Adelani had always hated moving. Not just the physical strain of packing boxes and sorting through the debris of her life, but the unsettling feeling of detachment—the knowledge that no place, no city, was truly hers. It had started in childhood, when her father, a restless academic, uprooted the family every few years, hopping from one Nigerian university to another. New school, new friends, new neighbors who were warm at first, then indifferent once they realized she wouldn't be staying long.
By the time she was sixteen, she had stopped trying to belong. When her father moved the family again, this time to Ibadan, a city full of books and heat and people who were never really interested in her, she figured it was just one more place to survive. She was never the one they waited for after school to see, never the one who made the best friends. She was always the one who had to pack up first.
Now, at thirty-one, she was in Norwich, in a small flat with beige walls and a view of the grey, obedient streets. It was not a bad life. She had a steady job at a library where no one expected her to be anything but efficient. She had a church that respected her quietness but knew little of her true self. Her weekly routine had grown into a kind of refuge—an island where nothing and no one could break her peace. If her coworkers thought she was quiet, she let them. If her neighbors assumed she was a polite, unremarkable woman with no stories to tell, she saw no need to correct them. She liked the predictability of being misunderstood.
But Adelani had a secret.
At precisely 10:47 p.m. every Saturday, when the city was settling into its lull, she transformed. The quiet, conservative church girl became someone else entirely—not through anything as scandalous as drugs or strange men in dark alleys, but through the sharp, electric thrill of anonymity.
She logged into her secret Twitter account and typed with the reckless confidence of a woman with nothing to lose.
*The thing about trust issues is that people act like you developed them in a vacuum. No, dear. Someone—maybe several someones—carefully planted them, watered them, watched them bloom.*
Her followers—over fifteen thousand of them—responded immediately.
> *Whew. Preach, sis.*
> *You have been in my diary again, I see.*
> *And yet, men will ask why women have trust issues as if they are not the perpetrators.*
She smirked. If only they knew.
In real life, she did not say things like this. In real life, she smiled politely when people talked about love and marriage and "God's timing." She let the aunties pray for her future husband without informing them that she wasn't entirely convinced she wanted one. She listened, nodding in the right places, while women in her church group discussed how many children they hoped to have, never adding that she wanted none.
It wasn't that she hated children. She just didn't want to be a mother.
It was an unspoken taboo, a quiet defiance against the script that had been written for her long before she was born. Her mother—beautiful, elegant, perpetually exasperated—had once told her, "A woman's greatest joy is in her children." It was not a statement; it was a decree. Adelani had nodded, then changed the subject.
Now, as she scrolled through responses to her tweet, she felt the familiar satisfaction of existing—fully, truthfully—in this digital world. Here, she could be as blunt as she wanted, as sharp-edged as she pleased. Here, nobody expected her to be soft and accommodating.
Her phone vibrated with a message. Incoming voice note from Ronke.
She sighed. Ronke, her best friend since secondary school, was calling from Lagos, which meant either gossip or trouble. Or both.
She pressed play.
"Adelani! Guess who I ran into today? Your ex. And guess what? He is still fine." A dramatic pause. "And still single."
Adelani rolled her eyes. "So is Buhari," she muttered, tossing her phone onto the bed.
She should have known. Trouble had a way of finding her, no matter how carefully she hid.