TDoCAJ 1: 0.2

The gods of Lagos traffic were in a benevolent mood because she made it from Victoria Island in under twenty minutes, which at this hour was practically a miracle she wasn't going to question.

She heard the swimming section before she saw it; the overlap of splashing and whistles and a coach calling across the water that meant the session was still going. She nodded at the security lady who'd jerked awake at her approach and followed the familiar path around to the pool deck.

It looked exactly as she'd left it three weeks ago. That was the thing about Ikoyi Club; it had a practiced resistance to change that she'd found stuffy growing up and now found quietly reassuring. It moved at its own pace and expected you to adjust to it, not the other way around.The same faded red loungers arranged in not exactly exacting rows. The same hibiscus hedge that needed trimming on the left side. The same rotation of mothers and a scattering of fathers clustered in their usual configurations, except, she slowed slightly, in greater numbers than a Wednesday afternoon warranted, and arranged with an awareness of the far end of the pool that didn't seem to have anything to do with watching their children swim.

She spotted Leila and made her way over, stepping around the small pile of abandoned belongings that surrounded her lounger: Tiise's slides, Tunji's towel haphazardly balled up, what appeared to be someone's half-eaten chin-chin in a ziplock bag.

Leila herself was untouched by any of it. With the kind of height that announced itself even sitting down, long legs stretched out, sunshades pushed up into her hair, she was watching the pool with the ease of someone who had spent years being looked at and had never seen a reason for that to stop.

"You're back," she smiled up at Kiiti, and moved her purse off the lounger beside her.

Kiiti dropped onto it with more weight than she intended. "I forgot how much I missed this." She meant it. She was intentional about carving out two afternoons a week for Tiise's swim meets, but over a month of back-to-back site visits and vendor calls and Mike's very patient, very pointed silences had made her almost forget that there was a version of her life that included sitting beside a pool watching the love of her life train to be the next Phelps.

She let her body sink into the lounger with gratitude, taking in the smell of chlorine, the green smell of the hedge, and the low hum of the afternoon. A couple of the older members were playing a leisurely game of tennis on the far court. The barman was restocking the outdoor fridge with the bored efficiency of a man who had done it ten thousand times. Across the pool, two women she half-recognized were sharing what looked like a very serious conversation over very bright Chapmans.

The water in the pool was still churned up from the session, the kids moving through cooldown laps in loose lanes while two coaches she knew walked the edges. A third unfamiliar figure was crouched at the far end talking to a small group of boys, tall enough that crouching still left him at eye level with them. She couldn't make out his face from here.

"Okay," she said. “Who’s that? What's happening?"

Leila's mouth curved. "New parent coach."

“Huh?”

"He did a session two weeks ago and since then, every woman in the WhatsApp group has developed a sudden interest in improving their child's technique."

Kiiti snorted. "How many of them actually got in the water?"

“Three. One did a full length, which she announced in the group at eleven-thirty at night."

"She did not."

"With a voice note."

Kiiti pressed her lips together. She looked back at the cluster near the pool edge, at the angles they were standing at. She considered getting up briefly, then didn't. The sun meant business, her lounger was comfortable, and she'd been on her feet since seven.

"He must be a sight for sore eyes."

"You have no idea," Leila said. "How's Mike?"

"Alive. Barely tolerating me." She picked up her phone. "I have three interviews this week for a new event manager. If I hire someone good, he might forgive me by the end of the year.”

"For what?"

"Existing, mostly."

Leila laughed. Her phone buzzed and she glanced at it, held up a finger, and stepped away. Kiiti watched the coaches for a moment, then turned to her own phone, and somewhere between her unread emails and the ones she meant to answer, she was asleep.

It was the water that woke her, a scatter of cold drops across her face and arms that had her sitting up. Tiise, Tunji, and Leila's twins were standing over her in various states of post-swim dishevelment, damp and delighted, already dressed in the chaotic way children dressed when left unsupervised, Tiise's shirt inside out and one of the twins with her costume strap twisted sideways.

"Okay, okay." She held up a hand against their noise. "I'm up."

"You were snoring," Tiise informed her.

"I was not snoring."

“Just a little bit," Tunji said, with the solemn honesty of someone else's child.

Leila was back on her lounger, still on her call, and caught Kiiti's eye with a look that said she had no intention of defending her.

Kiiti stood and stretched, helped straighten the twin's strap, told Tiise to fix his shirt, and gathered her things. The deck had thinned out while she'd slept, the performance audience of mothers mostly dispersed, the pool staff already rearranging the lane dividers for the evening cohort coming in from work. A Wednesday winding down the way Wednesdays did here, slow and unhurried.

"Ready?" Leila said.

“Yeah, let's go before they remember they're hungry."

They were nearly at the gate when Leila nudged her.

She looked.

He was maybe fifteen feet away, talking to one of the older coaches, and for a half-second she took in only the fact of him — tall, the kind of build that came from actual use rather than a gym, still in his coaching clothes. Then her brain caught up with what her eyes were already telling her and the ground did something unreliable beneath her feet.

Seven years.

He hadn't looked over yet. She had maybe three seconds.

He looked over.

The frown came slowly, the frown of someone sorting through a large mental filing cabinet, not alarmed, not certain, just working. His eyes moved over her face with the steady focus of a man who was accustomed to being patient and didn't yet know he should be anything else.

She turned back to the kids.

“Tiise, come on." Her voice came out level, which was its own small miracle. She put her hand on his shoulder and steered, catching Tunji's wrist with her other hand, keeping her eyes forward and her pace measured because she was not a woman who fled from a swimming pool in front of her friend and four children, she was absolutely not doing that.

"Hey!” Leila was half-laughing behind her. "What's the hurry?"

"I think I need to eat something." She didn't slow down. "Low blood sugar."

She didn't look back. She focused on the exit turnstile, on the security lady now deep in conversation with one of the cleaners, on getting the children through in the right order, on not doing the thing her entire body was telling her to do which was walk considerably faster.

Only when they reached the car, said their goodbye kisses to Leila and the twins, got the doors closed and the boys buckled and the driver out into the street, did she sit back, look at the roof, and let out a breath she hadn't known she was holding.

What the hell was the father of her son doing in Lagos?