She stopped calling as often. She said she was busy with assignments. She said the network in her area was bad. She said she was tired and needed rest.
Daniel listened and understood and kept sending money and kept calling and kept waiting.
Then one week she did not pick up at all.
He called fourteen times in three days.
Nothing.
He sent messages.
Nothing.
He asked a mutual friend to check on her. The friend reported back awkwardly that Tracy seemed fine. She had been seen around campus laughing and looking well.
Daniel sat with that information for a long time. Something cold settled in his chest, but still he told himself there must be an explanation. She was probably stressed. She would call when she was ready.
He would wait.
He kept waiting.
She never called.
The day everything became clear arrived on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon.
Daniel was in the middle of changing a tire when a sleek black SUV pulled up slowly at the edge of the road. He didn’t pay special attention at first. Nice cars stopped at the shop all the time.
He wiped his hands on his overalls and walked over.
The passenger door opened.
Tracy stepped out.
Daniel stopped walking.
His brain took a moment to understand what his eyes were seeing.
Tracy. His Tracy. Standing on the same street as his shop, wearing expensive clothes he had never seen before, with sunglasses that probably cost more than a week of his salary.
She had not seen him yet. She was laughing at something the driver had said.
Then she turned.
And she saw him.
For one brief moment, something moved across her face. Shock. Recognition.
Then nothing.
Her expression went completely flat, like a phone screen going dark.
Daniel walked forward slowly. His heart was pounding, but his voice was calm.
“Tracy.”
She looked at him the way you look at a stranger who calls your name by mistake.
Then she turned to the driver, who had stepped out of the car, a tall, well-dressed young man, and said simply, “I don’t know him.”
The man looked Daniel up and down: dirty overalls, rough hands, small roadside shop behind him.
A slight smile played at the corner of his mouth. The kind of smile that is worse than any insult because it does not even consider you worth insulting properly.
He said something quietly to Tracy, and she laughed.
They got back in the car and drove away.
Daniel stood on the roadside for a long time after the car disappeared.
Around him, Lagos continued as it always did: loud, busy, unbothered. A danfo bus honked. A woman walked past balancing a tray on her head. Someone nearby was frying akara, and the smell drifted through the air.
None of it reached him.
He was somewhere far away.
That night, in the single room he rented not far from the shop, Daniel sat on the edge of his bed in the dark.
He thought about the morning he had told Tracy he was leaving school. He thought about the look on her face, the tears, the promises, the tight hug. He thought about every Friday he had sent money he could barely spare. He thought about the reading lamp. He thought about fourteen unanswered calls.
Then he put his face in his hands and he cried.
Not the kind of crying that feels good afterward. The kind that comes from a place so deep it surprises you. The kind that makes no sound because the pain is too heavy even for noise.
He cried for a long time.
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