Three months later
The autumn air in Kano carried the first real bite of the season—crisp, smelling of wet leaves and woodsmoke from someone’s rooftop fire pit. Lila walked the familiar stretch of 12th Street with no particular destination, only the quiet certainty that she belonged to herself now in a way she never had before.
She’d kept the apartment. She’d kept the red dress, dry-cleaned and hanging at the back of the closet like a talisman. She’d kept the small black notebook where she’d written one-line truths after each night—raw hunger, sacred surrender, controlled chaos, primal strength, rhythmic release, quiet worship, desperate homecoming—and then closed it, never to be reopened.
She hadn’t seen Nico since that Sunday morning promise of coffee.
Not because she avoided him. No
