Kunle did not tell anyone about Amina.
Not his mother, who would have asked questions he was not ready to answer. Not Sola, who would have wanted details. Not even Tunde, though he came close.
It was not secrecy. It was instinct. A sense that whatever this was, it belonged first to him alone.
The days after their second meeting passed with an unfamiliar lightness. He woke earlier. Paid attention to things he normally drifted through. The city seemed sharper, as if someone had adjusted the focus on a lens he had never realized was blurred.
They met again two days later. Then again on the weekend. Each time felt unforced. Conversation flowed easily, not because they avoided depth, but because they did not rush toward it either. They spoke about books they had loved and forgotten. About childhoods that had shaped them in ways they were only beginning to understand. About the strange loneliness of becoming an adult and realizing that no one was coming to hand you the life you were supposed to want.
"You don't talk like someone who's lost," Amina said one afternoon as they sat on a bench near the river. "You talk like someone who's searching."
Kunle considered that. "Is there a difference?"
"There is. Lost people give up. Searching people still believe there's something to find."
He smiled. "And you?"
She looked out at the water. "I think I've been both."
He wanted to ask what she was searching for. What she had been lost in. But the words did not come easily. Some things were better left in the quiet between them, at least for now.
It was on the fifth day after they met that he realized he wanted more.
Not just another coffee. Not just another walk. He wanted a place in her life that was not temporary.
They were standing at the corner where they always seemed to part. The street was busy, people moving past in quick, unremarkable lines. He did not know what prompted him to speak then. Perhaps it was the way she lingered when they said goodbye, as if she, too, was reluctant to return to whatever waited beyond him.
"Amina," he said.
"Yes?"
"Would you have dinner with me tomorrow?"
She smiled. "Is that different from what we've been doing?"
"It is," he said. "At least in my head."
She studied him for a moment, eyes searching his face for something he could not name.
"All right," she said. "Dinner."
He did not touch her then. But the space between them felt altered. Charged with a possibility neither of them spoke aloud.
That night, he walked home with a strange mixture of anticipation and fear. He was not used to caring this quickly. It felt like stepping onto a bridge whose other end he could not see.
Inside the house, the familiar sounds of family life greeted him. The television murmured from the living room. Plates clinked in the kitchen. Someone laughed.
"Kunle," his mother called. "You're home late."
"Just walking," he said.
He paused at the doorway of the living room. His father sat in the armchair by the window, reading. The lamp cast a warm pool of light over his shoulders. He looked older than Kunle remembered from childhood, though not frail. Still commanding, still solid. A man who had always seemed larger than life.
"Hey, Dad," Kunle said.
Samuel looked up. "You've been out a lot lately."
Kunle shrugged. "Just… thinking."
His father studied him for a second longer than usual.
"Thinking about what?"
Kunle hesitated. Then smiled faintly. "About what I want."
Samuel nodded slowly. "That's a dangerous thing to start doing."
"Why?"
"Because once you know, it's hard to pretend you don't."
Kunle absorbed that.
"Good night," he said.
"Good night."
He went upstairs with his father's words echoing in his head.
Amina spent the evening before their dinner staring at her wardrobe.
It was not vanity. She did not care about impressing him in the way she had once cared about impressing people. It was something else. A quiet desire to be seen clearly, not as an idea, but as herself.
She chose a simple dress, dark and unadorned. She tied her hair back loosely. She looked at her reflection and tried to recognize the woman staring back.
She had never planned for this.
She had come to the city with one purpose. Find the man whose name had shaped her life. Ask him the questions she had carried for as long as she could remember. Understand where she came from.
She had not planned for connection. Or for how quickly that connection could begin to matter.
Her phone buzzed.
Kunle: I'm outside.
Her heart tightened in a way that felt both welcome and unsettling.
She slipped on her coat and stepped out.
He stood by the curb, hands in his pockets, the streetlight catching in his eyes when he saw her.
"You look… good," he said, a little awkwardly.
"So do you."
They walked to the restaurant in easy silence. It was not a place she would have chosen on her own, but she liked that it was quiet, intimate without being pretentious. Candlelight flickered on the tables.
They sat across from each other, menus between them.
"You seem nervous," she said gently.
He smiled. "Is it that obvious?"
"A little."
He took a breath. "I don't usually do this. I mean, I do. But not when I actually care about how it goes."
She felt something warm unfold in her chest.
"I care too," she said.
The admission settled between them.
Dinner passed in fragments of conversation and shared laughter. They spoke about their families in careful outlines. About dreams that had shifted over time. About the things they had not yet figured out.
"You haven't told me much about where you came from," he said at one point.
She hesitated, then said, "I grew up with my mother. It was just the two of us."
"What about your father?"
The question was gentle, but it struck the place she kept guarded.
"I never knew him."
"I'm sorry."
She nodded. "It's complicated."
He did not push. He never did.
They left the restaurant later than they had planned, the night cool and still. They walked without speaking for a while, the rhythm of their steps comfortable.
At the corner where they usually parted, he stopped.
"Amina," he said. "Can I ask you something that might be too much too soon?"
She looked up at him. "You can ask."
"What are you hoping to find here? In this city."
The honesty in his eyes made it difficult to hide behind half-answers.
"I'm looking for answers," she said. "About who I am. About where I come from."
He nodded slowly. "Do you think you'll find them?"
"I don't know. But I know I won't find them if I don't try."
He took a step closer, not touching her, but close enough that she could feel his presence.
"And what if what you find changes everything?"
She met his gaze.
"Then I'll have to decide who I want to be after that."
Something passed between them then. A shared understanding that life was not neat, that the things worth having often came with complications.
He lifted his hand as if to touch her cheek, then stopped, waiting.
She did not pull away.
His fingers brushed her skin, tentative, respectful.
Her breath caught.
He did not kiss her. Not yet. But the moment lingered, suspended in something neither of them wanted to rush.
"I'm glad I met you," he said quietly.
"So am I."
They parted with the promise of seeing each other again soon.
She watched him walk away, heart heavy with something that felt dangerously close to hope.
Samuel had not slept.
He lay beside his wife, staring at the ceiling, the letter in his desk drawer pulsing in his thoughts. Every time he closed his eyes, the words returned.
I had a daughter.
He had spent his life believing that duty defined him. That choices made in difficult circumstances could be compartmentalized, sealed away. That what he had done in one place did not follow him into another.
He had been wrong.
The next morning, he rose early and went for a walk. The city was quiet at that hour, the streets washed clean by night. He moved through it with the familiar discipline of habit, but his mind was anything but ordered.
He tried to imagine her.
A daughter.
What did she look like? Did she have his eyes? His stubbornness? Did she know anything about him at all?
The letter had given him no way to reach her. No address. No phone number. Only a name.
Amina.
He turned it over in his mind.
He did not know whether to be grateful or afraid.
He returned home just as the house was waking. The smell of coffee, the sound of footsteps on the stairs. His wife greeted him with a smile that felt like both comfort and accusation.
"You're restless," she said softly.
He met her gaze.
"I have something I need to tell you," he said.
Her expression shifted, the smile fading into something more attentive.
"About what?"
He opened his mouth.
And closed it again.
Not yet, he told himself. He needed time. He needed to understand what this meant before he placed it into the fragile ecosystem of his family.
"About… nothing urgent," he said finally. "I'm just tired."
She studied him for a moment, then nodded. "You don't have to carry everything alone."
The words pierced him more deeply than she could have known.
Later that day, Kunle sat in his room, replaying the previous night in his mind.
He felt different.
Not lighter, exactly. More… aligned. As if a part of him that had been waiting had finally found something to move toward.
He picked up his phone and typed a message.
Last night meant something to me. I just wanted you to know.
He hesitated before sending it.
Then did.
The reply came a few minutes later.
It meant something to me too.
He lay back on his bed, staring at the ceiling, a quiet smile forming.
Down the hall, his father sat in his study, the letter still locked in the drawer, its truth pressing against the walls of the life they shared.
Neither of them knew that their paths, already crossing in invisible ways, were moving toward a collision neither could yet imagine.
And in another part of the city, Amina stood by her window, the night air brushing her face, unaware that the man she was searching for and the man she was beginning to love were bound by the same blood.
She only knew that something inside her had begun to change.
And that whatever she was walking toward, it would not be simple.blood.
She only knew that something inside her had begun to change.
And that whatever she was walking toward, it would not be simple.