“What have you to tell us?” Cesare demanded in the same brusque manner he’d used before. “Can you tell us about our Teo or not?”
“I can do,” Nkata said. “？’F Rosie’s here, she’ll want to hear as well, I ’xpect.”
“Let me fetch her,” Solange said. “Please. If you will sit . . . ? It will be a moment only.”
Once she had left them alone, Cesare turned to Nkata and said, “It is over, this? Are we having our Teodora back? You come here in person with news, no? Otherwise you do not return.”
“Tha’s right,” Nkata told him. “An’ your news is you’re returning to work, innit?”
“I am. Enough of this at-home time. I am needed elsewhere, and between you and me, I wish to be elsewhere for at least part of every day. Me, I love my family, yes? But not twenty-four hours every day and every week and on and on. That? It makes me . . .” He pointed to his head and rolled his eyes dramatically.
“Hear you,” Nkata said. “I ’xpect tha’s the case for most people, eh?”
Solange reappeared at the doorway. She said, “Rosie is coming. She works earlier today so she was just dressing. Can we begin without her?”
“Can do, yeah. But I got to say: Rosie’s needed to clarify a few details.”
“Rosie?” Solange asked.
Cesare added, “Why? What is this she clarifies?”
Nkata didn’t need to answer because he could hear Rosie coming down the stairs. The sound suggested she was in her stilettos and ready to leave. He stood as she entered the room, as striking a woman as he’d ever seen and today was no different. She wore a fashionably tailored coverall in pumpkin orange with a forest-coloured cardigan over her shoulders. The stilettos were, as before, a few strips of leather that left most of her weight balancing on her toes.
“Maman says you need me. So there’s news?”
“We’ve made an arrest and we’ve got a confession,” he said. “Your sister was gone after by a woman called Philippa Weatherall, who was due to repair her FGM damage.”
This was met by silence. All of them looked stunned to varying degrees. It was Solange who said, “But Teo had already been repaired. What was this?”
“Teo’d been cut open,” Nkata said. “But tha’s diff’rent from being repaired. Repaired means getting her close to what she was, or ’least as close as possible. So she got examined by a surgeon and she got the go-ahead. Only problem was the surgeon was performing FGM on the side to make money to help with the cost of women getting repaired. Teo worked that out after she’d seen her to be checked for surgery. She wanted to stop her doing FGM, but the surgeon didn’t want to be stopped. And there wasn’t any way she wanted to be struck off, which was what would’ve happened if Teo turned her over to the police.”
Solange raised her fingers to her lips. Against them, she murmured, “Did no one know?”
“Which part?”
She shook her head. “I . . . I don’t know which part I mean.”
Cesare said, “She tells no one about this? That she will have surgery to be . . . what?”
“Made normal-looking far as a surgeon could make her. Made so she could feel something again if that was possible.”
“What is this ‘to feel something’？” Cesare asked. “How did she not feel something?”
Solange looked as if she wanted to ask the same question. As for Rosie, her gaze was on her stiletto-shod feet, which suggested she knew exactly what ‘to feel something’ meant.
“To enjoy herself more,” was how Nkata put it. “Seems she never enjoyed it at all.”
“Sex,” Rosie finally looked up and spoke to her parents. “I think he means that Teo couldn’t enjoy sex with Ross.”
“This was why they divorced?” Solange said.
“They hadn’t divorced, Maman. You know that. They hadn’t even begun the process. If you ask me, they never would have. They would have continued in some sort of mad limbo with neither one of them wanting to escape.”
“But . . . You and Ross? What was that?” Solange asked.
“What’s this of you and Ross?” Cesare said. “How do we have a you and Ross?”
Rosie looked to her mother, and it was clear to Nkata that the news about the coming grandchild via Rosie and Ross had not reached Cesare. He wondered why mother and daughter were keeping it from him. Would he react with too much passion? Too much emotion? Too much of something that might bring on another stroke? They were afraid to tell him, and Nkata could see it. He reckoned it was not his place to shed any light on the subject.