Second Chance at Allen Avenue

The bell above the pharmacy door rang at four fifteen on a Thursday, and Adaeze Nwosu did not look up.

"Welcome. I will be with you in a moment."

She was counting tablets. Amoxicillin, five hundred milligrams, twenty-one in a tray, the little white capsules clicking into place under her spatula. The shop was quiet. Outside, Allen Avenue roared with its usual afternoon fury: okadas, danfo buses, a woman in the street shouting about tomatoes. Inside, the fan turned slowly, and the shelves of cough syrup glowed in the amber light.

"Ada."

Her spatula stopped.

Nobody had called her that in seven years. Nobody. It had been a private word, a nickname invented by one person at one table on one rainy Sunday, and it had died with him.

She lifted her head.

He stood in the doorway in a charcoal suit, with the sun behind him. He was taller than she remembered, or perhaps it was that he had grown into his frame. His shoulders had broadened. There was grey at his temples. His face was leaner and harder, with a faint scar along the jaw that had not been there before. But the eyes were the same. Dark, steady, tired. They were looking at her as though she were the last cold glass of water in a very long desert.