Chapter 6: THE VISITOR

The man came to the gate on a Thursday afternoon, while Aderonke's mother was at the market and her father was still out looking for work he no longer expected to find. Aderonke was alone on the veranda, shelling the last of the groundnuts her mother had left half finished, when she heard the gate creak and looked up to see a stranger standing just inside it, notebook in hand, looking at the house the way a person looks at an address they have checked twice against a piece of paper.

He was perhaps thirty, dressed simply, a worn leather satchel across his body that had clearly carried more books and documents than it was ever designed for. He did not have the look of a relative or a church member or any of the usual visitors who found their way to that veranda. He had the look, instead, of someone who had come with a purpose, and who was already, before saying a word, slightly apologetic about what that purpose might cost the person he was about to speak to.

"Good afternoon," he said. "I am looking for the family of Aderonke Bello."

"I am Aderonke."

Something crossed his face then, quick and unguarded, an expression she would later come to recognize as the particular surprise of a man whose research had finally produced a living person instead of another file. He recovered himself almost immediately, closing the notebook he had been holding open, as though suddenly aware it was rude to keep it out while looking at her.

"My name is Dayo," he said. "I am a researcher. I have been looking into cases of children who went missing in this city without official police reports being filed. Your name came up in some records I have been reviewing."

Aderonke did not invite him to sit. She remained on the step, the groundnuts forgotten in the basin beside her, and studied him with the same careful attention she had been giving everything and everyone since her return.

"My case was reported," she said. "There was a police report. My father filed it."

"I know," Dayo said. "That is actually part of why I am here. Your case is one of the very few in this pattern that was reported at all. Most of the others were not. Families told neighbours their children had gone to relatives, or to school in another town, or simply stopped mentioning them at all after a while. I am trying to understand why some cases were made official and others were buried, and whether there is a connection between the two kinds."

It was the word buried that caught in Aderonke's chest, though she kept her face as still as she could manage.

"Why would anyone bury the disappearance of a child," she said. "What kind of family does that?"

"Sometimes it is a family protecting itself," Dayo said. "Sometimes it is a family protecting the child. And sometimes," he added, watching her carefully as he said it, "it is not entirely clear which of the two is happening, even to the family involved."

Aderonke felt the words land somewhere close to the place where the ribbon and the photograph and the fragmented hand already lived, and she understood, with a kind of cold clarity, that this stranger standing at her gate had arrived carrying pieces of the same puzzle she had been assembling alone in her room for over a week. She did not yet know whether that made him dangerous or useful. Both possibilities seemed equally likely, and she had learned enough in her short time back to know that the two were not always easy to separate.

"What do you want from me," she said.

"I want to ask you some questions about the night you disappeared. And about the years since, if you remember anything at all. I know it has only been a short time since you returned, and I know this is an intrusion. I am not with the police, and I have no authority to make you speak to me. I am asking because I believe there is a pattern here, a larger one, and I believe your case might help me understand it, if you are willing."

"And if I am not willing?"

"Then I will thank you for your time and leave you in peace," Dayo said. "I am not in the business of forcing people to relive things they would rather forget."

It was, Aderonke thought, a strange kind of honesty from a man whose entire visit was built around asking her to do exactly that. And yet something in the plainness of his answer, the absence of any attempt to charm or pressure her, made her trust him slightly more than she had expected to trust a stranger who arrived at her gate uninvited with a notebook full of other people's tragedies.

Still, she was not ready. Not yet. Not with her mother's fear so raw and recent, not with a photograph and a ribbon still hidden inside her Bible, evidence she had gathered for herself and was not prepared to hand over to a man she had known for less than ten minutes.

"I don't remember much," she said, which was not entirely a lie, though it was not the whole truth either. "The years are mostly a blank to me. I would not be useful to you."

Dayo studied her for a moment, and Aderonke had the uncomfortable sense that he did not fully believe her, though he did not press the point.

"I understand," he said. "May I leave you my number, in case you remember something later, or simply want to talk? Sometimes memory returns slowly, in pieces, especially after trauma. If anything surfaces, even something small that seems unimportant, I would be glad to hear it."

He tore a page from the back of his notebook, wrote a number on it in neat, quick handwriting, and held it out to her. Aderonke hesitated before taking it, aware of how the small piece of paper felt heavier in her hand than its size should have allowed.

"There is one other thing," Dayo said, as he turned to go, and something in his tone shifted, became more careful, more deliberate. "I have a photograph. Of a girl who disappeared several years before you did, under similar circumstances. No police report was ever filed for her. I don't suppose the name Morenike Adeyemi means anything to you."

Aderonke's whole body went still.

"She's my cousin," she said, and hated how quickly her voice came out, how little control she had over the alarm that must have shown on her face. "Why do you have a photograph of my cousin?"

Dayo's expression changed then, something sharpening in his eyes, the look of a man who had just found a thread he had not expected to find so easily.

"She is not simply your cousin," he said quietly. "According to the records I have gathered, Morenike Adeyemi has not been seen by anyone outside your immediate family in over three years. There is no record of her attending any school in the east, no record of her crossing into any state where your family claims she went to stay with relatives. As far as any official document is concerned, Morenike Adeyemi disappeared from this city at almost exactly the same time you did, and no one has filed a single report about it."

Aderonke stood very still on the veranda, the groundnuts forgotten, the small piece of paper with Dayo's number pressed hard into her palm, and understood that whatever wall her family had built around the truth of those missing years, it had just developed its first serious crack, delivered not by her own patient digging but by a stranger who had walked in through her gate with a notebook and a question she had not been ready to hear.

"You should go," she said, though her voice had lost the sharpness she intended it to carry.

"Before my mother returns."

"I will," Dayo said. "But please. Think about what I have told you. And if you remember anything, anything at all, even something that seems too small or too strange to matter, call that number."

He left the way he had come, through the creaking gate, down the narrow road toward the main junction, and Aderonke stood alone on the veranda for a long time afterward, the piece of paper still clutched in her hand, watching the empty road as though he might turn back at any moment and tell her the whole conversation had been some kind of mistake.

He did not turn back. And when her mother returned from the market twenty minutes later, humming to herself, a basket of tomatoes balanced on one hip, Aderonke folded the paper quickly into her pocket and said nothing at all about the visitor who had come while she was gone, though for the rest of that evening she could not stop hearing Dayo's voice repeating the same terrible sentence in her mind, over and over, no one has filed a single report about it, as though her cousin, gentle, gap-toothed Morenike, had simply been erased from the official record of the world, the same way the third girl in the photograph seemed to have been erased from Aderonke's own memory.