She called him that evening.
Not because her three days were up and she had decided to act she had already acted, the call to Vael made, the meeting arranged, the next step taken with the deliberate momentum she applied to things once she had decided on them. She called Musa because she had been not calling him for three days and the not calling had become its own weight, and because tomorrow she was meeting a man whose business card had been in a dying man's pocket and if something went wrong it was better that someone who loved her knew the general shape of what had happened.
She did not frame it to herself as: I am afraid and I want to hear his voice. She framed it as: someone should have this information.
Both things were true. She acknowledged the second one.
He answered on the first ring.
"Zara."
Just her name. The specific register of it not worried exactly, something quieter than worry, the tone of someone who had been waiting without letting themselves fully acknowledge they were waiting.
"I'm fine," she said.
"I know." A pause. "I could tell from your message you were fine. I was not worried."
"You answered on the first ring."
"I happened to be holding my phone."
"Musa."
"I was mildly concerned," he said, with the dignity of a man making a significant concession. "There is a difference between mildly concerned and worried. I was on the correct side of that line."
She almost smiled. Sitting on her kitchen floor, back against the cabinet, the crack in the tile running its familiar path from cabinet to centre of the room. She had been in this position so many times in the past week that the tile had started to feel like a designated thinking space.
"I need to tell you something," she said. "It's going to take a while."
The brief silence of someone settling in. She heard him move the specific sound of him relocating, getting comfortable, which meant he had understood from those eight words that this was not a short conversation and had reorganised himself accordingly.
"Okay," he said. "I'm listening."
She told him everything.
Not the edited version she had been constructing in the back of her mind the version that left out the more alarming details, that softened the car park encounter, that made the IleIfe forest visit sound like a contemplative walk rather than what it actually was. She had prepared that version, she recognised, as a form of protection for him, and she abandoned it as she started talking because protecting him from the truth of her situation was not something she had the right to do when she was also asking him to be the person who knew the general shape of what had happened.
She told him about the patient and the amber eyes and the four words. The disappeared body. The surveillance. The car park and what had come out of her and the two men going backward and the sound she had produced that she still had no language for. Mama Folake and the woman called Mrs. Haruna and twentyfour years of December visits. The research. IleIfe and the forest and the red earth on her palms. The business card and the call and the meeting tomorrow at noon.
She talked for forty minutes. He did not interrupt once.
When she finished there was a silence that lasted long enough for her to check that the call hadn't dropped.
"Musa."
"I'm here." His voice was careful not the caution of someone frightened but the caution of someone handling something that required precision. "I'm thinking."
"Take your time."
"You drove to IleIfe on Sunday morning without telling anyone."
"Yes."
"And sat on the ground in a forest."
"Yes."
"And the ground was warm."
"Yes."
Another silence. She waited. She knew his thinking rhythms the way he worked through information in layers, the most immediate practical layer first, the deeper theological and philosophical layers following after in their own time. He was a thorough thinker. It was one of the reasons she trusted him.
"The men in the car park," he said. "You said they went backward. When you made the sound."
"Yes."
"How far backward?"
She thought about it. "Three steps for the broader one. The younger one his back hit the pillar. He didn't choose that. His legs chose it."
"And you felt—"
"I felt something open," she said. "That's the closest I can get. Something that's been at pressure for a long time. It opened and then I closed it again."
"Could you close it? Did it feel voluntary?"
She considered this carefully. It mattered she could tell from how he asked it that it mattered to his thinking.
"Partially," she said honestly. "Closing it took effort in a way that it hadn't closed by itself. But it did close. I had some I had influence over it."
"Okay." Another pause. "Okay. The business card. You're certain it was intentional. That it was meant for you to find."
"He grabbed my wrist and told me to run. Then he lost consciousness. If he put the card there before losing consciousness knowing I would move it when I cut the jacket yes. I think it was intentional."
"Then the man called Vael wanted you to call him."
"Yes."
"He engineered the situation to produce that outcome."
"Almost certainly."
"Which means he is either trying to help you," Musa said slowly, "or he is trying to collect you through more sophisticated means than the people in the car park used."
"Yes," Zara said. "That's the question."
"And you called him anyway."
"I called him because I need information and he appears to have it. I set the meeting terms. Public location, my choice, my send of the address. He agreed without negotiating."
"Someone who wants to collect you would also agree to those terms," Musa said. "To get you there."
"Yes. Which is why I'm telling you."
The silence this time had a different quality. She felt him arrive at something.
"You want me to come," he said.
"I want you to be nearby. Not at the table I think that changes the dynamic in ways that are less useful. But nearby."
"Zara—"
"I know what I'm asking."
"Do you?" His voice had shifted not angry, something more direct than his usual careful register. "I am a human being. I have no whatever you have, whatever these people are, I have none of that. If something goes wrong at this meeting I cannot help you in any practical sense."
"I know."
"Then why—"
"Because you're the smartest person I know," she said. It came out simply, without qualification, the way true things came out when she stopped managing them. "And because if this man tells me things that I need a second mind on I want yours. And because—" She stopped.
"Because what?"
She looked at the crack in the tile.
"Because I've been handling this alone for a week and I'm tired of it," she said. "And you asked if I was eating properly and I lied and I've been on the kitchen floor more than is strictly reasonable and I would like someone who knows me to be in the same physical vicinity as me tomorrow. That's all."
A long pause.
"You lied about eating properly," he said.
"I had a meat pie on Sunday."
"One meat pie."
"And rice. Monday."
"Zara." The word carried the full weight of two years of friendship and the specific exhaustion of caring about someone who treated selfmaintenance as a lowpriority system. "Okay. I'll come. Where?"
She sent him the location she had already chosen a café on Ozumba Mbadiwe Avenue in Victoria Island, glassfronted, openplan, visible from the street in every direction, with an outside seating area that gave her sightlines she was satisfied with and an interior where Musa could sit at the counter with a clear view of her table.
"You'll be at the counter," she said. "Coffee. Read something. Don't look at me."
"I'm a doctor. I know how to observe without appearing to observe."
"I know. I'm saying it anyway."
"What do I do if something goes wrong?"
She thought about this. "Call Mama Folake," she said. "She'll know who to contact."
A pause. "She knows more than she told you."
"Almost certainly."
"Are you angry about that?"
She considered the question with the honesty she tried to apply to things that mattered.
"Not yet," she said. "I think I will be. At some point there will be space for it and I'll be angry. Right now I need her to be a resource more than I need her to be wrong."
"That's very practical."
"I'm a very practical person."
"You are," he said. "It's one of your best qualities and occasionally your most frustrating one."
She smiled. She let him hear it.
They talked for another hour after that.
Not about the supernatural world they had covered what needed covering and Musa, characteristically, had stored it and would process it in his own time and come back with questions when he had organised his thinking. They talked about other things. His rotation, which was brutal. The assignment deadline that had been moved to Friday. The study group she had missed. A mutual friend who had finally gotten the Canada visa and was leaving in six weeks and who they were both sad about in the practical way that Nigerians of their generation had learned to be sad about departures not with drama, not with resentment of the person leaving, but with the quiet arithmetic of loss that was becoming too familiar.
"Hafsat says she'll come back," Musa said.
"They always say they'll come back."
"Some of them do."
"Some of them," Zara agreed.
A pause that held the weight of the unspoken: and what about us. She and Musa had had versions of this conversation before not about themselves specifically but about the general question of staying, which for their generation was a question that arrived regularly and required regular reanswering. She had turned down the two visa pathways and Musa had turned down one and neither of them had asked the other directly why, and the notasking had become its own kind of answer that neither of them had fully examined.
She was aware, sitting on her kitchen floor on Monday evening, that the question had become more complicated in the past week. She was something other than human. Her blood connected her to a specific ground, a specific history, a specific set of obligations she had not agreed to and was not sure she would agree to. The possibility of leaving had always been abstract. Now it was—
She did not finish the thought.
"Get some sleep," Musa said. "Actual sleep. Not four hours."
"I'll try for six."
"Seven."
"Five and a half and I'm being generous."
"Zara."
"I'll try," she said. "I mean it."
"Okay." A pause. "I'll be at the counter at eleventhirty."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me. If this man turns out to be dangerous I'm going to be very irritating about having told you so."
"You didn't tell me so."
"I implied it strongly."
"Goodnight, Musa."
"Goodnight. Eat something before you sleep."
She ended the call and sat for a moment in the quiet apartment, Lagos doing what Lagos did outside her window the generators, the voices, the sound of a city that metabolised everything and kept moving.
She got up. She made herself toast two slices, properly buttered and ate it standing over the sink because sitting at the table felt like too much ceremony for toast at 10pm. She drank a full glass of water. She noted these as achievements without irony because they were.
She went to bed at tenthirty. She lay in the dark and thought about IleIfe and Kazaure and the red earth on her palms and a woman who had watched her for twenty minutes every December and left.
She thought about what Musa had said: someone who wants to collect you would also agree to those terms.
She thought about the voice on the phone warm, unhurried, containing underneath the warmth that quality of total attention.
She thought: I know.
She thought: I'm going anyway.
She slept at eleven. Not four hours. Not six.
She slept for seven hours and twelve minutes and woke before her alarm with the specific clarity of a body that had been given what it needed and was ready.
She lay still for a moment, looking at the ceiling.
Okay, she thought.
Let's see who you are, Mr Vael.