Chapter 2: THE ROOM

By the third day, Aderonke had begun to understand that grief and relief could wear the same clothes in her mother's house, and that it was becoming harder by the hour to tell them apart.

The visitors had not stopped coming. Aunties from the church, women from the market where her mother used to sell provisions before things became difficult, neighbours who had watched Aderonke grow up and wanted, now, to touch her face and confirm with their own hands that she was real and whole and truly back. Each of them asked the same questions in slightly different words. Where did they keep you. What did they want from you. Did they hurt you. Do you remember their faces.

Aderonke answered as little as she could without seeming rude. She had discovered, within her first two days home, that the less she said, the more people filled the silence with their own theories, and that those theories often told her more than any direct question could have. One auntie was convinced Aderonke had been taken by ritualists and spared only by the mercy of God. Another was certain it was a Boko Haram affiliated group operating quietly in the city, though nobody could explain why such a group would release a girl unharmed after three years.

A third, an older woman with a permanent squint, said nothing at all in front of others but caught Aderonke alone by the well one afternoon and asked, very quietly, whether Aderonke remembered a house with a yellow gate.

Aderonke had gone still. She had not told anyone about the yellow building in her memory.

"Why do you ask that," she said.

The woman had only shaken her head, muttered something about age and forgetfulness, and hurried away before Aderonke could press her further.

It was that evening, alone in her room while her mother entertained yet another round of visitors in the parlour, that Aderonke finally allowed herself to search properly.

The room had changed in almost every visible way. New curtains, a different arrangement of furniture, a small table that used to belong to her now pushed against the wall to make space for boxes of fabric her mother stored there, some overflow from the tailoring work she had taken up since Aderonke's father lost his position at the depot. The walls had been repainted a pale blue that Aderonke did not remember choosing and did not particularly like.

But the drawer beneath her old reading table was exactly as it had been.

She had noticed it the first night, in the chaos of arrival, and set it aside in her mind as something to return to. Now, with the house quieter, she pulled it open properly and went through its contents one item at a time, the way she imagined Dayo, the researcher who would later come asking his uncomfortable questions, might have done it, though she did not yet know that name or that he existed.

A folded school uniform, too small for her now, the LAUTECH affiliated secondary school badge still stitched neatly onto the br£ast pocket. A notebook of old class notes, mathematics formulas in her own careful handwriting from a life that felt like it belonged to someone else. A rosary that had belonged to her grandmother. And beneath all of it, wrapped in a handkerchief that was not hers, the ribbon.

She had already examined it once, in the dark, turning it over without being able to place it. Now, in better light, she looked more closely and found something she had missed before. A small mark on the underside of the ribbon, done in biro, faded almost to nothing. Two letters.

An M and what might have been an O, though the second letter had smudged badly enough that she could not be certain.

M.O.

Not her own initials. Not her cousin's, whose full name was Morenike Adeyemi, which would have given M.A. if anyone had bothered to mark it at all.

She sat with the ribbon in her lap for a long time, turning the letters over in her mind the way she had turned the ribbon itself over the night before, searching for a shape that fit. Nothing came. Only the same fragment as before, the small cold hand in hers, the promise she could not place a face to.

Her mother knocked and entered before Aderonke could hide what she was holding.

"Ah, you found your things," her mother said, her eyes going briefly, sharply, to the ribbon before settling back on Aderonke's face with practiced ease. "I kept everything exactly how you left it. I thought, when she comes back, she will want her room the way she remembers it."

"This isn't mine," Aderonke said, holding up the ribbon.

For a fraction of a second her mother's face did the thing it had done the first night, that flicker, quick as a moth passing a lamp. Then it was gone, replaced by mild confusion, a small frown, a tilt of the head that looked almost convincing.

"It must have fallen in there from one of the boxes," her mother said. "You know I store all sorts of things in this room now. Fabric, thread, old clothes for the tailoring. It is probably from a customer's child. Nothing important."

"There are initials on it. M.O."

"Ah," her mother said, and this time the pause before she spoke was a fraction too long. "I don't know whose that could be. Many of my customers' names start with M. Or O. It is a common ribbon, Aderonke. You are looking too deeply into small things."

It was, Aderonke thought, a strange thing to say to a daughter who had just spent three years missing under circumstances nobody in the house seemed willing to fully explain.

Looking too deeply into small things was precisely what she intended to keep doing, because the small things were the only pieces anyone had left her with.

She did not argue. She had learned already, in three days, that arguing only made her mother retreat further behind the wall of practiced calm she had clearly built for this exact situation, as though she had rehearsed, in the years of Aderonke's absence, exactly how this homecoming would go and exactly which questions she was prepared to answer.

Instead Aderonke folded the ribbon carefully and placed it inside the notebook of old class notes, tucking both back into the drawer where they had been, and said only, "You're right. I'm probably tired. It has been a long few days."

Her mother's shoulders visibly loosened. "Rest, my dear. There is soup on the fire. Come and eat something before it gets cold."

Aderonke followed her mother out of the room, and if her mother noticed that her daughter's eyes lingered a moment too long on the drawer before the door closed behind them, she gave no sign of it.

That night, once the house had gone quiet again, Aderonke lay in bed and made herself a small, private promise. She would not confront her mother again, not directly, not until she had more than a ribbon and a half remembered voice to stand on. She had grown up watching her mother navigate difficult customers and difficult neighbours with the same calm, patient persistence, never pushing too hard all at once, always circling back, always gathering one small piece of information before reaching for the next.

She would do the same thing now, only this time the customer she was patiently working to understand was her own family, and the truth she was circling was one that, she was beginning to suspect, more than one person in that house had spent three years working very hard to bury.

Somewhere beneath the floor of her chest, that same restless feeling from the taxi outside the gate turned over again, heavier now, more certain of its own shape. It was not simply confusion anymore. It had become something closer to purpose.

She was going to find out who M.O. was.

And she was going to find out why a ribbon meant for a much younger child had been kept, all these years, in the one drawer of her room that nobody had dared to touch.

Sleep, when it finally came, was thin and unhelpful, the kind that leaves a person more tired than they were before closing their eyes. She dreamed, briefly, of the yellow building again, though in the dream it had no clear shape, only a colour, a warmth pressing against her closed eyelids, and a sense of being watched from somewhere just out of view. She woke before dawn with her heart beating too fast and the ribbon, which she had left in the drawer, somehow already back in her hand, though she could not remember rising to retrieve it.

She sat up and studied it in the grey early light, the faded pink fabric soft with age, the small biro initials nearly worn away by whatever hands had touched it over however many years it had waited in that drawer. It occurred to her, turning it slowly between her fingers, that a ribbon this small and this specific was not the kind of object a mother kept by accident. Fabric offcuts and stray customer items did not usually survive being tucked, deliberately, beneath a folded uniform in a drawer nobody else was permitted to disturb.

Someone had chosen to preserve this. Someone had decided, at some point, that it mattered enough to keep, and dangerous enough to hide.

She thought of her mother's face the evening before, that flicker before the calm settled back into place, and understood, with a clarity that surprised her, that whatever answers waited for her in this house would not come from asking questions directly. They would come the way this ribbon had come, sideways, through drawers nobody meant to have opened and silences that lasted a fraction too long.