The Flat on Herbert Macaulay Way

She told no one about the letters.

Not her sister Adaeze in Enugu, who would have squealed. Not her mother, who would have prayed. Not her friend Kemi from work, who would have taken one look at the envelope and said it was a scam. She kept them in a shoebox under the bed, with a rubber band round them, and she read them at night with a cup of tea and the fan turned low.

Dear Ifeoma,

You asked what I do. I am a marine engineer. I work on the supply boats that service the offshore rigs. It is a good job and a lonely one. Three weeks on, three weeks off. The sea is beautiful at dawn. It is less beautiful at four in the morning when the engine fails.

You asked what I like. I like quiet. I like the smell of diesel and wet rope. I like pepper soup made by my mother and not by me. I like the sound of a man laughing in the next cabin through a thin wall, even if I don't know the joke.

What do you like?

Chidi

She wrote:

Dear Chidi,

I am a quantity surveyor at a construction firm in Victoria Island. It is less glamorous than it sounds. I measure things. Bricks, pipes, wires. I tell men with hard hats that they have used too much cement.

I like fresh bread. I like rain on a tin roof. I like the particular silence of a Lagos Sunday, just before the generators start. I do not like my landlord, who has twice raised the rent without notice and called me "young madam" in a voice that suggests I am a goat.

I do not know your sister. But I have been thinking about her. I hope she is well.

Ifeoma

She hesitated over the last line. She had not planned to write it. She had no idea why Chidi had said "my sister," only that in his second letter, almost casually, he had mentioned that Amara Okoro was his younger sister and that he had written to her address every month for the last two years. She had taken the hint and not asked.

The reply, when it came, was a single page.

Dear Ifeoma,

Thank you for asking. I realise I never explained.

Amara died two years ago. A road accident on the Enugu expressway. She was twenty-four. She had just finished her master's degree and was on her way home to tell Mama she had got a job at a hospital.

She never arrived.

After the funeral I could not make myself stop writing to her. It started as a way to keep her alive. I'd imagine her reading my letters in her flat, laughing at my jokes, rolling her eyes. I'd imagine her writing back.

I know it's foolish. I know she's gone. But writing to her has been the only thing that has made the grief bearable.

When your first letter came, I almost stopped. I thought: I have been writing to a ghost, and now the ghost has an address. But I read what you wrote. I read the part about the tomato. And I laughed. For the first time in two years, I laughed at something that wasn't a memory.

I am not asking you to replace her. I am only grateful.

Chidi

Ifeoma set the letter down. Her tea had gone cold. Her eyes were hot. She sat in the lamplight, with the fan whirring, for a long time.

Then she took out a fresh sheet and began to write, and the pen shook, and she did not stop for three hours.

Dear Chidi,

I am so sorry.

I do not have the words. I wish I did. I have been staring at your letter for an hour, and everything I think of sounds either too small or too large.

I'll tell you what I know. I know that grief is a country with no map. I know that my father died when I was fifteen, and I wrote him letters for a year, and burned them on the anniversary. I know it did not help. I know it helped enormously.

I will not say it gets easier. I'll say it gets quieter.

And I will say this. You are not foolish. A person who writes to their dead sister is not mad. A person who stops is just a person who has learned another way to carry her.

I will keep writing, if you like. Not as Amara. As me.

Your friend,

Ifeoma

She posted it the next morning. Then she did something she had not done in three years: she called her sister in Enugu and told her everything.

"You're writing to a strange man," said Adaeze, after a long silence.

"Yes."

"A stranger you've never met."

"Yes."

"Who writes to his dead sister."

"Yes."

"Ifeoma. That is the most romantic thing I have ever heard."

"It's not romantic. It's friendship."

"Of course it is." Her sister's voice was dripping. "What does he look like?"

"I've no idea."

"Ask for a photograph."

"I won't."

"Then I will find him on Facebook."

"Adaeze!"

"I'm joking," said Adaeze, in the tone of someone who was not joking at all.