The Hands of the Night

The rain fell on Yaba like a confession held back too long. That evening, Adaeze was shelving books in her uncle's small bookshop, a narrow place wedged between a hair salon and a tailor's workshop, where the smell of yellowed paper mingled with the fried rice from the kiosk next door. She was twenty-six, had two rejected manuscripts in a drawer, and one friend, Ifeoma, who believed in her with a stubbornness no one else dared imitate. They had met at the University of Lagos, two girls from the same city but from different worlds — Adaeze, the orphan raised by a bookseller uncle; Ifeoma, the pastor's daughter from Surulere, whose laugh could fill an entire room. They shared a dream: to write stories that looked like their country, not like what foreigners wanted to see in it. "One day, we'll have our own publishing house," Ifeoma would say, and Adaeze would smile, because she knew it would be true. But life in Lagos does not bend to the plans of young women. Ifeoma fell ill on a Tuesday in November. First fatigue, then a fever that refused to leave, then hospitals, queues, hurried doctors. Adaeze spent sleepless nights in the corridors of Lagos University Teaching Hospital, writing in a spiral notebook the things she could not say aloud. She wrote fear, anger, helplessness. She also wrote memories: the first time they saw the sea at Tarkwa Bay, the night they danced until dawn at a party in Ikoyi, the letters they exchanged when Ifeoma spent a year in Abuja. One morning, Ifeo