UNSPOKEN (Chapter 16)

Who Do You Think You Are?

May 11, 2026

Some wounds don’t arrive dramatically.
No shouting. No confrontation.
Just a sentence.
Said casually.
By someone who didn’t know they were holding a knife.
……..
Narrator’s Nook
Everything was going well.
She’s been going to church. Reading her Bible. Attending MAP group. Doing the recordings. Saying one true thing per day. Making jokes in the office. Laughing with Zainab about a bench in a garden in VI.
Everything was going well.
And someone said something.
Casually.
And Ọrọ who has spent twenty-four years learning to read the space between words for danger heard every layer of it.
Let’s begin.

ỌRỌ’S POV — Wednesday, Shapers Ltd., 12:32 p.m.

The day started well.

Wednesday had given me a good morning.

The Lady Doreen check-in at nine had gone well. She had shared feedback on the Shaping Leaders framework update I had submitted, the kind of feedback that was direct and correct and left you feeling like you had been seen rather than evaluated. I had taken notes. I had asked two questions. I had left the fifth floor feeling solid.

By noon I was at my desk, earphones in — one, not two — working through the curriculum section that had been giving me trouble since last week. The kind of focused work that arrived when the brain decided to cooperate and everything else faded.

I was in it.

Then Mautin appeared at my desk.

Not unusual. He stopped by occasionally. Not often enough to be a pattern, not rarely enough to be remarkable. Just — sometimes. Usually with something brief. A MAP group update, a book recommendation, a question about the Shaping Leaders data that was adjacent to his own work.

I took out my earphone.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

He was holding a takeaway bag. He had been out, clearly, the kind of lunch run that people who left the building for food did, which I was doing more of now but still not every day. He leaned against the partition beside my desk with the easy comfort of someone who had decided this conversation would be brief.

“How are you doing?” he said.

“Good,” I said. “The framework section is finally cooperating with ne.”

“Good.”

He glanced at my screen briefly.

Then, in the same casual register, like the sentence was simply the next one in the sequence,

“Have you spoken to your family recently? Your parents?”

I looked at him.

“Why?” I said.

“The Jos situation,” he said. “ You once said, you grew up in Jos. So, I just put two and two together. The news has been bad this week. I saw updates this morning — the unrest in some of the residential areas. I guess your family is there.”

He said it simply.

Not dramatically. The way you mentioned something you assumed the other person already knew and was already handling.

“Just wanted to check you’d been in touch.”

I held his gaze.

The Jos situation.

He was not wrong that it had been bad. I had been following the news with the controlled attention of someone who did not want to panic but also could not fully look away. The communal tensions that had been simmering for weeks had escalated in the past few days — clashes in some neighbourhoods, road closures, the kind of news that arrived in Lagos drawing rooms as distant headline and in Jos family WhatsApp groups as: don’t go out today. Stay inside. Pray.

My family was in Jos. My mother, my father, my siblings. The house on the street where Mama had been selling provisions since I was seven years old.

I had not called them this week.

I had seen the news. I had noted it. I had told myself I would call on the weekend.

I had not called.

And Mautin who had been in Jos exactly zero times, who knew my family existed but had no texture for what that existence looked like, who had heard me say I used to live in Jos in passing and had apparently filed it. Mautin had just, casually, in the middle of a Wednesday lunch hour, made that fact audible.

Have you spoken to your family recently?

Seven words.

Said with genuine concern. I could hear the genuine concern. It was real, it was him, it was the same quality of attention he gave everything he chose to pay attention to.

But underneath the concern, I heard another thing.

Why haven’t you called them?

Not stated. Implied. Or not even implied. Received. Translated by the antenna into an indictment.

“I’ve been following the news,” I said. My voice came out measured. Correct. The email voice, arriving in person.

“Okay,” he said. “Just — it looked serious. I wasn’t sure if you’d seen.”

“I’ve seen,” I said.

A pause.

He looked at me briefly like he was trying to read me and is assessing the temperature of a room.

Then he nodded once and straightened up from the partition.

“Okay,” he said again. “Good.”

He lifted the takeaway bag slightly.

“I’ll let you get back to it.”

He went to his desk.

I put my earphone back in.

I looked at my screen.

The framework section was no longer cooperating with me.

I lasted forty minutes before I opened my notes app.

Not to write. To read. The morning question from today, written at 6:08 a.m.:

What did I want to say to myself today that I didn’t?

I had written: That calling home is not a failure of love. That I have been managing the distance the same way I manage everything. By making the management look like a choice.

I stared at that sentence.

Then I looked across the office to where Mautin was at his desk, eating his takeaway, reading something on his screen. Completely unaware. The man who had just, with seven genuinely concerned words, walked directly onto the landmine I had been circling for weeks.

Have you spoken to your family recently?

He didn’t know.

He didn’t know about the dinner table and the look that closed my mouth at age seven. He didn’t know about what happened in Kaduna before we moved to Jos. He didn’t know that my relationship with home was not the clean, warm thing that the word family implied in normal conversation — that it was complicated in ways I had not yet found the language for, that calling home required a kind of preparation that had nothing to do with finding the time.

He didn’t know any of it.

He had just seen the news and thought of me and asked.

That was all.

And my antenna had taken just checking you’ve been in touch and translated it into you are a bad daughter and I have noticed and I am letting you know I have noticed.

I knew this was what had happened.

Knowing did not fully dissolve it.

I picked up my phone.

I opened the family WhatsApp group.

Adekunle Family — Shining Stars

The last message was from my elder sister Bimpe, sent two days ago: a news article link and three words. Please be careful.

Below that, nothing.

No response from Mama. No response from my father who had never, in the history of this WhatsApp group, sent a single message, but whose number was in the group as proof of existence. No response from my seventeen-year-old younger brother Seun, who communicated exclusively in memes. No response from my younger sister Dara, twenty, who was at university in Ibadan and called home more than I did. No response from Brother Odunlade.

No response from me.

I looked at the unanswered news article.

I typed: I saw this. I’ve been following. How is everyone? Is the area okay?

I hit send.

I put my phone face down.

I stared at the framework section that was not cooperating.

At 4:30 p.m. I was packing up when Mautin appeared again.

Not at my desk this time but at the elevator, where we arrived simultaneously, the coincidence of leaving at the same time that had been happening with a frequency that was probably just geography and probably nothing else.

We stood at the elevator.

“Good afternoon?” he said.

“The framework is done”, I said. “Finally.”

“Good.” The elevator opened. We got in. He pressed ground floor. I had already pressed it. The button was already lit. He looked at it and then at me with the faint acknowledgement of someone who had noticed a thing and chosen not to make it a thing.

The elevator descended.

“The family group responded?” he asked.

Not looking at me — looking at the doors.

I went still.

“How do you know I messaged them?” I said.

“I didn’t,” he said. “I was asking if they responded to the news generally.”

He glanced at me briefly.

“Did you reach out to them?”

I looked at the floor numbers.

“Yes,” I said.

“Good,” he said.

Simple. Warm. No weight in it.

But I heard the weight anyway.

Good. Like I had done the correct thing after a delay that he had noticed. Like he had been monitoring the situation and had now received confirmation that I had acted appropriately.

The elevator opened.

“Mautin,” I said.

He stopped. Turned.

“When you asked earlier — about my family.”

I held his gaze.

“U need you to understand something.”

He waited. The full attention, the interior kind.

“My relationship with home is not simple,” I said.

“It’s not the kind of relationship where I call on Tuesday and it’s fine. There is… there is history there. That I haven’t fully told you. And when you ask, casually, whether I’ve been in touch, it lands differently than you intend it to.”

He looked at me.

Not defensively. Not with the deflation of someone who has been told they did something wrong. With the steady openness of someone who is receiving information and is going to sit with it properly.

“Okay,” he said. “I hear that.”

A pause.

“I didn’t know. I should have asked less casually.”

“You couldn’t have known,” I said. “I haven’t told you.”

“I know,” he said.

“But I still should have. I assumed. I assumed it was the straightforward thing.”

“Most people do”, I said.

A pause.

“Will you tell me?” he said. “Not now. Not here. But — at some point.”

I looked at him.

The VI evening outside the building. The traffic beginning its nightly negotiation. The air with its Lagos evening smell of salt and exhaust and somewhere nearby something frying.

“Maybe. Maybe at some point,” I said.

He nodded once.

“Okay.”

We went in different direction. Him to his ride, me to the bus stop where I was still, some days, when I felt like it, taking Mallam Isah’s danfo despite the rides I had started ordering.

Today was a danfo day.

I sat in my corner seat.

The city moved outside the window.

I opened the family WhatsApp group.

Mama had responded at 3:47 p.m. — one message, typically Mama in its economy:

We are fine. The area is tense but we are inside. Your father is resting. Come and visit when you can.

I read it three times.

Your father is resting.

I typed back: Okay Mama. I’ll call this weekend. Please stay safe.

I put my phone in my bag.

Outside, Lagos did its evening things.

I thought about what I had said to Mautin at the elevator. History there. That I haven’t fully told you.

It was the most I had said about home to anyone except Sewa. And even with Sewa, I had said it in fragments — pieces here and there, never the full picture assembled into one frame.

The antenna had misfired this afternoon. I knew that. Mautin had been concerned and I had received it as criticism. That was the old pattern in a new location, exactly what Coach Smart had named.

But underneath the misfire — underneath the translation error — was something true.

I had not called home.

The Jos situation had been in the news for weeks.

And I had not called.

Not because I was busy. But because calling home required a preparation my management system had been quietly declining to arrange.

That was the true thing.

The one I had to sit with.

MAUTIN’S POV — Wednesday Evening

I sat in my ride home and thought about the elevator conversation.

Not with guilt. I had not done something wrong in the fundamental sense. Genuine concern, genuinely expressed. But I had done something I was learning to call careless. Not cruel. Careless.

I had assumed.

I had seen the Jos news and thought of Ọrọ and assumed that calling home was a simple thing. A logistics thing. A matter of finding the time and making the call and having the warm exchange and hanging up satisfied.

I had not considered that home might be a complicated geography.

I should have.

Because I knew from everything she had mentioned, the fragments she had given that her father was a military man who ran a silent house. That she was the third of five children and had spent most of her childhood finding ways to be invisible. That she had built a management system so comprehensive that she had forgotten it was a system.

People who built those systems usually built them for a reason.

And the reason was usually located at home.

I had just walked directly into that without a map.

She had told me. Calmly. Without drama.

When you ask, casually, whether I’ve been in touch, it lands differently than you intend it to.

That sentence had weight.

Not accusation. She was not accusing me. But it was information about her interior that she had chosen to share standing in a lobby at 4:30 p.m. on a Wednesday, which meant she had decided I was worth giving it to.

That was not nothing.

I owed her the corresponding honesty.

I opened WhatsApp.

I want to say something, I typed. You don’t have to respond tonight.

I sent it.

Then:

When I asked about your family today, I was thinking about the news and I thought of you and I acted on the concern without thinking about whether my way of expressing it was helpful. It wasn’t. I assumed your relationship with home was simpler than it is. That’s on me.

Send.

I’m not asking you to explain anything you’re not ready to explain. I just didn’t want the assumption to sit there unchallenged.

Send.

I put my phone in my pocket.

The ride moved through Lagos traffic. The evening light. The city doing its thing.

My phone buzzed.

Her reply:

Thank you for that. It means something that you named it.

Then, after a pause:

My father is apparently resting. Mama said the area is tense. I messaged the family group.

I read it.

“Good,” I typed. Then I deleted it.

Not good. Not as a response to someone who had just navigated something difficult. Too small. Too similar to what had started the whole thing.

I typed instead: I’m glad you reached out to them. That couldn’t have been easy.

Her reply came after a moment.

It wasn’t. But I did it.

I know, I said. That’s the work.

A pause. Then she sent a voice note.

I pressed play.

Her voice. Not the managed version but the real one. Slightly tired around the edges in the way voices got at the end of hard days.

“I owe you an explanation about home. Not tonight. But soon. You said the right thing at the elevator and I want you to know that I heard it. And I’m — I’m working on the distance. Between me and them. It’s slow. But I’m working on it.”

I listened to it twice.

Then I typed: Take your time. I’ll be here.

I put my phone away.

The ride pulled up to the front of our church building.

I got out.

I stood outside for a moment in the Yaba evening and I thought about what she had said.

I’m working on the distance.

Yes. She was.

In every room she entered. Every earphone she didn’t put in. Every true thing she said out loud. Every voice note she sent instead of managed text.

She was working on the distance.

I hope she isn't so mad at me that she doesn't come for midweek service in order to avoid me.

Join The Smart Seide’s subscriber chat

Available in the Substack app and on web

ỌRỌ’S POV — Wednesday, 11:47 p.m.

I had been asleep for forty minutes when my phone buzzed.

Not the WhatsApp notification sound but the call sound. Loud, insistent, the kind that pulled you out of sleep before your brain had assembled itself.

I grabbed it.

Unknown number.

I picked up.

“Ọrọ.”

Mama’s voice.

Not the voice note warmth. Not the 4:00 p.m. are you eating energy. Something underneath all of that. The voice Mama used when things had moved past the point where she could manage them into ordinary language.

“Mama?” I sat up. “What happened?”

“Your father,” she said. “We are at the hospital. He collapsed this evening. They are saying it is his heart.” A pause — the pause of someone holding themselves very still because the alternative was not holding.

“I need you to come, Ọrọ. I need everyone home.”

The room was dark. The Yaba street outside, quieter at midnight, not silent.

“Which hospital?” I said.

She told me.

“I’m coming,” I said. “Tomorrow morning. First thing.”

“Come safe,” she said. “The roads — with the situation here — come safe.”

“I will.”

“Ọrọ.”

“Yes, Mama.”

A pause.

“Your father was asking for you,” she said. “Before he went under. He asked where you were.”

I sat in the dark with that sentence.

Sergeant Major Biodun Adekunle. The man who had run a silent house. Who had communicated through atmosphere rather than language. Who had given me one look at a dinner table when I was seven and closed my mouth for seventeen years.

Asking where I was.

“I’m coming, Mama,” I said. “Tell him I’m coming.”

The call ended.

I sat in the dark for a long time.

Then I got up.

I started packing.

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?