BEFORE WE LEAVE

A story in parts

Author’s note: I need to be honest with you before you read this chapter. I almost did not write this story. Not because I did not have it in me, but because I was not sure anyone would want to read it. Fiction felt like a big leap for someone who had mostly written essays and reflections but Eliana and Tito would not leave me alone. They showed up fully formed, almost — a girl with an old soul and a childlikeness she hadn’t outgrown, a boy who prayed before he did the brave thing — and they asked me to tell their story. So I did. And you stayed.

This is my first fiction. My very first. And the fact that you read it chapter by chapter, waited 24 hours between parts, sent messages, left comments, restacked your favourite moments, that is something I will carry for a very long time. You made this feel real in a way I could not have manufactured on my own. Thank you. From the bottom of my heart and brain.

This last chapter is my gift to you. A thank you wrapped in a story. Read it slowly. You have earned it.

AFTER NYSC

Five years later.

She saw him before he saw her.

That was perhaps inevitable, given that she had learned his profile from across an assembly ground at seventeen and had never entirely unlearned it. The intervening years had not made her less observant. If anything they had sharpened it.

The Lagos Youth Leadership Summit was held at the Civic Centre on a Thursday in March, and Eliana had just stepped off the stage from the second panel of the morning — communications and narrative in social development — carrying the familiar mix of calm and quiet adrenaline that public speaking left in her. She was heading toward the refreshments table, her lanyard in her hand, when she saw him on the other side of the atrium.

He was taller. Or she had forgotten. Or both.

He was in a grey kaftan and dress trousers, speaking to someone she did not recognize, one hand in his pocket, entirely unhurried and he had the same quality she had first noticed from the second row of assembly at sixteen, the quality of someone who has decided what they are there for and needs no further confirmation of it.

She was twenty-three years old, a whole country of experience behind her, and she stood at the refreshments table for a moment longer than the water required.

Get it together, Eliana.

She looked at him one more second anyway. Then she got her water and walked over.

He turned before she reached him which should not have surprised her and still did, slightly.

“Eliana.”

The way he said her name had always been even. Like it was something he was certain of.

“Tito.”

The person he had been speaking to looked between them once, said “I’ll find you later,” and left with the tact of someone who had read the room correctly. Eliana chose not to acknowledge this.

Tito looked at her — really looked, the way you look at someone when five years compress into a single moment of recognition — and something shifted briefly in his expression before it settled back into steadiness. Not all the way, though. Not entirely.

“You were on the second panel,” he said. “I watched.”

“I know,” she said. “I saw you in the third row.”

The corner of his mouth moved. “Of course you did.”

“Of course I did.” She looked at him properly, now that she had the right to. The kaftan suited him in a way the school blazer had not quite managed. There was a fullness to how he occupied his own frame now, the ease of a person who had grown into himself without fighting it. “You look well.”

“You look like yourself,” he said. “But more.”

She held his gaze for a beat. “Which part is more?”

Something came into his eyes that was not quite a smile but lived in the same neighbourhood. “All of it,” he said simply.

She decided, privately, that the refreshments table had been worth stopping at.

They found a quieter corner away from the current of delegates, and stood with their water bottles like two people who had long ago learned how to talk to each other and had not forgotten though the nature of that talking, Eliana was already aware, had shifted in some way that the atrium lighting was making difficult to be casual about.

“Sports development NGO,” she said, nodding at his name badge. Cornerstone Sports Initiative. Director of Programmes.

“We use football as a pipeline for leadership development. Young people in underserved communities, the pitch as the classroom.” He said it with the quiet certainty of someone who had been building toward this for years. “NYSC was in Kaduna. I saw what sport could do in a community with very little else. I couldn’t stop thinking about it after.”

She watched him talk about it. The slight animation that came into his face when he spoke about something he genuinely cared about, the hands becoming slightly more expressive, the voice dropping half a register. She had always found that version of him difficult to look away from, and five years had done nothing to change that. “That sounds exactly like you,” she said.

“What are you building?”

“Communications consultancy. I help development organizations tell their stories well enough to be funded and joined.” A pause. “Started it after Ashesi. It’s growing.”

“That sounds exactly like you,” he said, and the way he said it — familiar, unhurried, with the recognition of someone who had known her before she fully knew herself — did something she was not going to name right now.

“How is Kelechi?” she asked, because grounding the conversation in Kelechi was always a reliable strategy.

Something crossed his face that was pure amusement. “Still Kelechi. He’s in marketing. The whole world is his tuck shop.” He looked at her. “Bunmi?”

“Journalism. Very good at it. She still claims she saw everything coming from SS2.”

“Did she?”

“She saw enough,” Eliana said.

He laughed quietly, genuinely, the same laugh she had first heard in a library side garden when she told him about a document with subheadings and something in her chest recognized it before her mind caught up. Five years. A whole country between us. He laughs exactly the same.

“I kept it,” she said. She had not planned to say it yet, or possibly at all, but it came out the way honest things did when she stopped managing them. “The notebook page. From the mango tree. It’s still in my journal.”

He went still in the particular way he went still when something had landed.

“I carry it everywhere,” she added. More than she intended. She held his gaze anyway because she was twenty-three, and she had done the work on herself that made her unafraid of her own honesty, and she was tired of pressing things down that did not need to be pressed.

Something shifted in the way he was looking at her. He took one small, unhurried step closer, not dramatically, not performing anything, just closing the conversational distance the way you do when something matters enough to not shout across it.

“You still have it,” he said. Quietly.

“I still have it,” she confirmed.

The thing that had always been there — which they had handled with discipline and grace at seventeen for all the right reasons — was now sitting between them in a conference atrium in Lagos, asking a different question entirely. And they were both old enough to hear it clearly.

“The things forming us most are the things we’re barely noticing,“ he said quietly.

“We were barely noticing,” she said.

“We were.” His eyes stayed on hers. “And look at us now.”

The announcer called the next panel. Around them the atrium shifted, delegates moving in a slow current toward the hall. Neither of them moved, and both of them noticed that neither of them moved, and there was a beat where that fact sat between them openly, without apology.

“Tea,” he said finally. “After the last session. You still make it at strange hours?” His voice was even, but his eyes were not entirely casual, and they both knew it.

“Always.”

He looked at her, not the polite, measured look of two old acquaintances, but the kind of look that says: I see you. I have always seen you. And I am done pretending that is a small thing.

“Then tea, Eliana.” Her name, deliberate and unhurried, the way he had always said it. “Just you and me. No agenda.”

No agenda.

The same words from five years ago, different weight entirely now.

She felt them land somewhere deep and warm, and for once she did not take inventory of her own reaction before allowing it. She was twenty-three. She had carried a torn notebook page across a national border without thinking twice. She had said I’ll start in rooms full of strangers and meant it. She was not afraid of this.

“Yes,” she said.

Completely. Without qualification.

And she did not press it down this time because some things are not meant to be pressed down forever. Some things are simply meant to wait until you are ready to hold them properly.

She was ready.

She had been ready for longer than she knew.

---

Really end.

“No agenda.” The same words. Five years later. A completely different weight. And she said yes completely, without qualification, without pressing it down and I had to close my laptop and walk away for a few minutes because something in me needed a moment to just sit with how far they had come.

From a folded note at the bottom of a school bag. To this.

From a girl who described him as “the sports prefect” when her mother asked, because that was all she would let herself say. To a woman who told him out loud, in a Lagos conference atrium that she had carried his words across a national border without thinking twice.

My very first attempt at building people from nothing, at giving them voices and friendships and feelings and growth and letting them live on a page. And if I am honest, I did not know if I could finish it. I have been thinking about writing another one, a new story, new characters, a different world. Nothing confirmed yet, just a feeling. The same kind of feeling I had before Eliana showed up in my head and refused to leave. So we will see. When she arrives, I will let you know.

Feelings are okay. I need you to hear that one more time as we close this. The feeling is not the problem. It never was. It is what we do with it, the grace, the discipline, the wisdom to hold something carefully without grasping at it before its time, that is the whole lesson. I hope this story gave someone the language for something they have been carrying quietly. I hope it reminded someone that not now is not the same as no and that the season of becoming is not a waiting room. It is the real thing.

Thank you for hanging on with me from the very beginning. You watched them grow. You watched me grow. And I am grateful more than I know how to say in a Substack end note for every single one of you who made it here.