The bedroom door opened slowly.
He was tall. That was the first thing I registered. Tall and broad in the way of someone who keeps himself in shape. He was wearing a plain white t-shirt and shorts, his eyes still carrying the soft confusion of sleep. He hadn’t heard anything. The bedroom must have been at the back of the flat, far enough from the front door that the screaming hadn’t fully reached him, or he had heard it and folded it into a dream.
He saw me first.
Then he saw Amara.
The confusion on his face lasted only a second before it became something else entirely. He said her name, just her name, the way you say a word when your brain hasn’t yet caught up to what your eyes are telling it.
“Amara.”
He moved toward her and I stepped back, giving him space, which is the right thing to do when you need someone not to look at you yet. He dropped to his knees beside her and touched her face and said her name again, louder this time, and then he looked up at me.
“What happened? What did you do?”
His voice was still more shock than anger. That was the window.
“She fell,” I said. “I heard screaming from outside, the door was open, I came in and she was already on the floor. I was trying to help her.”
He looked at me. Then at the door. The broken frame where the lock had given way. I watched him trying to assemble it all, the open door, the stranger standing in his girlfriend’s flat, Amara not moving on the floor.
“Who are you?” he said.
“I live in the building,” I said. “Two floors down. I heard her scream.”
He was already pulling out his phone. His hands were shaking. I could see him deciding between calling an ambulance and calling the police and I understood that I had very little time before the order of those two calls stopped mattering.
I took one step toward him.
He looked up from the phone just as I reached him, and whatever he saw in my face in that moment made him stand, made him put the phone in his pocket and square himself up the way men do when they have decided that whatever is coming needs to be met standing.
He was bigger than me. I want to be honest about that. And younger, and probably stronger, and he had the particular energy of a man whose anger had just fully arrived.
But anger makes people loud and loud people make mistakes.
He swung first. I let it land, absorbed it, used the momentum to take us both sideways into the wall. We went down together, heavy and graceless, knocking the small side table near the sofa, something ceramic shattering on the floor. He was strong. He got his hands on my collar and pulled and for a moment things were very uncertain.
We struggled across the floor, knocking into the sofa, into the wall. He was fueled by something I wasn’t, grief and rage together, which made him dangerous but also careless. He went for my throat with both hands and that was the mistake. It left his body open.
I got my arm around his neck from behind, locked it in with my other arm, and held on. He thrashed. He was strong enough that I had to work for it, my teeth clenched, every muscle in my arms burning, and for a long stretch of seconds I genuinely did not know how it would end.
Then the thrashing slowed. Then it stopped.
I held on a little longer just to be sure. Then I let go and he went sideways onto the floor and I sat back against the sofa, chest heaving, staring at the ceiling.
My jaw ached where he had caught me early on. I touched it with two fingers. Nothing broken.
I sat with that for a moment. Then I stood up and began to think.
The broken door frame. The ceramic pieces on the floor. Two bodies in a small flat in Lekki on a Thursday night. This was not Yaba. This was not a thin-walled student apartment building full of people who minded their business and half-expected bad things. This was the kind of building with CCTV in the stairwell, with neighbors who had generators and stayed up late and noticed things.
I had been calm when I arrived. I had nodded at the guard. I had walked up the stairs unhurried. I had been, I was certain, completely unremarkable.
But unremarkable is not invisible.
I needed to think faster and more clearly than I had ever thought before. I looked around the flat, at Amara, at him, at the broken door behind me letting in the faint sound of the city outside, still alive, completely indifferent.
I started at the beginning and worked forward, the way I always do when the only option is to be smarter than the situation.
Bola writes 