Cold Water, Still Water

5:04 a.m. The generator coughs. The kettle fills. The rice goes on for twelve minutes. Adanna Achebe has run the same schedule in the same Lagos house for eighteen years, and the schedule has held everything: her architect husband, three children, a mother across town with dementia, a household economy that never wastes a naira. The efficiency has been her pride and her invisibility.

Then her sister comes back from America. Her oldest son is sitting the JAMB exams and clearing out his room. The spare room at the end of the hall has a sketchbook in it now, and a measuring tape, and a small pile of fabric from Balogun Market, and twenty minutes of a stolen life that has begun accumulating in increments Adanna catches herself counting.

Her husband Chidi notices. He measures the distance from their son's desk to the spare room door in footfalls. Twenty-three meters. He does not ask what she is making. He waits. And Adanna, a woman who has never needed anything anyone could see, is learning in her own kitchen how to want something nobody asked her to want.

A Lagos-set companion novel to Night Currents about motherhood, marriage, the hunger underneath a competent woman's schedule, and the quiet, seismic work of making room for your own life.