Chapter 5: THREE YEARS

There was no single night Aderonke could point to and say, this is where it began, this is the first thing I remember. What she had instead were fragments, scattered across three years like beads from a broken string, none of them numbered, none of them dated, none of them willing to lie still long enough for her to arrange them into any order she could trust.

She had started, in the week since coming home, to write them down. Not in a notebook her mother might find and take away, but on loose sheets of paper she kept folded inside her Bible, a place nobody in the house would think to search, since nobody in the house had seen her open that particular book with any seriousness since she was a much younger girl. Each fragment she wrote as plainly as she could, without trying to explain or connect it to anything else, the way she imagined a doctor might record symptoms before attempting a diagnosis.

The bus station came first, because it was the fragment closest to the surface, the one memory she trusted completely because it sat at the very edge of her return, close enough to the present that it had not yet had time to blur.

She remembered waking on a wooden bench under a corrugated roof, the smell of diesel and roasted corn thick in the air, her body aching in a way that suggested she had been sitting in that position for a long time. She remembered a woman selling groundnuts nearby who had looked at her strangely, the particular look people give someone who seems lost or unwell, and had eventually approached and asked, gently, if she was alright. She remembered not knowing, in that moment, what day it was, or how long she had been gone, only a vague, disorienting certainty that time had passed, more time than made sense, though she could not have said how she knew this except that her body felt different, her clothes felt different, everything about her own physical presence in the world felt subtly wrong, like a shoe worn on the opposite foot.

That fragment she trusted. It was recent, unclouded by the fog that covered almost everything before it.

Before the bus station, the fragments thinned and scattered.

A yellow building. This one recurred more than any other, arriving without warning at strange hours, while she was eating, while she was half asleep, once even while she was standing in the market with her mother, a building with walls painted the particular ochre yellow of a compound that had once been freshly done and had since faded under years of sun and rain. She could see, when she concentrated, a gate of corrugated iron sheets, a narrow corridor inside leading to a courtyard, and beyond the courtyard, a room with too many adults in it and not enough light.

She did not know where this building was. She had walked, in the days since coming home, along several streets near the old family compound, testing herself against each corner, each turning, waiting to feel the particular pull of recognition, and had found nothing that matched. Whatever the yellow building was, it did not seem to be anywhere near where she currently lived, which raised a question she had not yet found the courage to ask aloud. Had she been taken somewhere else entirely, some other town, some other part of the country, during those missing years, and if so, why had she ended up back here, in this same city, on that same bus station bench, as if returned deliberately to the exact point from which the story could most plausibly resume.

A woman's voice belonged to the yellow building too, though Aderonke could never quite separate the two, never quite be sure whether the voice and the building were part of the same memory or two different memories that her mind, starved of a proper timeline, had simply pressed together for convenience. The voice was not her mother's. It was younger, huskier, speaking with an urgency that Aderonke could still feel in her own chest when she let herself remember it properly, a physical tightness, the body's memory of fear outlasting the mind's memory of its cause.

The voice said things about time. About a window. About someone coming, or something ending, she could never be certain which. Once, lying very still and letting the memory play as fully as it would allow, she thought she heard the voice say a name, not Morenike, not the strange initials from the ribbon, but a third name entirely, gone from her the instant she reached for it directly, the way a dream dissolves the moment you try to describe it to someone else.

And then there was the hand.

This was the fragment she returned to most often, and the one that frightened her most, because unlike the building and the voice, which remained abstract, distant, almost like scenes from a film she had once watched and half forgotten, the hand carried a physical sensation so vivid it startled her every time it surfaced. Small fingers curled around hers. A palm slightly damp with fear or heat or both. The particular tremor of a child trying very hard to be brave and not quite succeeding.

She remembered speaking, in that same memory, though she could not recall her own words exactly, only their shape, a promise of some kind, something like I will come back for you, or don't be afraid, I won't leave you, the sort of thing an older girl says to comfort a younger one in a frightening situation. And then, immediately following that promise, a terrible wrenching sensation, the hand pulled from hers, not gently, and a sound she had never been able to place properly, something between a door and a cry.

After that, nothing. A gap so complete it felt less like forgetting and more like a wall built deliberately to keep her from seeing further.

She wrote all of this down, fragment by fragment, on the loose sheets folded into her Bible, and then she did something she had not done before. She tried to lay the fragments beside each other, not to force a story onto them but simply to see, plainly, what she actually had and what she did not.

She had a bus station, recent, trusted, unconnected to anything before it.

She had a yellow building, recurring, unplaced, tied loosely to a woman's voice she could not identify.

She had a promise made to a small, frightened hand that was not, she was now almost certain, Morenike's hand.

She had a photograph of three girls, and a name she could not yet put to the third.

She had a ribbon marked M.O., found in a drawer nobody else had touched in three years.

And she had a mother whose fear, when finally allowed to surface, looked less like the fear of a woman who did not know what had happened to her daughter, and more like the fear of a woman who knew exactly what had happened, and had spent three years dreading the day her daughter would come home and start asking the right questions.

Aderonke folded the papers back into her Bible and sat for a long time in the quiet of her room, the photograph propped against the base of the lamp so that the third girl's careful, guarded eyes seemed to watch her from across the small space.

She did not yet have Dayo's name. She did not yet know that somewhere else in the city, a man with his own missing person, his own three years of unanswered questions, was tracing a different set of documents toward the same tangled center she was circling from the inside. She did not know about the school registers waiting to be found, the notebook stolen and returned with its pages cut, the recording that would one day make her recognize a voice from the yellow building with a certainty that would nearly stop her heart.

She knew only that the story her family had handed her did not fit the shape of what her own body remembered, and that somewhere beneath the surface of that mismatch lay an answer to the question that frightened her more than any other, the question she had carried home with her from wherever those three lost years had actually taken place.

Was she a victim of whatever had happened. A witness who had simply not understood what she was seeing. Or something else, something she was not yet ready to name even to herself, sitting quietly in the space between the two.

Outside, the evening call to prayer rose faintly from a mosque several streets away, and somewhere beneath it, closer, the ordinary sounds of the compound settling into night.

Aderonke closed her Bible around the folded pages and the two hidden pieces of evidence inside it, and for the first time since coming home, she allowed herself to admit, plainly, that she was afraid not of what had been done to her, but of what she might discover she had done herself, in a room she could not fully remember, to a girl whose name she could not yet recall.