inclined to try any harder to get him out of it. She knew about him and Eloise—he wasn’t intelligent enough to hide it from her, and he’d been faithful up till then. It was so obvious when he stopped; all the little changes were stark and loud. She didn’t mind what his grief was turning him into. Part of her felt like he deserved to go mad: while she had been pouring herself into their child, he had been pouring himself into her friend.
She hoped he never found his way out of that bed. She hoped he would rot inside it.
Eloise even had the nerve to be calling and checking on them. Kavita started hanging up the phone whenever she heard her voice. Let the woman figure out what she knew. She wouldn’t have picked up the phone at all, except for the chance that it could be one of the girls calling with information about Vivek, something they hadn’t confessed to her yet. She also hung up when Mary or Ekene called. To Kavita, they were now the same person, and she would never forgive them for what had happened at their church. Chika had insisted on inviting them to the burial, but once that was over, as far as Kavita was concerned, so were they.
While Chika lay in their bed, Kavita stayed in Vivek’s room. She ran her hands over the walls, over the posters he’d ripped out of pop magazines Eloise had brought back from the UK. The woman’s interest in her child seemed false and ugly now; perhaps it had all been a way to get close to Chika. Kavita reminded herself that it didn’t matter. Eloise could have Chika if she wanted. Nothing mattered. Her eyes ran over the pictures without really registering them: Missy Elliott. Puff Daddy. En Vogue. Backstreet Boys. He had put them all up before he went off to uni. Kavita wondered why he hadn’t taken them down afterward, once he’d changed. Or maybe he hadn’t changed as much as it seemed. At night, now, she slept in his bed and cried. Sometimes she thought she could hear Chika crying, too, through the wall, but she never went to him.
Sitting across from Somto in Rhatha’s sitting room, Kavita watched the girl cry and thought how ridiculous it was that she could still look so pretty even while sobbing. There were no inelegant strings of mucus swinging from her nose, no shiny saliva pooling in her mouth when she opened it to wail. Somto wept mostly with tears, gleaming against her skin as they fell. She dabbed at them with the hem of her dress, the skirt full and wide, leaving enough material to cover her thighs even as she bent to reach her face.
“I’m sorry, Aunty Kavita,” she said. “I know this must be terrible for you.”
Terrible, Kavita thought. What a word. Did it feel like terror? More like horror, actually. Terrible sounded like it had a bit of acceptance in it, like an unthinkable thing had happened but you’d found space in your brain to acknowledge it, perhaps even begin to accept it. Then again, horrible sounded the same way. The words had departed from their origins. They were diluted, denatured. She looked up and realized that Somto was looking at her, sitting there in silence.
“I just want to know how this happened,” Kavita said. “What time did he leave here?”
Somto thought for a bit. “Maybe around twelve o’clock? He didn’t say where he was going. We all assumed he was going to see Juju.”
“Are you sure he didn’t say? What of Olunne? Maybe she’ll remember what he said.”
Somto looked at Kavita, a bit concerned. “Aunty, you can just ask Juju. I know she saw him that day, but I don’t know if he went straight from here.”
“Where is your sister? I want to ask her also.”
“She’s not here. She went out with our mum.” Somto stood up. Kavita could see the discomfort wafting off her. “But I’m sure Juju is at home with Aunty Maja. You can go and ask her.” Somto must have known she was being rude, but she didn’t seem to care. “I have to go and run some errands,” she added. “My mum will be angry if I don’t finish them before she gets home.”
Kavita stood up, already thinking of what she could ask Juju and Maja. “Tell your mother and sister I’ll come back another time to ask them,” she told Somto, who made