknowledgment and the reconnection.
Green.
A humourless smile touched Femi’s mouth and disappeared.
His thoughts drifted back to Ile-Ife, to an unfinished building on the outskirts of campus and a boy newly named Junior. Seyi had stood too straight that night, trying to arrange his courage and had failed. The uncertainty and fear showed in the set of his shoulders at the sight of the bound man they had marked for death.
Femi had recognised that look.
Before he was Alapa. He had seen it years earlier in the mirror of his bedroom, before Atlantic Hall taught him to be ashamed of the boy looking back.
He remembered the afternoon he and Joshua had been handpicked. The senior brothers had gathered quietly in a corner of the hostel. A rival cultist had killed one of theirs, and retribution was required. Alápa had been chosen to lead the small team. Junior would accompany them, the newest blood, still soft enough to be shaped.
Looking at Seyi’s uncertain posture, Alápa had felt contempt rise in him. The boy seemed to carry his innocence openly, as though it were something worth protecting. Alápa had long ago learned otherwise.
He had learned it at fourteen at the prestigious boarding house his father had shipped him to for his secondary education. He remembered again.
The evening had been humid, the hostel corridors thick with the smell of damp clothes and floor disinfectant. Alápa had been at the school only a short while, still young enough to believe that the older students’ rough laughter was merely the noise of boys growing into men. He had gone to his school father’s room to collect a textbook and pushed open the door without knocking.
The older boy sat on the edge of the bed, his trousers open, his hand moving with private urgency.
He looked up without surprise or shame.
“Do you know what I am doing?” he asked, his voice almost gentle and his hand still frantic between his legs.
Femi stood frozen in the doorway. He did not understand the question, and the older boy seemed to take his silence for an answer. He gestured towards the floor and commanded him to kneel between his legs.
Femi had expected his school father to teach him how to survive the strange world of boarding school, to offer advice, perhaps even protection. Instead, the person he had been taught to trust became the first to show him how easily trust could be exploited.
What followed had lasted years. The memory did not return as a sequence of scenes so much as a collection of sensations: the oppressive heat, the smell of the room, the shame he could not name, the knowledge that saying no would not necessarily make anything stop.
He learned to anticipate the older boy’s moods. He learned when to remain silent, when to obey, when to make himself seem less afraid than he was.
Eventually, he learned something else. Fear could be turned against the people who created it.
By the time Femi discovered that violence could purchase safety, that it could make the older boys step aside, turn humiliation into authority and give him some measure of control, he had begun to bury the part of himself that still wanted to be protected.
He became harder, then harder still, until he could no longer remember what it had felt like to move through the world without expecting someone to take advantage of him.
He began to despise weakness wherever he encountered it.
Years later, seeing that same vulnerability in Seyi had felt like an insult. The boy’s uncertainty reminded Femi of the child he had once been, the one he had spent so long trying to erase. His irritation had deepened with time, settling into something patient and cold. He had found it increasingly difficult to tolerate the sight of innocence surviving in another person.
The whiskey glass stopped turning.
Femi Savage stared at the amber liquid. He had spent years learning to recognise weakness in others, to exploit it before it could be used against him. Yet Tomide had unsettled him in a way he had not anticipated.
There had been no hesitation in the other man’s gaze. No attempt to impress him, no nervous display of respect, no eagerness to prove himself. Tomide had sat across from him as though he understood the terms of the room and had no intention of pretending otherwise.
Femi lifted the glass but did not drink.
He thought of Seyi again, of the boy who had entered that unfinished building trying to look like a man who had nothing to fear. Then he thought of Tomide, whose composure seemed to have been earned somewhere far beyond the walls of a university or the rituals of a fraternity.
He turned the glass once between his fingers.
Green had looked at him without fear first at OAU and then at the meeting about his investments. Something told him that one day he would require answers from him, especially about Seyi.
Though he was not a man given to fear, the prospect of that confrontation unsettled him in a way few things ever had. He already felt a quiet reluctance settling in, as if even he sensed that facing Green’s unwavering stare would demand more from him than he cared to give.
He closed his eyes.
The day was coming. He could sense it in his bones.
© Umari Ayim.
2026