The light outside was dying, yet he kept his eyes on the street below, watching for any sign of a Black woman stepping out of some car or coming down the sidewalk toward the apartment complex. He scanned the tarred road, from the corner with the red hydrant to the smoke shop whose neon lights seeped into the sitting room. He’d meant to look for only a few minutes, but a terrible anxiety had begun to nibble at the muscle beneath his heart. His eyes rested on an elderly woman walking a dog. He could see from her frequent hesitations that she must be blind. She was about to cross the road when it struck Okenna that he’d been standing at the window for too long.

Dogba, who had secured Okenna and his wife this apartment, had warned him to be careful not to be seen by the neighbors who sometimes sat on their balconies. They could alert the authorities; most Italians didn’t want people like them filling up their country. Dogba had told them this on their first day, after he had helped them escape the temporary shelter in Lampedusa by bribing the officials. A tall, lanky Nigerian with a braided ponytail, he’d sat in the passenger seat of their taxi, directing the driver in accented Italian and telling them all the things they needed to be cautious of.

The only person they did not have to worry about was the landlady. “She is a very good woman!” Dogba proclaimed loudly. “She won’t give you people any problem at all.”

Dogba said the woman was blind⁠—a genetic disorder had inflicted sudden blindness upon her years before. She’d been an accountant at a bank, and her husband worked for the government.

“They were happy⁠—very happy,” Dogba stressed, in a way that would have made even the most tired listener interested in the story he was telling. “But after she became blind, her husband tell her say, him wan leave him job look after am. They did not have children. But eh, the woman say no. No, don’t. Instead, she beg am to hire house help.”

They turned a corner and the blinking yellow light of another car transformed Dogba’s silhouetted face into something temporarily hallowed. “Guess what? That was the mistake of her life. Four months later, in that same house, on the kitchen table right there, she heard her husband making love to the maid. That was it!”

Dogba said the last sentence with a small shout and fell silent. Minutes later, they were inside the apartment.

Okenna turned away from the window. The room had darkened, and his phone told him that he’d been standing there for about twenty minutes. This was one of the marvels of this place: the way time seemed to pass so quickly. It had already been four days since he’d last seen his wife, Nkem. He sat on the sofa in the sitting room and began scrolling through Facebook. He was watching a montage of Nigerian politicians with their expensive cars when he caught the familiar sound of Nkem’s feet mounting the stairs. Without thinking, he stood, his arms ready to open in embrace. There were bags under her bloodshot eyes, and he could tell from the odor of her breath that she’d been drinking. Her hair carried a foreign smell.

While she bathed, Okenna plotted his response in their bedroom, which was lit by a fluorescent bulb that hung from a corner of the ceiling. He did not want to protest or raise dust, but how could he not? Only eight days before, they’d completed one of the most dangerous journeys in the world, through the Sahara desert to Libya, and then onward to Europe. In one week, his life and marriage had fallen into a state of paralysis.

He waited until she came out, a towel tied over her bosom, her chest and arms mostly dry. She combed her hair in front of the mirror between the sitting room and the bathroom. A drop of water trailed from her hair down her back.

“You know,” he said, “it has been four days⁠—eh?”

“Yes,” she said. “I was busy.”

He nodded, as if this were a reasonable answer. He’d tried not to sound confrontational, to exude only what it really was that he felt: desperate curiosity.

“I understand, but … what … why … what took you so long?”

She tilted her head, gently slapping her right ear to get the water out of it. She made to speak but puffed out her cheeks instead. When the words came, they carried sparks of irritation⁠—“Look, norring … norring, Okey?”

He could hear in her English the new, affected accent she used here, one meant to soften the coarseness of their African speech for European ears. He watched the way she moved her lithe hands, as if every action required the utmost care; it was one of the things he’d first found attractive about her. A habit from working as a nurse, always making sure to hold the needle carefully while entering a vein.

“Okay, omalicha, I jus’ said let me find out,” he said in English, before catching himself and switching to Igbo to ask if she was hungry.

She turned, and for the first time met his eyes. “Anyi nwere nri?”

He nodded. It was he who must not go out. The authorities were more lenient with women, but a Black African man would raise eyebrows. He was to wait for Nkem to bring more groceries. Until then, there was still some of the plain spaghetti he’d made the day before. He warmed it on the stovetop, listening as she hummed one of her favorite tunes.