THE DOOR OF NO RETURN. EPISODE 7: THE VISITORb

KEHINDE AKPORIEN
@akporienkehinde866986
5 days ago

When Ada came back through the door, Simi was waiting for her.
But Simi was still in Lagos.
Ada had not called her.
And whatever wore Simi's face smiled too wide.

The archive door swung open before Ada had finished pulling herself up, and there stood Simi, leaning against the frame, arms crossed, wearing the ankara wrapper she always wore when she wanted to look like she had not been worrying, which was exactly how Ada knew she had been worrying terribly.

"You have been in here three hours." Simi's voice was light, teasing, achingly familiar. "Dele has been calling you nonstop. Why did you not pick up?"
Ada's mouth went bone dry. "You are supposed to be in Lagos. Your flight is not until Thursday."
Something crossed Simi's face. Not confusion exactly. A flicker, like a bad connection dropping mid sentence, and for one blinding instant Ada saw something underneath the smile that had no business being there.

"I came back early," Simi said. "Obviously."
"I never called you."
"I did not need you to." The smile stretched, a fraction of a second too long, a fraction of an inch too wide, before settling back into something almost, almost, like her oldest friend's face. "I just knew you needed me."

It was such a Simi thing to say that Ada nearly believed it. Nearly. But she had known Simi since primary school. She had memorized the gap in her front teeth, the way her left eyebrow rose higher than her right whenever she teased. This Simi's teeth were perfectly even. This Simi's eyebrows moved in flawless symmetry, like a mirror learning to imitate a face from the outside, getting almost everything right and missing the one detail that mattered.

Dele found them in the corridor twenty minutes later, and Ada watched his expression change the instant he saw who stood beside her. Not alarm yet. Just a small, involuntary crease of wrongness he could not name and could not stop feeling.

"Simi." He kept his voice careful, controlled. "When did you land?"
"This morning," Simi said, at the exact moment Ada said, "I do not know," and the two answers collided in the air and hung there, ugly and unresolved.

That night, walking Simi to the guest room, Ada noticed it. The tiled corridor floor, still damp from the evening's cleaning, held no prints behind her friend's bare feet. None. Not even the faint ghost of a smudge. Her stomach dropped through the floor itself.

She said nothing. She did not sleep either. She lay awake counting her own heartbeat like a countdown clock she could not stop.
In the morning she called the real Simi's number, hands shaking so violently she nearly dropped the phone twice.

Simi answered on the second ring, voice thick with sleep, four hours behind Lagos time. "Ada? Why are you calling this early, is something wrong, are you crying, talk to me."
Ada hung up without a word. Down the hall she could hear the thing wearing her best friend's face, humming a song the real Simi had always hated, standing in a kitchen that made absolutely no sound at all.

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