The rain came the way it always did in July, without warning, hammering the zinc roofs of Victoria Island until the sound swallowed every generator on the street. Adaeze Umeh had exactly four minutes before her battery died, and she used every one of them running from the danfo stop on Ahmadu Bello Way to the half-finished building on Kofo Abayomi, the one with scaffolding still bolted to its face and a security guard who slept through thunder. She had been photographing it for three weeks for her architecture blog, sneaking up the unfinished stairwell to the ninth-floor balcony because the light there, just before a storm, turned the lagoon the colour of gunmetal.
She did not expect anyone else to be insane enough to be up there.
He was leaning on the railing with his shirt already soaked through, a laptop bag clutched to his chest like a child he was trying to keep dry, and when the door banged open behind him he spun around so fast he nearly went over the rail into eight floors of black air and NEPA-dark city.
"Ah ah, sorry o," Adaeze said, breathless, water running off her braids in ropes. "I didn't know anybody would be — this is not your house, is it?"
"Neither is it yours," he said, and there was a laugh underneath the words even though his voice was shaking. "I've been coming up here since April. Nobody ever comes."
"I've been coming since May." She held up her phone, screen cracked in the corner, battery icon a furious red. "For pictures. The light. You get the whole bridge from here when it's clear."
He looked at her properly then, the way people do when they've stopped being afraid and started being curious, and she saw a tall man, maybe thirty, with the particular exhaustion of someone who worked too many hours in a bank building further down the Island, tie still knotted despite the storm, shoes ruined. "Tunde," he said. "Tunde Bakare. I work at the Eko Atlantic site office — well, near it. I come here because my own flat in Lekki has three roommates and a landlord who thinks doors should be optional, and I need forty-five minutes of quiet before I go home and pretend I like my life."
"Adaeze," she said. "I run a blog nobody reads about buildings nobody finishes. This one's my favourite. Whoever stopped funding it left the best view in Lagos just sitting here."
Below them, Third Mainland Bridge was a necklace of red brake lights stretching toward the mainland, blurred by rain into a long smear of colour, and somewhere beneath that the lagoon churned dark and restless against the pilings. A danfo conductor's voice rose faintly from the street, "Oshodi, Oshodi, one chance," swallowed almost immediately by another crack of thunder.
"You should go before it gets worse," Tunde said, though he made no move to leave himself. "The stairwell has no rail past the sixth floor. I nearly broke my neck the first week."
"You first, then. Since you know where the gaps are."
He smiled — really smiled, the kind that changed his whole face from tired banker to something younger — and gestured for her to walk ahead of him instead, one hand hovering near her elbow without touching, the way a man behaves when he has decided, quietly and immediately, that he does not want anything to happen to her. They picked their way down eight flights of exposed rebar and wet concrete by the light of his phone, her explaining why the building's original developer had vanished to Dubai owing contractors eleven months of pay, him listening far more carefully than the story deserved.
At the ground floor, the security guard was awake now, arguing with a delivery man about generator fuel, and the ordinary world reasserted itself in noise and neon and the smell of hot oil from a suya stand across the road. Adaeze realised she didn't want to walk toward it yet.
"I come on Thursdays," she said, too quickly, immediately embarrassed by how it sounded. "For the light. Before it fades."
"I come most days," Tunde said. "But I could start caring about the light too."
Standing under what remained of the scaffolding awning, rain sheeting silver in the security light behind him, he looked at her like a man deciding whether to say something reckless, and then he didn't say it, and the not-saying sat between them warmer than the thing itself would have been.
"Thursday, then," she said, and stepped out into the rain toward her bus stop, because if she stayed under that awning one more second she was going to invite a stranger to dinner, and there were two very different kinds of trouble a person like her could get into in this city, and she had no idea yet which kind he was.
He watched her go until the rain and the dark folded her into the crowd of Third Mainland-bound commuters, then he climbed back up alone, because for the first time in months he wanted one more minute with the view before it disappeared.