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“I’m here, but before you say anything, I just want to tell you something, okay?”

“Aima…”

Ahmed could hear her voice through the phone, faint but clear. “No, let me talk. It’s important. I’m sorry, Kalu. You were right; it shouldn’t have mattered about the proposal. We always said we’d do it in our own time, we were always on the same page, and we love each other. I shouldn’t have listened to everyone else. I should’ve been on your team, on our team. I’m so sorry. I couldn’t go to London. I’m not ready to give up on us. I want to try again, babe, do you? Can we try again? Please? I’m so sorry.”

Kalu was crying with no sound, his cheeks wet. Ahmed knew it was all he’d been wanting, for Aima to come back, for them to have another chance. He smiled at Kalu encouragingly as the car wound up the highland roads, but when Kalu looked at him, there was a shadow in his eyes that was deeper, darker than Ahmed had ever seen.

“I’m sorry, Aima,” he said, and Ahmed’s heart sank. “I…I can’t do this. I’m not…I’m not who you think I am.”

His voice cracked apart and Ahmed looked away. In his head, the image of Kalu pulling out of Machi was playing, Okinosho’s grin as he stared at Kalu, white ropes smearing along Machi’s thighs.

“I’m so sorry, Aima,” Kalu was saying.

“No.” Her voice was distraught. “No, you can’t be serious. Kalu, please, I’m begging you! What happened? What changed?”

Kalu covered his mouth with his hand, as if the truth would leap out and shove itself into the phone, into Aima’s ear, break her mind apart like it had broken Kalu’s. “I can’t…I can’t tell you.”

“Tell me what? You can tell me anything, love. Please.”

Ahmed reached across the car and grabbed the phone, ending the call. Kalu exhaled in a ragged gasp. “You can’t ever tell her,” Ahmed said, keeping his voice harder than he wanted to. “Give it time and maybe you can try again. But you can’t tell her any of it.”

Kalu laughed, a hollow and dull sound. “What kind of relationship is that? What kind of love is that, keeping a secret like this?”

Seun’s eyes going blank, Ahmed’s hands clenched around his throat. He had almost let himself pretend it hadn’t happened and even that twisted erotic moment with Souraya, that had been a mistake. He’d brought his darkness to her, fucked it into her. He’d taken her into the belly of the city she hated because that’s who he was, and in the end, he had seen the hollowed look in her eyes when Ola led her away. He could chase her down, sure, but Ahmed knew he had already lost her. His throat was hoarse. “Everyone has secrets, Kalu. That’s just how it is. You put it somewhere else in your head. You find a way.”

Kalu gave him an unimaginably sorrowful look. “You pretend it never happened,” he said, his voice plaintive, and for some reason, Ahmed felt like he was talking about two boys in a dark bedroom a lifetime ago. He forced himself to look at his best friend.

“It’s how you survive,” he said. “I don’t…I don’t know another way, Kalu. I don’t know another way.”

Kalu curled back toward the window. “I feel like he reached inside me, Ahmed. The pastor. I feel like he took a handful of dead things and he pushed his hand into my chest and dumped them there and now I’m decaying, like him. I’m rotting; I’m dying.”

“He doesn’t get to do that, Kalu. He doesn’t get to change who you are.”

“He already has.”

Ahmed didn’t know what to say to that. The night was thick and dark around them as they drove.

“The woman at the party warned me,” Kalu said.

“Which woman?”

“Some woman on the balcony. She said this city changes us so slowly that we don’t notice, little by little. Until it’s too late. And we’re part of everything we always hated.”

Ahmed wanted to say something, anything, but there was Seun’s weight in his arms, Machi’s face against the carpet, Souraya sobbing over her bloody hands. He swallowed hard, a grief-colored stone falling endlessly inside him. Kalu fell silent, his broken phone lighting up with texts and missed calls from the woman he loved. Ahmed stopped the car at a red light. He wanted so badly to tell Kalu everything, everything that had happened, seek understanding, absolution, something. Anything that wasn’t this silence, this horrific shame, this gutting despair carving both of them into pieces.

As if he could tell, Kalu suddenly spoke up. “It’s too late,” he said.

Ahmed’s fingers dug into the steering wheel. The light turned green. “You’re right,” he said, as a fault line inside him yawned into something worse. “It’s too late.”

He put his foot on the accelerator, and looking straight out into nothing, he drove them both into the night.

Acknowledgments

This book has been a long time coming. It was originally a short story that was published in 2014 by Sable Literary Magazine, and I would like to thank Kadija George and Jacob Ross for their edits on that. You both helped develop my voice at such a nascent stage in my career, and I am deeply grateful for it. Jacob was the first editor to bluntly point out that I needed self-restraint and as a baby writer, that critique was such a gift. I took his advice and it has continued to serve me throughout my entire career. Thank you for not holding back.

Many thanks to my editor, Laura Perciasepe, and to everyone at Riverhead Books for your work in stitching this book together into a physical story that can now go out and touch the world. I hope you are as proud of it as I am.

As always, a deep well of thanks to my agents at the Wylie Agency, particularly Jacqueline Ko, Kristi Murray, and Jessica Bullock. What luck to have you all on my team!

To everyone who read drafts of this book over the years, who workshopped it with me and gave me notes, thank you so much. These books are never made alone. To my family and my community, thank you for growing with me.

To my readers—I can’t tell you how pleased I am to be sharing my eighth book with you! Thank you so much for supporting me and my stories, for telling your friends and family about them, for gifting my books to people you care about, for teaching my books in schools even while under threat, for understanding that disseminating the stories is part of the work. I couldn’t be in this service without you. This book might be difficult to witness but my hope is that it gives us some courage to witness the difficult things in our lives, to understand how close they can brush to our skin, and to move accordingly.

About the Author

Akwaeke Emezi (they/them) is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Death of Vivek Oji, which was a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award; Pet, a finalist for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, a Walter Honor Book, and a Stonewall Honor Book; Freshwater, which was named a New York Times Notable Book and short-listed for the PEN/Hemingway Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize; Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir, which won the 2022 ALA Stonewall Book Award–Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award; and most recently, Content Warning: Everything, their debut poetry collection; Bitter, their second young adult novel; and You Made a Fool of Death with Your Beauty, their debut romance novel. Selected as a 5 Under 35 honoree by the National Book Foundation and featured on the cover of Time as a Next Generation Leader, they are based in liminal spaces.