The sound of the room door opening was still echoing when I froze. Her body heavy in my hands, my pulse hammering. And suddenly, I was back there. Back to before Amara. Before any of this. Back to where it all started.

University days. A cramped off campus apartment. My walls thin enough to hear the life next door.

She lived there, my neighbor. Thirty-six to my twenty-two, married to a man who worked away from home for weeks at a time, returning briefly and then disappearing again. She seemed, in those first weeks, like a woman waiting for her own life to start back up.

Her name doesn’t matter now. What matters is how it began.

At first, it was harmless. Greetings on the stairs. Passing smiles. She’d sometimes ask me to help, carry groceries, fix the broken fan, move furniture. She was always alone. Her husband traveled constantly, gone for weeks at a time. She seemed lonely. And I noticed.

Then came the invitations. A plate of food after class. Movies in the evenings. I’d sit in her living room, trying not to stare, but always catching her watching me too. Something simmered under the silence between us. She talked about loneliness the way you talk about something you have accepted. I listened the way I always listen, completely, which is the most powerful thing you can offer a person who has only ever been half-heard.

The first time it happened, it was an accident, or maybe not. She poured us drinks after I fixed her leaking tap. We sat close, too close. She touched my hand. I didn’t pull away. Her voice dropped to a whisper when she said, “This doesn’t leave this room.”

I promised.

Weeks blurred. Afternoon visits turned into late nights. I knew every corner of her body, every sigh she tried to swallow. She told me things, about her husband, about her loneliness, about wanting to feel alive again. I believed her. I believed I was what she needed.

But then it changed.

She grew distant.

I couldn’t accept that. Not after everything.

The night it ended, I remember every detail. She called me over , she had arranged herself carefully on the sofa, sitting upright, a deliberate distance between us. Her voice was steady. It was finished, she said. She loved her husband. What had happened was a mistake.

I begged her. Told her I loved her. She looked at me for a moment with something close to pity. Then she said: “You’re just a boy. That’s all you ever were to me.”

I don’t even remember deciding. One moment I was pleading, the next my hands were on her. She pulled back, stumbled, hit her head on the counter. A crack. Then nothing.

She was gone.

I stared at her body for what felt like hours, my heart pounding in my ears. I couldn’t let it end like this, not with me as the fool she discarded.

So I thought. Planned. Worked.

I dragged her to the storeroom, covered her with old cloth and tools, then waited for her husband to return from his trip. That night, I slipped into their flat with the spare key she once gave me. I tore her clothes, splashed liquor across the floor, and placed his belt in my pocket. Then I dragged her body back inside, laying her where the fight would look real. His belt tightened around her neck. His fingerprints, lifted from a glass, pressed onto her skin.

By morning, the building was chaos. She was found, broken, lifeless. And him? They took him away in handcuffs. Neighbors whispered that it finally made sense, people in Lagos mind their own business as a rule, but they notice, and they remember, and when the moment comes they find out they have been witnesses all along without knowing it.

I sat in my room, listening through the wall one last time. The silence was deafening. And sweet.

The building moved on. A short season of gossip, then it became just another story, absorbed into everything else.

He rotted in prison. She rotted in the ground. And me? I was free. Free, and hungrier than before.

That hunger brought me here. To Amara’s door.

And as the door sound grows louder, pulling me back to the present, I know the truth: I’ve done this before. I can do it again.

This is who I am.