We met at a birthday dinner.

My friend LaShawn said people called him the Denzel Washington of academia and his art history classes had long waiting lists, and starry students stalked his office hours.

He didn’t look like Denzel, but of course Denzel was just a metaphor for men like him, men of coiled beauty.

I looked at him and gravity loosened and slipped.

The pull I felt was immediate, consuming, elemental, every granular part of me suddenly rushing toward him.

In that moment, something was not so much lost as surrendered.

He was dark and dark-browed.

A few times our eyes met and held, but he glanced away and then barely paid attention to me.

There was a nonchalant slouch in his manner, in how he wore his power; he knew he didn’t have to try too hard, with the world yielding so easily to his light.

When he spoke, everyone at the table seemed rapt as if they were sitting at his feet, waiting for crumbs of extraordinary insight to fall their way.

“He opposed civil rights and supported apartheid in South Africa, and I’m supposed to mourn him?”

he said, very slowly, as if he felt his listeners should have known better than to even bring up the subject. “We’ve forgotten his ‘states’ rights’ campaign speech? I’m not even talking about his disastrous war on drugs. Man, Reaganomics destroyed us.”

I had never heard the word “Reaganomics”

before, and for years afterwards, whenever I heard it, an emotion both wistful and bittersweet consumed me.

Dinner was over and everyone was saying goodbye, and still he made no move.

I wished I was brave enough, like Omelogor, to make the move myself, but I didn’t know how to be that kind of woman with men, the one who initiated things.

Finally, he asked for my number, not eagerly, but as if he could do with it or not, and yet I felt triumphant.

I have never lied in my life as often as I lied to Darnell.

I lied to please him, to be the person he wanted me to be, and sometimes I lied to wrest wretched scraps of reassurance from him.

I’m sick, I would write, to force a reply, after days of sending him unanswered texts.

Sometimes he replied right away, and other times he waited a day or two.

Feel better, was all he would write; not a question that opened the door for more, not How are you feeling now? or What’s going on? My days passed as emptiness until I saw him again.

My phone lay always beside me on my desk, never on silent, for fear I might miss his call.

When it beeped with a text message, I snatched it up and felt annoyed with whoever had texted, as if by texting they had taken up the space meant for him.

His silences astonished me; how could my force of feeling not cause in him a similar obsession? I imagined him looking through boxes of papers in the bowels of the library, sneezing from the dust, and not thinking of me, while my every moment was mined in thoughts of him.

I was trying again to write a novel and already failing again, but in his silences I failed more.

I kept starting and restarting, making tenuous connections to Darnell in everything I read, and lingering over sentences that had to do with love, or men, or relationships, as if they might shine a light on the mystery of Darnell.

—

“I was worried about you,”

I would say when he finally reemerged.

“But I’m deep in the archives every minute I get, and you’re working on your novel.”

“We can still check on each other every day, can’t we? Even if just a quick ‘hi’ text before you teach your class, or when you take a bathroom break,”

I would say, feeling desperate, and unable to quell my desperation. He would respond only with a look, that withering look, so eloquent in its lordly disappointment, that said “your needs are so ordinary.”

I wanted love, old-fashioned love. I wanted my dreams afloat with his. To be faithful, to share our truest selves, to fight and be briefly bereft, always knowing that the sweetness of reconciliation was afoot. But it was pedestrian, he said, this idea of love, bourgeois juvenilia that Hollywood had been feeding people for years. He wanted me to be unusual, interesting, and it took a while before I understood what that meant.

“What nasty things have you done?”

he would ask. “Tell me.”

I told him of things that had never happened, rich detailed stories plucked from the air: the massage therapist with supple hands who paused in the middle of my massage to unwrap a dildo from a roll of silver cloth.

Sex, that primitive interlacing of bodies, to me has always been about hope for connection, meaning, beauty, even bliss.

But I lied to Darnell, because he wanted the unusual more than he wanted the true.

With each story, he watched me, as though assessing its worth.

Sometimes he wanted me to retell the stories he liked, and each time I did, I added small embellishments.

I always had the sensation of something about to slip through my fingers.

We were two adults, and Darnell made a living from teaching adults, but there was a terrible childishness in my lies and in his expectations.

He told me his ex-girlfriend had carved blood-filled rifts on her thighs with razor blades.

A Somali woman called Sagal.

Even the name alone.

Sagal.

I imagined her, lithe and lissome, moving liquidly through a room.

He said she was brilliant and adventurous, but didn’t say what he meant by adventurous.

I did not want to ask what became of her.

She was a ghost that existed only to make me feel insecure.

—

Once, he appeared after a weeklong silence to say he had been in Alabama, looking at lithographs of African American art.

“What? I had no idea,” I said.

“Well.”

He shrugged, leaning back on his chair, as if already bored with our conversation, his eyes scanning the people in line at the café counter. He seemed to me not a full knowable person but a mystery deepening by the day.

“I mean, I thought you would let me know if you were going to be out of state,” I said.

“What difference would it make? I could have just been in the library.”

But it did make a difference. What if there had been a plane crash, a tornado, a hurricane? Or nothing had happened and I just wanted, no, deserved to know that he was not on campus as usual, a few miles away from me. I deserved to know if he had even just driven somewhere outside Philadelphia—but to go out of state, all the way down south, a thousand miles to Alabama, while ignoring me for a week? Tears pooled in my eyes.

“What are we doing? Am I your girlfriend?”

I asked. I heard, and hated, the nasal tone in my voice.

“What are we doing?”

he repeated, with that quick one-sided twitch of his mouth. Sometimes it showed irritation, other times contempt. “That’s a hackneyed question lifted from the contemporary morass that is pop culture. That kind of language is the enemy of thought.”

I looked away, to try and blink back my tears. On the café wall were cheerful drawings: a bendy wineglass with a strawberry on its rim, a lollipop stuck in a coffee mug.

“The important thing is that I’m here,”

he said, his face briefly softening, and under the table he pressed his leg against mine.

“I love you,”

I said. He didn’t respond, of course, and so I said, “Darnell, I want to hear you say, ‘I love you.’?”

“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.”

“But say it, please. I want to hear it.”

“I love you,”

he said. A mumble, but to me a victory. I was a beggar without shame.

“I’d love to hear that in bed,” I said.

“What?”

“When you say, ‘Shit shit shit,’ it feels so unromantic.”

“Girl, you’re hormonal.”

I laughed. I was always so quick to laugh falsely. I had told him how a doctor finally gave me a name for a horror I’d lived with for years, suffering, really suffering, a few days every month, my mind mute with self-loathing, my bloated body drained of energy and hope—premenstrual dysphoric disorder.

“How’s that different from premenstrual syndrome?”

was all Darnell asked me, sounding clinical, as if I were a case study without a soul. Whenever I laid intimacies before him, he responded in detached tones, or with a breezy mockery that stung. But I hid my hurt in laughter, because hurt would seem needy and he said neediness was boring. My love for him was a thing bled dry of reason. Even the physical was no consolation. For a man drawn to stories of the unusual, he was singular, habitual, oblivious to needs outside his, and near ecstasy, when he said, “Shit, shit, shit,”

I closed my mind to his words, which in turn made my body shutter itself.

Love can be self-damage, if in fact it is love.

Do we need another name for this state of queasy euphoria? This ardent absence of contentment.

I looked him up online and read things I had read before and studied photos I had seen before.

I set up fake email accounts and sent him messages pretending to be students in love with him, and I was relieved when he did not respond to them but anxious that he still might.

It baffles me to think now of the madness of my emotions.

—

Every year, my father took us all to Portugal on holiday, to Lisbon and to Porto and then to Madeira, the only time he ever lavishly spent money.

He said it was to show his gratitude to Portugal for helping Biafra during the war.

Just as in the World Cup he would shift his support to Portugal as soon as the Black African teams were out.

Through the years I saw Lisbon change.

We used to be the only Africans shopping on Avenida da Liberdade, and shopkeepers would switch to English as soon as we walked in.

Then came Angola’s oil boom and the street was filled with Angolans in Gucci and Prada buying more Gucci and Prada, and shopkeepers began to speak to us in Portuguese, assuming that we, too, were Angolan.

“History as irony, Angola is saving the Portuguese economy,”

my brother Bunachi said as we watched a Portuguese salesperson bend on one knee to help an elegant Angolan woman try on a pair of designer shoes.

I took stealthy photos of the Angolan woman, her permed hair pulled back, her eyes haughtily half-closed as the shoes were slipped on.

I sent Omelogor the photos with the quip Portugal on its knees, and she replied, So funny, you should suspend the novel and try travel writing.

It was a joke, but it brought me a dawning.

So much tourism was about the past, but what about the present? Restaurants and nightlife said more about a place than museums and old castles did. I quit my job, heady with my new anticipation, and already I imagined my articles, and a cover letter that said, “Lighthearted Observations from an African Perspective.”

I traveled in comfort, chartered taxis, shopped and walked alone. I wrote of eating a salty omelet in a famous hotel in Paris, attending a rave club in Budapest with some women also traveling alone, and counting the number of clothes hanging out to dry on lines across the cobblestone streets of Rome’s Trastevere. All the travel magazines rejected my articles. One magazine sent back the cover letter page, across which was written, in capital letters, the word “NO,”

followed by an exclamation mark. The exclamation mark unnerved me. So aggressive, that line and dot. I read my article again, looking for clues to explain why it deserved this slap. A simple “no”

would have sufficed, even if writing such large—and capital—letters across the page was still excessive. Other magazines sent a slim piece of paper, a quarter of a sheet, with two generic lines that said this article is not right for us.

I asked on a travel-writing web group if anybody else had received a “no”

with an exclamation mark. None had. But they shared stories of their own rejections, one about an editor who said yes, only to say no after the final revision. Somebody said the exclamation mark could have been a typing error. No, I replied, it was handwritten. Another said submissions are becoming electronic and very soon, nobody will get rude handwritten responses from some editor having a bad day. One wrote, Editorial judgments about your work are never permanent. This exclamation mark editor might very well like and publish your next piece.

Thank you, I replied. In the jungle of the Internet, there still existed the kindness of strangers. I found tips and ideas on those web groups, and made Internet friends of people who had published in real travel magazines, and sometimes I traveled to places where they had gone too.

On my flights back I felt energized, my mind pulsating, my notebook pages filled. Ideas swam in my head, but when I sat in my study and tried to plait them into sentences, they skittered away, stubbornly separate, refusing to meld. And in a haze of frustration, I wrote sentences that were not quite what I wanted to say, and I felt that my true words were close, achingly close, and yet I could never reach them.

“It is now travel writing?”

my mother asked. “You’ve become an explorer of foreign lands?”

“No, more like a watcher of people and a taster of food in foreign lands,”

I said, smiling.

My mother looked skywards and clapped her hands—wonders shall never end! I did not begrudge her leeriness. Here I was with another new hubris, after floating in and out of minor jobs since graduation, instead of returning home to join the family business with my father and Afam.

“You don’t earn any money until your article is published? How will you pay for all this watching and tasting?”

“With my own money.”

“You mean with your father’s money, which he puts in your account.”

“Mummy, if somebody puts money in your account, isn’t it now your money?”

“You did not earn it.”

She didn’t earn any money, either, and she spent more of my father’s money than he did. But I would never say that, of course. Later, I heard my parents talking, and I knew from my mother’s theatrical tone that she wanted me to overhear.

“First novel writing, now travel writing. What if we couldn’t afford to fund all these things she keeps doing?”

“But we can.”

“You need to stop this last-born-spoiling. It’s not good for her; she has always been too soft and you are not helping her.”

My father hummed, a neutral, peace-seeking sound.

Somewhere underneath his shrewd, cautious nature, a part of him dreamed, and recognized dreaming, and let others dream.

My mother protected me the only way she knew how, with blunt slabs of pragmatic sense, tried and true, the norm.

Often I saw her watching me, eyes dimmed in bewilderment, her baby, her only girl, refusing to come home, drifting about like a dried leaf chased by wind.

I lacked the kind of ambition familiar to her, and for this she blamed America.

It took years before she stopped asking when I would move to Nigeria, as if my life here was mere prelude.

America was like a party whose host has prepared for any eventuality, any at all.

I wanted to stay because I could never be too strange here.

But I didn’t tell her that, because I felt it unfair to expect her to understand.

—

Darnell Googled my father and said, “Jesus fucking Christ. Is that actually his net worth?”

“You know these things are always exaggerated,” I said.

“No, I don’t know. Some of us have folks who don’t even know what ‘net worth’ is. I mean, I knew you were a princess, this fancy-ass apartment in Center City, and you just up and quit your job to focus on travel writing,”

he said, his forefingers curving in air quotes as he said “travel writing.”

“But this? Jesus.”

After that he joked often about my family’s wealth, his teasing always studded with thorns. His friend was filing immigration papers pro bono for an African family in New Jersey, he said, and added, “A real African family, not like yours,”

as if affluence made Africans impurely African.

With alcohol his acid humor, which was not quite humor, flared and filled the room. After a few drinks with his friends, he liked to say, “You know Chia’s people probably sold my people? She comes from old Igbo money going back centuries. It wasn’t just palm fruit they sold to the White folks on that West African coast.”

His friends would stiffen into expressions of in-between, as if they could not laugh but could not not laugh. At first, I said jokingly, “The Biafran war wiped out old Igbo money, so it’s all spanking new now.”

But the joke fell flat, and so after that I just smiled a smile full of the promise of remorse. Anything to calm the simmering in Darnell. It was a strange kind of resentment, because it had admiration at its edges. At a fundraising gala his friend invited us to in New York, he said, boastfully, to the WASPy White man who had paid for our table, “The fancy soap your New York ancestors ordered from London in the 1880s was made with the palm oil that Chia’s family exported from Igboland.”

“That’s wonderful,”

the man said, while nodding nonstop, red-faced from alcohol, and struggling to hide his confusion.

It unsettled me, but I told myself it was at least not as bad as the international counselor at college who asked her colleague, while I stood there waiting to fill out a form, “So how dirty is her family’s money?”

I was shocked into silence. Only after I left, walking down the hallway, did I think of a reply I would never have had the courage to give anyway: “My family’s wealth is cleaner than your body will ever be.”

—

I postponed my first trip to India because Darnell suddenly emerged from his silence.

He appeared at my apartment door, after days of unanswered texts, his black bag slung across his front.

As soon as I saw him, the sky aligned with the earth and all was well.

My excitement made me as jittery as when I had too much caffeine.

I fluttered about, asking what he wanted to do, should I order dinner or should we go out, and his hoodie had a stain down the front and did he want me to pop it in the washer? He was lounging on my couch, and I sat beside him and tenderly touched his cheek.

I did not usually touch him unless he touched me first, because my weakness for touch might be yet another flaw.

He pressed my palm against his face, and for a moment I felt that we knew each other and our future loomed secure.

Later, I asked if he would look at my article.

I had never asked before, because I knew not to ask, but the day felt special and suffused with hope.

The article was called “How We Nigerians Travel Before We Actually Travel,” about the obstacles my passport brought, the visa denials, the extra wait times, the glowering suspicion of the visa officer at the Indian Embassy. Nigerian passport as object of distrust.

“It’s a bit different. I want to know what you think,” I said.

“You need somebody objective,”

he said. He didn’t look at the open laptop I had pushed to him. Saying I needed somebody objective was his way of saying no.

“But you peer-review your friends’ work,” I said.

“That’s different,”

he said shortly.

I never asked again, just as I didn’t take my anxieties to him, to protect him from the burden that I could be.

I was rebooking my hotel in Delhi when he asked, “Is it travel writing if you’re traveling in luxury?”

“It’s not really luxury.”

“Maybe not to you. Folks backpack and do hostels and shit.”

“But there are people who travel like me. I don’t think travel writing is only about budget travel.”

“Reader, know thy class! The high-and-mighty have ordained!”

he mocked.

“If you read my pieces, you would know it’s not like that.”

He glanced at me, and I realized he thought my response was defiant, which I had not meant it to be.

“I meant a general ‘you,’ not you you,”

I said, and laughed. “I mean that if anybody reads what I write, they’ll see I’m not all high-and-mighty.”

“Okay, okay,”

he said, with that side twitch of his mouth that shredded my self-esteem. I began worrying about being patronizing. I went back to my last article and cut the paragraph about hiring a taxi to drive for hours through the countryside around Zurich. It might be high-and-mighty to rent a taxi instead of taking a tour bus. But it was true, so why pretend? I pasted the paragraph back, and then deleted it again. I felt a bewilderment similar to what I had felt in senior year, on a trip to Mexico with a group of friends for spring break. Some girl I didn’t know well asked me, “You’re taking a taxi to Tulum? Who does that? The fare costs enough to feed the kids up in the mountains for a year.”

I remembered her pale eyebrows, her face alight with accusation, as if I had somehow seized the money meant for feeding children in the mountains. I didn’t even know which mountains she was talking about. But I canceled the taxi and took the bus with everyone else. Later LaShawn said, “Why did you do that? We totally wanted to get in the taxi with you.”

I wished I had stood my ground then. I put back the paragraph about driving outside Zurich for almost seven hours, with my warm chatty driver who came from a family of farmers in Vnà and spoke Romansh, a language I did not know existed until then. Was it patronizing to write about him too? Finally, I deleted the paragraph again.

—

Darnell’s friends were the kind of people who believed they knew things. Their conversations were always greased with complaints; everything was “problematic,”

even the things of which they approved. They were tribal, but anxiously so, always circling each other, watching each other, to sniff out a fault, a failing, a budding sabotage. They were ironic about liking what they liked, for fear of liking what they were not supposed to like, and they were unable to feel admiration, and so criticized people they could simply have admired. Nobody gets grant funding that fast unless they’re fucking some bald White guy. Half of that book was totally stolen from a postdoc. He finished that shit too fast, it’s not real research, he’s a lightweight.

With them, I felt hopelessly lacking. A rich man’s daughter who had published two articles in an online magazine that nobody had ever heard of. If only I wrote complicated articles in prestigious journals.

“Darnell says you’ve traveled in Central and South America,”

Shannon said, the Black woman who taught American Studies. She seemed fresher and much younger than the rest, always in graphic T-shirts, her pretty coppery Sisterlocks held up in two girlish buns.

“Yes,” I said.

She looked at me, waiting for more.

“I discovered how mixed many Latin American countries are,”

I said, and immediately thought I sounded idiotic.

“It’s interesting to think about the ways in which the Black diaspora is invisible in Latin America,”

Shannon said. She said “the ways in which”

very often. They all did.

I thought about my Brazil article comparing two restaurants: “Be carefree in Rio or self-important in S?o Paulo.”

I had thought the sentence clever but now saw how lightweight the whole article was. Shannon would never read an unknown online magazine based in New Zealand anyway.

“I couldn’t believe that half the population in Brazil is Black. There are never Black people in popular images of Brazil,”

I said, and hoped this was more substantial.

Darnell shifted and pursed his lips; I could tell he was unimpressed, maybe irritated. If only I knew how to talk like his friends.

“It’s a structural erasure, a symbolic genocide, because if you’re not seen, then you don’t exist,” he said.

“Exactly. Except that the genocide isn’t merely symbolic,”

Charlotte said, the White woman who taught sociology.

“I survived the genocide,”

Thompson said drily, the Garifuna man from Belize, a visual artist, his beard like a black map painted on his chin. I laughed, gratefully, because Thompson always dimmed their harsh glare.

The first time we met, he asked if “Chia”

was short for something, and then repeated “”

in a way that made me feel like a person who could be interesting.

“Speaking of travel writing,”

he intoned, “would it be offensive to say you’re too beautiful to be a travel writer, Chia? You could have been an actress.”

I glanced at Darnell. He looked amused, so I laughed and said, “I can’t act to save my life.”

“Neither can many actors,”

Thompson said.

“Newsflash, Thompson. A woman can be beautiful and have an occupation unrelated to her looks,”

Shannon said, quite seriously, as though Thompson hadn’t been joking. “Besides, we need more women travel writers. Traveling as a woman has its unique challenges.”

“True,”

Thompson said.

“Travel writing is a self-indulgent genre,”

Charlotte proclaimed, looking at me. She was small and slight, with the pinched, humorless face of a person who thrived on grievances.

“I see what you mean,”

I said quickly. “But I’m hoping mine isn’t too self-indulgent. I’ve just come back from Comoros, and it’s such an interesting place.”

“A friend of mine at Brown did some work there,”

Charlotte said.

“Oh really,”

I said. She spoke of Africa only as a place where her friends had “worked”—so-and-so did some work in Tanzania, in Ghana, in Senegal, in Uganda—and I imagined her Africa full of White people all toiling unthanked in the blazing sun. It was hilarious, but I always tried to look alert and interested.

“Nice shirt,”

Thompson said to Shannon.

“This old thing,”

Shannon said, looking down at her T-shirt, at the print of a behatted Mary J. Blige, her face partially in shadow.

“Is it me, or is Mary J.’s beauty not acknowledged enough? A subject worthy of inquiry,”

Thompson said.

“What is it with your misogynistic obsession with beauty today?”

Shannon asked.

“Why is it misogynistic?”

Thompson replied.

“The question should be: Why isn’t Mary J. Blige’s talent acknowledged enough?”

Charlotte said.

“Her talent is not in dispute. She’s beautiful, but it’s obvious the music industry doesn’t reward looks in certain kinds of Black women,”

Thompson said.

“With the collaboration of the rewarded women,”

Charlotte said, as though she disapproved not just of women being objectified but of women being attractive at all. She had to be sending me a message, that beauty’s appeal was beneath her, beauty itself problematic, and beauty, apparently, was my only draw. She looked at me and I looked away and cut into my well-done steak. I cut carefully, slowed by my sinking confidence.

“I can’t believe I sold out and got an iPhone. Apple is so problematic,”

Shannon said, cradling the phone in her palm like a reluctant offering.

“Apple’s project is to homogenize our thoughts and actions. It’s not about unleashing creativity or solving problems; it’s a plan for mass conformity and mass banality. There’s a way in which it runs parallel to heteronormativity,”

Charlotte said. Then she turned to me and said, “You’re eating death.”

I tried frantically to make the connection between Apple, my eating, and death.

“Oh. You mean my steak. Well, I guess it’s tasty death,”

I said, and out came my bright false smile. I wanted Darnell to defend me—he ate meat, too, even if he had ordered a bulgur salad—but he said nothing.

Charlotte was not done with me. “If only people could see how much meat just hangs around in their intestines undigested. It’s disgusting. Never mind that eating meat has deadly consequences for the global south, especially Africa.”

“Charlotte, Charlotte, Charlotte,”

Thompson said. “This isn’t how we’ll win recruits to the climate cause. We’ll need better messaging than that.”

“Appeasement is never a good look,”

Charlotte said, and Thompson, smiling, reached out and gave her a quick side hug.

“Have you written about Belize, Chia? You should go. I’ll take you,”

he said, and winked an exaggerated wink.

“Hey, Thompson. Who says my woman needs you to take her anywhere?”

Darnell asked.

Darnell’s possessiveness, playful as it was, gave me a rush of happiness. My woman. I loved hearing it and he said it so rarely. Sometimes he was so detached from me in public, I feared he was only waiting for the evening’s end to tell me it was over.

“We could go this summer, when Darnell is doing his fieldwork with sharecropper sculptors or whatever,”

Thompson said, and laughed his hearty laugh.

“Actually, Chia is going to be in writing seclusion this summer,”

Darnell said. “In her house in Maryland. Her father bought her a house in suburban Maryland because she wanted a quiet place to write that book. Just sit and write in this house with an original fireplace and a housekeeper.”

“Wow,”

Thompson said. “That’s the life I want!”

“There’s a violence to the wealthy buying homes that are only occupied for part of the year while there’s a housing crisis,”

Charlotte said.

“It’s really a family home. My parents stay there when they visit,”

I said.

It sounded too defensive, and so I tried a joke—“Darnell forgot to say the housekeeper doesn’t actually come with the house”—which of course fell flat.

A soft contempt glowed in Charlotte’s eyes.

I chewed my meat, loathing her and longing for her approval.

I’d seen photos Darnell took at her parents’ summerhouse, showing fluffy dogs and the washed-out shabby décor of New England wealth. I wondered if that house, too, was a “violence,”

or maybe violence was done only when people who were unlike her owned second homes. I would never say this, of course, because I was not brave like Omelogor. Instead, I smiled my hopeless-hapless smile. Later I told Omelogor, “Charlotte doesn’t like me, but if I were a poor African, she would dislike me less.”

“Nonsense, you don’t need her to like you,”

Omelogor said promptly. “They can’t stand rich people from poor countries, because it means they can’t feel sorry for you.”

“Charlotte’s not really like that,”

I said, knowing I was shielding not Charlotte but Darnell.

Our close friends are small glimpses into us, after all, we choose them, they are not grants from nature like relatives are, and being close to Charlotte said something about Darnell.

Omelogor could be so cutting about people who were ignorant of Africa, and I didn’t want Darnell caught in the snare of her scorn.

I already softened and edited the stories I told her about Darnell, with a knot of worry that she could tell, because she knew me so well.

Once I said that since I’d met Darnell, I was getting nicer responses from editors, and she said, “Thanks to Darnell’s magical essence?”

It was easier on the phone, at least she wasn’t watching me steadily with her head tilted—and nobody’s gaze pierced more than hers. She saw people, through people. Only two years older but she had always hovered vigilantly, ready to jump in and protect me from myself. I told Darnell how brilliant and fearless she was, gleaming wherever she went, a star from birth doing starry things as a banker in Abuja.

“You talk about her like a myth,”

Darnell said.

“I do?”

“Yep. Like she can do no wrong. Her dad rich too?”

“Oh no. He’s just a lecturer,”

I said quickly, and as soon as I did, shame spread slowly over me. Why had I spoken like that about my beloved Uncle Nwoye? Yes, he wasn’t rich, and wealth didn’t matter to him at all, but saying he was “just a lecturer”

in that tone was an unnecessary belittling, to please Darnell, and not to tell the truth of my uncle.

“He’s a pioneer professor and he went to Cambridge; he’s globally famous in his field,”

I added. “My mom’s brother. He’s lovely, very kind and also vague about lots of things. We like to say he’s the only professor who doesn’t know how to use a TV remote control.”

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