When Sally bought the used 1995 Toyota Tercel, I knew that it was a terrible decision even before she turned the key in the ignition. The car, the color of stale merlot, peeled in jagged strips along the hood like sunburnt skin. A dent marred the driver’s door, as though someone had pestled it in a fit of rage. Inside, the upholstery reeked of cigarette smoke, and something harder to place—maybe regret.
It took Sally seven months to acknowledge and admit the truth.
“This,” she allowed one lax evening, collapsing onto my couch, “is the worst decision I’ve ever made.”
Indulging, I slowly sipped a tablespoon of the catfish pepper soup on my lap, and snickered.
Her eyes flicked to mine, narrowing slightly. “You’re dying to say it, aren’t you?”
I shrugged in feigned innocence. “Say what?”
“That you told me so.”
I grinned. “I mean…I did.”
She groaned, throwing an arm over her face. “I thought it had potential.”
Potential. That was Sally’s problem. She saw it everywhere. In everything. Even when it didn’t exist.
She stood outside my gate when she first brought the car home and said excitedly that she had purchased the car from Fred. “I got it from Fred,” she announced with an expectant smile, as if awaiting applause.
Fred’s involvement, of course, explained everything. He was the one guy everyone knew was untrustworthy. We were in the same department for three years, until he dropped out abruptly from the university, and our lives. He’d then reappear sporadically, somehow with suspiciously “good deals.”
He had a shifty face, the kind that made you instinctively reconfirm your pockets after shaking his hands: scruffy beard, deep-set eyes, and a loose smile, which he perhaps tried to hide with a face cap always yanked low.
“You bought a car from Fred?” I’d asked, incredulously.
Sally’s grin wavered, just slightly, as if she were now unsure of her initial excitement. “It was practically a steal.”
I folded my arms. “Or maybe it was a steal because he stole it.”
Her smile disappeared. Without a word, she lunged, yanked open the glove compartment, and pulled out a stack of documents. Title. Registration. All the necessary paperwork was neatly signed and stamped with her name. Proof that, at the very least, she would not be pulled over for grand theft auto.
Satisfied? her expression asked away.
Not really.
The car was a disaster from the start. The engine sputtered whenever she started it. The transmission slipped without warning, causing the car to lurch forward at unpredictable intervals. Sally once described it as “having a mind of its own,” which, under different circumstances, might have been charming.
The air conditioning buzzed and rattled weakly, always exhaling just a few degrees cooler than the sweltering Lagos heat. The radio only played static, no matter how much she fiddled with the dial. And once, on the Third Mainland Bridge, the car shut off mid-drive, forcing her to honk furiously while other drivers cursed her lineage.
Still, she held on longer than she should have.
“I think it just needs a few fixes,” she insisted one afternoon, after I met with her at the shop where we watched a mechanic prod at the unrequited engine with the slow, self-defeating persistence of a man who, having come too far, refuses to give up. But it wasn’t just a few fixes. She repaired the air conditioning, then the dent, and then the radio. Still, the car lurched; the engine hummed; and it continued to break down everywhere and anywhere, at inconvenient times.
By month seven, she’d had enough. Her confession was prolonged—an act of penance.
“Buying that car was the worst decision I’ve ever made.”
I let the words settle in the air before responding.
“Sally,” I said gently, “we both know that’s not true.”
She turned to me, lips pressed into a thin line. “Oh? And what is the worst decision I’ve ever made?”
I didn’t answer; there were too many contenders.
“You know,” Mrs. Edet said towards the end of her second wedding anniversary party. “Sally didn’t cry immediately after I had her. She only lay there, quiet, as if pondering whether she even wanted to be there. The doctors had to scramble around, getting her on oxygen and rubbing her back to get her to cry.”
Mrs. Edet’s soliloquy about Sally’s childbirth was delivered with casual precision. It sounded bereft because we all felt that she’d implied that Sally had suffered from an intellectual disability as a consequence of that single event. She affirmed this suspicion by saying further, “I knew I should have had someone look into it. But I was only nineteen myself! I was barely surviving,” she said, chuckling.
It was the kind of thing she often said, with her words bordering on a joke and judgment, leaving a sting in their wake. Mrs. Edet was the kind of woman who carried her past like a designer handbag—always visible and hefty, and somehow, always making a statement.
She had Sally in her late teens, a scandal whispered about in hushed tones throughout their small town. The father, her secondary school biology teacher, disappeared barely twenty-four hours after she told him about the pregnancy.
“He ran,” Mrs. Edet would say, her voice hard, her lips curling into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “like a rat.”
She spoke about him without sentimentality or longing, only in cold facts. She referred to him exclusively in the third person. To her, he was as nameless as he was faceless.
She had raised Sally alone until she met Mr. Edet in her mid-twenties—the only man Sally ever called dad. He had loved her like his own, and for a while, their family had been stable and secure, until he passed away from diabetes fourteen years later, leaving both mother and daughter to navigate the world alone once more.
After that, Mrs. Edet became what some might call practical—but what others might call ruthless.
She dated again, and then again, never fully committing to anyone. Rumors circulated that some of her male companions were married. While this wasn’t entirely accurate, it wasn’t entirely false either. However, she did get married again when she was well into her sixties, and the man she married was a full two decades younger.
“He just wants your money,” Sally had said when she first heard about him.
That was before she discovered that the man known to her as her stepfather owned and controlled a conglomerate of rubber production companies, wealthier than anyone she had personally encountered and moneyed than her mother.
“He’s not after my money,” Mrs. Edet had laughed. “But even if he were, at least I’d understand the game. Unlike you.”
It was a jab, one of many they exchanged over the years. Sally and her mother had a relationship that teetered between sharp insults and deep, unspoken love. They clashed often, sometimes cruelly, but never truly walked away from one another.
I had always thought she was too hard on Sally. Too dismissive of her choices. But sometimes, late at night, I would wonder: Wouldn't she know her daughter better than I did?
Because Sally—my sweet, reckless Sally—had spent her entire life making decisions that felt like they were pulled out of thin air. And maybe, just maybe, it was because she had spent her whole life trying to prove something to a mother who had already decided who her daughter was.
Sally’s first business foundering came wrapped in velvet…or maybe diamond.
It was the jewelry store—her dream, her passion, her “sure bet.”
We were both in our late twenties when she opened Edet Luxe in Ikoyi. At the time, she was balancing adulthood with the jittery confidence of people who still had to look up certain recipes in Nigel Slater’s cookbook. She had poured everything into it: her savings, a small loan from her mother, and an almost childlike belief that if she worked hard enough, nothing could go wrong.
“Luxury is about trust,” she would say, adjusting the delicate chains on their display busts. “People need to trust you.”
It was ironic, then, that she trusted the wrong person.
His name was Richard. A flimsy, soft-spoken man with a round face that misfitted his wiry frame. He had a way of speaking that made you believe he was always just on the verge of telling you a secret; his voice always low and conspiratorial, like he was letting you in on something arcane, especially extravagance.
Sally hired him on the spot.
“He understands luxury,” she told me confidently one afternoon as we drank in the small lounge area of her store. “He worked at The Jewel Box in V.I. for three years.”
I took a sip. “Did you check?”
She frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Did you confirm he actually worked there?”
Sally rolled her eyes. “You’re so paranoid.”
I wasn’t. But I had known Sally since we were both scrawny, overambitious preteens in junior secondary school. And I knew she wanted to believe in people, even when all evidence suggested otherwise.
Richard lasted four months.
By the time she realized the play, he had already siphoned almost eight million Naira from the business. He’d started small: overpricing pieces and pocketing the difference; slipping extra cash out of the register. When that wasn’t enough, he escalated.
The final straw was a set of custom-made diamond earrings purchased by a senator’s wife that never arrived. After threatening to ruin Sally’s reputation, Sally pleaded and refunded the money. The next morning, she stormed into the store only to find Richard was gone. And then came the unraveling: everything vanished. Cash. Jewelry. Pride. The carefully curated trust and luxury Sally had spent years building were now just an empty store. A week later, she shut Edet Luxe down.
If Edet Luxe broke her professionally, the married man, Tunde, nearly broke her emotionally.
He was older and charismatic, the kind of man whose presence filled a room before he spoke. A businessman—oil money, old money, serious money. The kind of money and chivalry that made even smart women reckless.
“He’s married,” I told her the first time she mentioned him.
“Yes,” she admitted.
That was it. No excuses; no justifications. Just “yes.”
I had expected her to say it wasn’t serious; it was merely a fling. But it wasn’t.
“He says he loves me,” she told me, her voice soft, hesitant. “That he’s going to leave her.”
I sighed. “Sally—”
“He is going to leave her.”
I struggled to find the words. Because what was there to say?
Tunde was never going to leave his wife. She knew it. I knew it. Everybody knew it.
And yet, for almost two years, she lingered.
She stayed through the broken promises, the missed birthdays, the weekends spent alone. She stayed a secret, through the carefully rationed time, the whispered phone calls, the shame of loving a man who could never fully belong to her.
She stayed until the day she didn’t.
“I’m leaving,” she told me one evening over the phone, her voice steady, almost rehearsed. “I’m moving to Amsterdam.”
Her sudden resolve was a surprise, but her chosen destination wasn’t. Amsterdam had been on the board for years—a vague, shimmering possibility, always floating in and out of reach like a flying saucer. She’d bring it up the way people talk about quitting their jobs or learning a second language: aspirationally, never urgently.
She was going to pursue her master’s, she would explain. It made sense; it had always made sense. But life, for some reason, had kept her tethered. There was always something—an obligation—and each time, she would sigh, shake her head, and say, “Not yet. Not now.”
But this time was different. I could hear it in her voice, in the absence of hesitation. No second-guessing, no wistful what-ifs.
“When?” I asked.
“Next month.”
A sharp, clean cut. No lingering; no slow unraveling.
I imagined her: suitcase by the door, passport in hand. I imagined the city awaiting her—shimmering canals, the hush of an unfamiliar room at night, the scent of a new place, the promise of a new home.
“I need to start over.” She added before ending the call.
She packed up what was left of her business and the remnants of her heart and disappeared into a new life. For the first time in years, she chose herself.
The first email came three weeks after she left.
Subject: Guess what?
Body: I live in a houseboat now...
Attached was a picture of a small, white-and-blue boat docked along a canal. It looked nothing like the kind of place Sally would live in—small, rustic, not a hint of gold or crystal anywhere.
I replied: A houseboat?
She responded: Yes! It’s so peaceful. You’d love it...
Sally had always loved the thrill of Lagos—the chaos, the noise, the drama of it all. And yet, there she was, living on water, in a city where no one knew her, with no jewelry store, no Richard, no Tunde.
She was starting over; she was doing fine.
At first, her emails were full of excitement—long descriptions of biking through cobblestone streets, of cheese markets and tulip festivals, of men with strange accents asking her on dates.
“His name is Joris. He is TALL. And he has the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen.”
“Met a new one. Lars. Architect. Smells like pine trees.”
“Okay, I think I might actually like this one. But he says he doesn’t want kids. What do you think? Is that a dealbreaker?”
“I actually met someone o. Young guy. Dark skinned. Nice teeth. Criminal defense lawyer. Nigerian. Long story short, mid-dinner date at a very nice restaurant, he blurted out that his middle name was Tunde.”
“Unprovoked, too. Mtcheeew.”
“Of course, he didn’t get a second date. Like, who asked you?”
I read her messages whenever I could. She was dating but never settling. She flirted, she explored, but she was in no hurry to get married. And then one day, she had told me she did not see herself settling down.
The years passed and her emails became infrequent, but when they did come, they were like postcards from a life I could barely imagine: A photo of her at a vineyard in Italy, wearing a wide-brimmed hat; a blurry selfie from a jazz club in Paris; a picture of her hair, streaked with gray.
“Can you believe this? I found my first gray hair! I think I’m just going to dye the whole thing silver. Be dramatic about it.”
I laughed. Of course, she would.
Then, one evening, years since she left Lagos, years since our lives had split into two different paths—I opened my inbox and saw her name.
Subject: The best thing that ever happened to me.
I clicked. There was a single attachment—a picture.
Sally sat by the window, her silvery hair neatly tucked behind her ears. The wall behind her displayed a sign that read “Carsten’s Orphanage.” In her arms, she lovingly cradled an infant dressed in a bright orange bodysuit, in what seemed to be a peaceful sleep.
Her smile was different this time. Not the impulsive, eager-to-impress smile she had worn when she bought the terrible car. Not the hopeful, waiting-to-be-loved smile she had when she spoke about Tunde.
This smile was something else entirely. A quiet kind of happiness. A certainty. Beneath the picture, just one sentence: “I am going to call her Didi.”
I stared at the screen, feeling something swell in my chest.
All her life, Sally had chased excitement. And yet, here she was, choosing something steady. A slow smile spread across my face as I closed my laptop. At that moment, my husband walked into the room.
“Didi, have you seen my car keys?”