"Joo-ji Je-me-da-fay," Kachi's inner child hums. Unlike the gossiping mothers at the school, Jooji's easy humor and grounded nature set her apart. Jooji hasn't arrived to pick up her kids; her four-year-old plays on the slide with the others.
Kachi escorts George to the car in silence, wary of the weight between them.
"George, is anything wrong?" she asks.
He shakes his head, grinds his sneakers into the dirt, traces a shape like a moon jellyfish.
"What's that you drew?"
He shrugs.
"Fine. Don't tell me." She crosses into the parking area. He trails behind, dragging his feet like a shackled prisoner.
"Could you lift your feet, sir?"
He kicks a rock ahead, shuffles up to it, kicks it again.
"Quit it."
He stops.
"Want to play with your friends for a while?"
"Nope."
She slides into the driver's seat of her Chrysler minivan. He climbs into the back. She buckles in, eyes flicking through the parking lot for Jooji's red Sienna.
Murals of animals and their letters glow in the sun. Children in sneakers climb the ladder, shrieking as they zip down the curling slide. Dappled light filters through the trees, bright as Jooji's grin---warm, amused, disarmingly kind.
"Who you looking at?" George asks.
Her fingers tighten around the keys. "No one. That's a beautiful tree, isn't it?"
"What tree?"
She points to the olive tree shading the school wall. "That one."
"It's a pompom tree."
"It's an olive tree."
"Whatever."
"Guess what goes well with sautéed fish?"
George stays silent.
"Olive."
"Whatever."
Kachi starts the engine and eases onto the accelerator. The Chrysler creeps forward.
"George, what's the matter? Why are you so grumpy?"
George pokes his head between her and the passenger seat, leaning on her headrest. "Can you stay in the car whenever you come to pick me up?"
"Sure. No problem. I don't mind collecting you like drive-through pizza."
He doesn't explain or sit back down.
"Any particular reason?" she asks.
"Because everyone will think you're my mom."
She lets the edge in his tone pass.
"My mom's not crazy," he adds.
She grips the steering wheel tighter. "Really, George. That's not polite." Thank God, say I no be your mama, her thoughts scream. I for tear you slap, one-time.
Breathe, Kachi, an inner voice says. You let them sway you around the court, you lose the rally. Her tennis coach. Michelle Obama: When they go lower, you go higher.
"If you ask me nicely, I might consider it," Kachi says in her best Queen's English.
Speaking in this accent gives her control; it lifts her above George's Cockney. Her nearly perfect English---honed to amuse---lets her slip into aristocratic spaces. Still, her Warri pidgin and crude wit break through whenever anger flares.
"But I asked nicely," George protests.
"No. You were brash."
He doesn't take the hint.
"George? What do you say to me?"
"Leave me alone."
When they reach home, Tom is already there.
Kachi recounts George's rudeness.
"Kids," Tom says.
He makes George apologize. That's it. No tongue-lashing. No attempt to probe the root of it.
Alone in their bedroom, Kachi faces him. "Thomas Daramola Alakija! Is this how you want to raise your son?"
"We need to be patient with him," he replies. "He's still adjusting to life away from his mother. Give him time."
Embarrassment prickles. Tom strains to win the boy's affection---more doting grandfather than parent. Always excusing, always yielding, expecting her to absorb the strain. Enough. He needs to step into the role.
She slams the bedroom door and storms into the kitchen. The floating shelves tilt. Plates and pots remain still. A trick of the mind. She drinks water, sets three carrots on a cutting board, drives the knife through them in a steady rhythm.
At his peak, Tom served as sales and marketing manager at Volkswagen Lagos. She never knew him then, but imagines a sharper man---the kind who left his first wife for someone younger. Now sixty-nine, the voice that once filled boardrooms has thinned to sighs. A good husband, yes. But twilight has claimed him. He sells used cars in Opebi-Allen and shares a life with her: an unemployed chef in her early fifties, older than his ex, past the age when choice in men still stretched wide. Their marriage strains under uneven expectations---his third attempt, her first.
What should she do about George? The boy pushes the limits of her patience. A child with blunt language; he calls her "crazy" because he lacks a word for suddenness, for the way she startles.
A child from Tom's past---his London trips---his secret. Three months ago, the boy's mother sent him here. Tom insists it was her idea.
"Don't you see?" Kachi had ranted. "She sent him here to split us. She wants you to leave me." Tom always answers, "I'm not going to leave you."
After the divorce, Tom lost his home in the settlement. They moved to a gated community in Lekki---"Lekki Montana." A place that prizes the exotic, measures class by accent, manners, and possessions. Where wives perform superiority and peel the poor away like carrot skins. Kachi's earthiness marked her. People began to avoid her. Once, during school pickup, the other mothers smiled thinly while she bantered in pidgin with the gateman, as though she'd breached a code, waved to a fisherman from a private yacht. Jooji stood apart. Same current, same rhythm. The only ones who kept their native names.
At dinner, Tom sits at the head of the table, George at the foot, Kachi between them, facing the underwater tapestry---tropical fish, jellyfish, coral reefs drifting across a blue field. It calms her. Tonight, sautéed shrimp pairs with caramelized plantain, Worcestershire blending with Tabasco and horseradish into a sharp heat.
Kachi lost her job as a poissonnier at a Chinese restaurant after uncovering their secret: octopus farms. Her employers exploited weak regulations---farming octopus despite the global ban. They claimed relocation, but she knew better. How can she forget those restless arms twisting in cramped tanks? Or those dark eyes fixed on her?
"Have you heard? Jooji and John have turned their house into a daycare?" Tom says. "Morning to rush hour."
"How nice. I'm happy for them," Kachi says. "That explains why I no longer run into her."
George lifts a tiny piece of carrot. "What's this?"
"It's carrot," Tom says. "And don't use your hand."
"Okay," George says, studying the orange crumb.
"I could work in her daycare," Kachi says.
George slips the crumb into his mouth.
"You don't mind working with children?" Tom asks.
"I don't," Kachi replies---though the thought lands differently: she doesn't mind working for Jooji. "Besides, I need to leave the house more."
Tom grins. "Splendid idea. Isn't it, George?"
George licks his finger. "Okay."
Tom and George drift into talking about schools, and how running them is different from running restaurants, their voices distant. Kachi turns inward---how to approach Jooji with the request.
Working at Tenderminds resembles nothing Kachi imagined. Jooji runs it like a machine---precise, unsentimental. The strain between them isn't the only thing that strips Kachi's dignity: each day ends with her feeling less like a caregiver, more like a janitor. She peels off her clothes as if contaminated, steps into the shower, turns the heat higher. The water nears a scald. She wants it to burn. To erase.
Even through gloves, the sensation clings---the wipes slick with shit, the smear, the give under pressure. Her skin recoils at the memory. It crawls. She gags, braces against the tile, waits for the nausea to pass. For a germophobe, the work doesn't humble. It violates. She absorbs it in silence, day after day.
Still, there is George.
His mood lifts as he grows closer to Jooji's twins, Julian and James. With little Jennifer trailing, they spill into the house after school---loud, sticky, uncontainable. They adore her. No mistaking it. Their faces light when she arrives; they hover before asking if today might be a candy day---or, if luck holds, a Coldstone day. On those afternoons, they crowd the freezer glass, leaving muddy prints as they argue over rainbow sprinkles and gummy bears.
Best of all, George's gaze shifts. In his eyes, she becomes something else---not his father's wife. Something brighter. Wanted. She grips that version of herself, holds it steady.
When the urge rises, she bakes for Jooji. For the toddlers. Cakes, cookies, tarts, scones---anything that floods the house with butter and sugar and heat. At first, Jooji reacts as though a line has been crossed. A rule, unspoken. But the food works. It always does. Approval follows---brief, contained, gone almost at once.
Their children draw closer.
They do not.
Frustration tightens.
Jooji rarely stays home. She trails John across the globe---Dubai, Singapore. That part makes sense. But Beijing, for a medical conference? And surgeries in neighboring West African countries---unexplained, withheld? When she returns, she seals herself inside her bedroom during daycare hours, door closed, presence withheld. On the rare occasions Kachi sits with her, Jooji's gaze drifts past her, lands on the wall clock. A quiet dismissal. Time narrows. Conversation must earn its place.
Once, after praising her baking, Jooji hesitates. Something flickers across her face---calculation, perhaps. Or judgment.
"You've got talent," she says. "I don't know what you're doing working in a daycare."
The words land softly. Almost kind.
Still, they close something. Doors sliding shut while Kachi stands in the frame.
When COVID-19 arrives, it doesn't knock; it seeps in---fine, relentless as harmattan dust. The daycare shuts. Life contracts into measured distance between bodies and breath. Inside the estate, they map the streets with their feet.
At first, Jooji's house stays alive with perfume and laughter---restless women drifting through, turning the living room into a small parliament of the Real Housewives of Lekki Montana---heels clicking, wineglasses chiming.
Then John falls ill.
Overnight, Jooji shifts into nurse. Her hands learn fever---cool cloths, measured sips, listening for the change in breath that signals danger. And Kachi, unexpectedly, begins to love the house more. John and Jooji remain. Rooted. Better still, the women stop coming. The laughter drains. The perfume thins. No shoes gather at the door. Silence settles, held and waiting.
One afternoon, the reason surfaces.
Kachi enters, removes her facemask. The parlor sits empty. The sharp scent of sanitizer replaces perfume, lingering in the air. A month ago, by noon, the room would have filled---women pressed close, bangles clattering, phones ringing. Laughter rising, breaking. Kachi moving among them, present yet unseen.
Now---nothing.
From the bedroom, a cough. John's. Dry. Persistent. Jooji must be with him; the children likely sent to a neighbor, as though illness travels by proximity alone.
Kachi turns toward the kitchen. A bowl of consommé might soothe that cough. Might offer warmth where fear has settled.
"Easy. Small sip," Jooji murmurs behind the bedroom door.
Kachi enters, tray balanced in both hands. Jooji startles.
"I made soup," Kachi says.
Jooji frowns. "You should knock."
"Sorry. If I had a free hand, I would have."
John looks terrible. Eyes sunken. Nose swollen. His chest lifts and falls with the heavy rhythm of someone suspended between rest and struggle.
"Put it there, thank you," Jooji says, pointing to the coffee table beside the couch.
Later, when John sleeps, they retreat to the parlor and close the door.
"You're my only true friend," Jooji says. "Thank you."
Warmth blooms in Kachi's chest. "You're welcome. At least the others should be calling."
Jooji exhales. "Sharon said Ethel started a rumor. That Tom returned from China. That's why he's sick."
"No." Kachi lifts a hand to her mouth.
"But Tom hasn't left Lagos in months. Not once. People can be wicked. Jealous."
Her anger flutters---sharp, unstable. Kachi has never seen her like this. Uncovered.
"Welcome to my world," Kachi says. "Parasites stay close until they finish feeding."
Jooji frowns. "What does that mean?"
"People smile. They wait. When they no longer need you, they disappear."
"And what did they need me for?" Jooji asks. "To begin with?"
"Your husband. He's a doctor. They needed health. Now they need distance. Safety."
"But it's a lie," Jooji whispers. "Tom only has the flu. I don't know what I did to Ethel to deserve this."
Her voice breaks. Tears follow. Kachi crosses the room, gathers her in. Jooji doesn't resist. She collapses against Kachi, small, undone.
For a moment, Kachi wants time to stop---to hold them there, suspended in something clean, untouched by rank or fear.
Time refuses.
The lockdown lifts. The streets inhale. Cars return. Visitors follow.
The women return too.
With them, the old arrangement.
Jooji resumes Madam.
Kachi becomes staff.
Their brief softness dissolves into routine. That afternoon of truth doesn't last like makeup after a swim. Only Kachi holds it.
Somewhere inside her, the memory persists: once---just once---she believed they had become friends. People nod along to the truths you offer, but when it counts, they choose what serves them. In Jooji's case, that is popularity. All Kachi's talk of realness thins, stripped of weight.
Saturday. Kachi and Tom sit through their usual outdoor breakfast while George plays a video game in the living room. A gust snaps Tom's newspaper. He lowers it, studies her.
"What?" Kachi says.
"Do I have any reason to be concerned about you?" he asks.
"What do you mean?"
"Did you say anything to anyone? Anything that would make them suspicious? Concerned?"
"No," Kachi says.
"John asked if you're getting help. If you're seeing someone. Why would he ask that?"
Shock drains her.
"I don't know," she says. "I'm fine. There's nothing to worry about."
"I wasn't worried until now. What did you tell the Jemedafes?"
"Nothing."
"Are you sure?"
"I'm sure."
He lifts the paper, pushes his glasses up his nose.
"I've let you down," Kachi says. "You'll leave me now."
"You're unbelievable." He leans back, covers his face with the paper.
In the days that follow, parents greet her with smiles that don't hold. Warmth drains from their voices. Questions shorten, stiffen. When she speaks, their eyes slide away---too quick, too practiced---leaving a thin chill behind.
Their question gnaws: "How are you doing, Kachi?" It presses. She wants to snap---How do you mean? Instead: "Fine."
Do they know? Yes. She feels it. Conversations collapse when she approaches.
At night, sleep fractures. Nightmares: smiling faces twisting, snapping. Jooji moves through skins, slipping between selves like an octopus shifting color. In the kitchen, when they cross paths, Jooji yields first, gaze drifting toward snacks, evasive, submerged.
Basket mouth.
Backstabber.
Tufia kwa gi!
A single push would suffice. Enough to trigger it. But the two-timer holds back, denies her even that.
Three days later, the dryness between them hardens. Every exchange cracks. This is not the ending she imagined. She tells Caesaria she's resigning. Caesaria answers with calm precision: she'll inform Madam Jooji. Thank you for your service. The children will miss you.
For a brief stretch, everyone liked her. Then Jooji dismantled it. She should have left Lekki Montana when she planned to. Not Tom's reminder about rent that softened her---but meeting Jooji at George's school. What a mistake.
Betrayals redirect lives. They leave wreckage where futures stood. Jooji may not grasp the weight of what she has done. So Kachi will make her understand.
With a gun.
A life for a life.
Stupid amebo. E no go better for you.
Thunda fire you and all your generations.
On Saturday morning, Kachi searches the shoebox atop the wardrobe where Tom keeps his gun.
Gone.
"Tom, did you move the revolver?" she calls.
He steps in from the balcony. "Who's looking for it?"
"Me."
"Why?"
"I want to know where it is."
"It's not lost."
"Where is it then?"
He retreats.
"If it's for protection, shouldn't I know where it is?"
Silence.
"If you keep moving it, you'll forget. George might find it, think it's a toy, point it at us, and---"
"Stop, Kachi. Stop."
"Oh, for God's sake! If I wanted to kill myself, there are easier ways."
The next morning, before dawn, Kachi unlocks the kitchen door, tucks a knife into her tracksuit.
She jogs in place. High knees. Hup, two, three, four. Shadows linger. Darkness swallows the street beyond the security lights. Cold grips her skin.
Dogs bark in the distance.
Jooji passes in a soft squeak of sneakers.
Kachi pulls up her hood. Follows. Closes the distance. Fingers tighten around the steel stashed in her pouch.
Lungs burn. Breath tears in and out.
Then---
Snoring.
The sound fractures everything.
Wetin?
The scene collapses.
Her bedroom reforms around her.
Sheets twist around her legs, damp with sweat. The air conditioner hums. Tom lies beside her, breathing heavy, slipping back into sleep.
She blinks into the dark, heart pounding.
Nothing shifts. Nothing leans closer. No sign of what almost was. Only her pulse carries it---pounding, insistent---while the rest of the night remains still, indifferent.
Later that Saturday, Kachi scrubs the bathtub with a soapy rag, thoughts spiraling. Hiring a hitman---simple. Like booking a bodyguard. Or a shooting coach.
She raises the trigger-spray bottle, aims at Jooji's reflection on the wall.
"So you're scared now," she snarls. "Wo, no try me."
She sets the bottle down.
A gun would end it too quickly. Too clean. Better to bind her wrists to a bed frame, ankles too---pull until she stretches wide. Ice pressed to skin---eyelids, neck, nipples, navel. Let it linger.
She plunges. Rubber strikes porcelain---wet, rhythmic. The resistance shifts. Feels wrong. Alive. In the swirling water, the drain opens into a dark mouth, pleasure leaking from it, pain close behind.
"Babe, have you seen my car keys?" Tom calls.
The words don't land. A dull ache builds in her temples, filling her head like a tank. The bathroom tightens, breath by breath.
"Make you dey run ya mouth dia. Cunt!" She drives the plunger's handle into the drain.
Light flashes from the mirror. The tub stretches, horizon where wall once stood.
Porcelain gives way to glass.
A saltwater tank.
Jooji thrashes inside it.
Kachi smashes through with the plunger. Jooji rises---tentacles flaring, suckers opening.
"Thunda fire you, amebo!" Kachi screams.
The plunger vanishes. Cocktail tongs fill her grip.
The water freezes.
Color drains from Jooji as ice clamps down on her mantle.
Her body pales.
Kachi snaps off her fingers---five brittle, manicured pieces.
They twitch. Nerves firing.
The pressure eases. The air loosens.
A voice reaches her.
Tom stands in the doorway. "What are you doing?"
"What does it look like?" she snaps. "I'm unclogging the drain."
At dinner, Kachi announces she quit the daycare.
"Is that why you've taken up a new hobby?" Tom asks.
"What hobby?"
"Early morning jogs."
Silence. She hadn't known she had left the house.
"What's your reason this time?" he continues. "Last time, your Chinese employers sold the restaurant to Nigerians who couldn't tell a chef from a cook."
"Really? I left because of their secret octopus farms."
"What 'secret octopus farms'?"
"The ones I told you about."
"You said nothing like that. You hated not being able to surprise guests with your specials."
"You weren't listening."
Tom studies her a beat too long.
"What?" she says. "You think I'm lying?"
"I checked your meds. You've missed doses."
"Tom, please. Don't change the subject. This has nothing to do with drugs."
He wipes his mouth. "Alright. Let's talk about Jooji. How did she treat you?"
"Well---"
"Did she force you to follow her system? Like a recipe?"
"It's a daycare, not a restaurant."
"Did she make you follow rules like that?"
"There are things I won't tolerate."
"Like what? Did she treat you like a maid?"
"No."
"Then what? 'Secret octopus farms'?" His face stays flat.
"I don't want to talk about it." Some memories resist inspection---even as doubt flickers, thin and unwelcome.
"If I say one thing, you'll twist it," she adds. It would be useless to mention sedated infants. He would reshape it. She isn't certain of her version---but certainty doesn't matter. It must hold.
"I wish you wouldn't give up so easily," Tom says. "It's no way to live."
"I'm not giving up."
"I didn't say that."
"It sounded like it."
"Is this about Jooji telling John what you told her?"
Kachi nods. "She told everyone."
"How do you know?"
"I know."
"Can you blame her? You threatened suicide. People hear that, they act."
So he knew. All along. Enough.
Wetin dey worry am, sef?
"It's not the end," Tom says. "You can still redeem yourself."
The plate leaves her hand.
Crack.
Porcelain shatters against the tapestry. Marinara splashes across seahorses and coral like blood. George chokes on spaghetti.
"Stop judging me!" Kachi shouts. "You're all the same. You judge. You leave. I've said it before---I don't like this place. I don't like these people. I don't want to live here. But I'm the problem. Always me. I'm tired. So tired."
Her knees turn to flour. She lowers herself and lies on her back, sobbing.
"I'm tired," she repeats.
Tom says nothing. He pulls her in, steady. Behind them, fish and seahorses spiral inward, drawing them into a slow vortex.
Four months roll by.
Or maybe less.
When Kachi tries to think back, the days slide away from her---identical and refusing to catch. She remembers a suitcase yawning open on the bed, tape screeching across cardboard, Tom's calm voice on the phone, George asking, "Are we coming back?" and getting no answer.
She remembers packing a box. Or was it Tom?
The rest is blank. Not empty. Just... unreachable.
They live in Victoria Garden City now.
Tom pays to break the lease. George changes schools. Kachi lands a job teaching home economics at his new school.
She has a new kitchen. It is pleasant. Still, the old one was better---though she can't say why.
Perhaps it's the view: once, the world stirred beyond her gauze fence. Now, a high brick wall stands between, blank and unyielding.
Lekki Montana fades.
Unspoken.
October 1st. Independence Day.
The parade at Tafawa Balewa Square has ended, but drums and trumpets still carry "When the Saints Go Marching In." Kachi and George sit in a Toyota Coaster bus packed with pupils from Badagry Young Academy. A crowd spills toward the gate, flags waving, blocking their path.
From the front seat, Miss Fari Bintu leans out, laughter in her voice. "Make una hellep us clear road, abeg!" She waves people aside.
Lekki Montana lingers only as a memory. It didn't take what mattered: her principles. The nannies sedated healthy children with melatonin when they couldn't cope. That's how it settles in her mind---the part that holds. Jooji slandered her. She might have done the same back. If she wanted friends like her, she'd keep octopuses.
The crowd parts. The bus jerks forward.
Fari settles back into her seat.
She handles people well---turns irritation into banter, deflects tension with ease. A national handball referee. A P.E. teacher. Of course. She knows when to press, when to yield. Balance. It steadies the space around her.
Kachi watches.
A bright Domino's Pizza sign flashes past.
An idea forms.
"Who wants to stop for pizza?"
"Meeee!" the children shout.
George holds back. Less eager than the rest. Measured. Careful.
Like say e no be pikin.
He's learning.
Kachi studies him.
Then her gaze shifts forward---to Fari.
Miss Fari Bintu leans out the window again, laughter spilling into the street as she waves pedestrians aside.
Something in it---light, effortless---catches.
"Fa-ri Bin-tu," Kachi's inner child hums.