I first saw her on Snapchat. Amara.

Didn’t know her in real life, not yet, but her stories felt personal. Like looking into a life I didn’t belong to but wanted so badly. The smile she always wore, the one that curled slightly higher on the left, I told myself she wore it for the camera. Later I would understand she wore it for no one in particular. That made it worse. That made it feel more like mine.

She didn’t know who I was, but I knew her.

Knew the way her lip curled when she found something funny. Knew the places she went, I knew the café she loved near Admiralty Way, the one with the blue awning. I knew the gym she went to on Friday mornings, before the after-work crowd showed up and ruined the atmosphere. I knew what her office building looked like, glass and concrete, the kind of place designed to let you know it was expensive. I knew what time her light went off at night. It felt like she wanted to be seen. By me

I never messaged her. What would I have said? That I had memorized her route? That I had started timing my movements around hers? It would have sounded wrong. And it wasn’t wrong. I just didn’t have the words for what it was yet.

So I watched. I learned. I mapped the rhythm of her days with the patience of someone who understood that the things worth having require a certain stillness.

Then her posts slowed. Her location vanished for days. It felt like a blackout in my chest.

I had to get closer.
I started going to her area. Not every day. Just sometimes, taking the long way, finding reasons. I was never conspicuous. I know how to move through a place without drawing attention, how to be the kind of person no one notices. Lagos is full of men like that, unhurried, blending into their surroundings. I was one of them.

I watched her walk out of her building one morning, headphones in, eyes focused on something far away. She had no idea I was there. Or maybe some part of her felt it. A presence you can’t name but can’t quite shake. We are animals before we are anything else, and animals feel things they cannot explain.

Weeks passed. Then came that night.

It was a Thursday. I had been near her building, standing by the provision store at the corner. Her light was on, the slow flicker of a television behind the curtains. Her car was in the compound. No visitors. No movement on the stairwell.

She was alone.

I crossed the street. The security guard at the gate barely looked up. I walked through the way you walk through places you have every right to be in, without hesitation.

Up the stairs. Third floor. The sound of a Nollywood drama through her door, voices rising and falling.

I knocked. Soft at first. Then harder.

Her footsteps. Then silence. Then her voice, careful and compressed: “Who is it?”

“It’s me,” I said. “You know me, Amara. Open the door.”

A longer silence. The television cut off.

The door opened, just a crack. One eye in the gap. Half her face, lit by the bulb behind her. I had imagined this moment so many times, the expression she would have when she finally saw me. I had imagined recognition. Something like relief.

Her eye was wide with something else entirely.

“I don’t know you. Please leave.”

I looked at the door. Such a small thing between us.

“You do know me,” I said. “Just five minutes, Amara. Let me explain.”

She tried to push the door closed. My foot was already in the gap.

I pushed back, one hand flat against the wood, and then drove my shoulder into it.

But then, something happened. Something I didn’t expect. She screamed, a piercing sound that shattered the silence. It was loud.

It cracked something in my head. I tried to calm her, shushing, reaching out, but she kept screaming.. I panicked. I didn’t mean to hurt her. I just wanted her to stop screaming, to listen to me, to understand.

My hands moved on their own, wrapping around her throat, silencing her cries. Her eyes locked onto mine, wide and pleading, until they slowly dimmed, her body going limp in my arms. 

I stood there, frozen, staring at her lifeless form. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. She was supposed to love me, to see me, to finally understand. But now, she was gone. 

The sound of the room door opening snapped me out of my daze.