Chapter 1: The Homecoming

The bus dropped me at the edge of Ijesun, and the red dust hit me before anything else did. It came up off the road in a fine cloud, settling on my black shoes, my black dress, the suitcase I had packed in a hurry three nights ago when my aunt called to tell me my father was gone. Sixteen years, and the first thing this place gave me back was dirt on my funeral clothes.

I stood there a moment longer than I needed to. The road hadn't changed. The mango tree at the junction was taller, its branches heavier, but it was the same tree I used to climb before my mother decided we were leaving and never explained why. Everything else about Ijesun looked smaller than I remembered, the way places always do once you've lived somewhere with taller buildings and faster cars. Smaller, and somehow louder in my chest than any city block had ever been.

I walked the rest of the way to the family compound because no okada rider would take my suitcase and my grief at the same time, not down that narrow path. By the time I reached the gate, my mother was already standing there waiting, as if she'd heard my footsteps from inside the house. Nkechi Adeyemi. My mother. She looked older than the woman in the photographs on my phone, her wrapper a deep, mourning black, her eyes swollen from crying that I guessed had started long before I arrived.

"Amara." She said my name like it cost her something to say it. Then she pulled me into her arms, and for a second neither of us said anything else. I let myself lean into her, just for that second, because I hadn't let myself lean into anyone in a very long time.

"I'm here, Mama," I said. "I'm here now."

She held onto my arm the whole walk into the compound, like she was afraid I might turn around and get back on the bus. Maybe she was. I hadn't come home in sixteen years, not for a wedding, not for a naming ceremony, not even the year my grandmother's memorial rites were held. I came home because my father was dead, and even a daughter who left can't skip that.

The house was full of people. Aunts I barely recognized, uncles who called out my name with too much enthusiasm for a wake, women from the market stirring pots of jollof rice in the yard like this was any other gathering. Grief in Ijesun was loud and communal, nothing like the quiet condolence cards people sent back in the city. Someone pressed a plate of food into my hands before I'd even set my suitcase down. Someone else was already crying into my shoulder about how much I looked like my father.

But underneath all that noise, I started noticing something else. A silence that moved through the room like a second guest nobody had invited.

It happened first with my aunt Folake. She was telling me how sorry she was, how my father had loved me, how proud he'd been watching me become an architect in the city, and then she said, "At least he didn't have to see you turn twenty-thr—" and stopped herself so fast it was like she'd bitten her own tongue. She smiled instead, too wide, and changed the subject to how thin I'd gotten.

I let it go. People say strange things at funerals. But then it happened again with my father's old friend, Baba Suleiman, who started a sentence about "the family's history" and ended it talking about the price of cassava instead. And again with a cousin I barely remembered, who looked at me for a beat too long before catching herself and looking away.

Nobody finished a sentence around me. It was like watching people walk toward a hole in the ground and swerve at the last second, every single time, like they'd rehearsed it.

By the time night fell and the compound finally quieted, I couldn't sleep. My room was the same one I'd had as a child, though someone had repainted the walls a pale yellow and hung new curtains. The bed still creaked in the same spot near the headboard. I lay there listening to the house settle, to a dog barking somewhere down the road, to the strange, thick quiet that comes with a place that has no streetlights.

I gave up around midnight and went outside instead.

The path to the river was one my feet remembered even though my mind had mostly let it go. Moonlight turned the water silver, and the air smelled like wet earth and the smoke of dying cooking fires. I stood at the edge, arms wrapped around myself, and let the grief I'd been swallowing all day finally climb up my throat.

That's when I saw her.

A woman in a white dress, standing perfectly still at the water's edge, maybe thirty feet from where I stood. Her back was to the river, her face toward me, though I couldn't make out her features in the dark. She didn't move. She didn't call out. She just stood there, watching me the way you'd watch someone you were waiting for.

My breath caught somewhere in my chest. "Hello?" I called, my voice smaller than I wanted it to be.

She didn't answer. I took a step closer, and my foot caught on a root, and for one second, one single second, I looked down.

When I looked back up, the riverbank was empty.

I told myself it was grief. Exhaustion. The kind of trick a tired mind plays on itself after three sleepless nights and a fresh grave. I walked back to the house faster than I meant to, my heart still not fully steady, and told myself I would laugh about this in the morning.

I did not laugh about it that night.

I had just changed out of my dusty clothes and was reaching to turn off the lamp when I heard it. Three knocks on my bedroom door. Slow. Deliberate. Spaced exactly a second apart, like someone counting.

"Mama?" I called out, already moving toward the door. "Aunty?"

No answer.

I opened it anyway, my hand shaking slightly on the handle, ready to see someone standing there with an apology or an explanation.

The hallway was completely empty. Dark and still, the way it had been for hours. Whoever had knocked was gone, if anyone had knocked at all.

I was about to close the door and blame it on the wind, on my nerves, on anything that would let me sleep, when I looked down at the floor.

Laid across my threshold, in a careful, deliberate line, were seven cowrie shells.

They had not been there when I went to bed.