She read for a period of ten or fifteen minutes, her feet curled under her, the wineglass gripped in one hand. The story engaged her, detailing the first leg of his trip, where he’d hitched a ride with an unsavory but rich acquaintance who’d driven south from Chad into the tip of Cameroon, skirting along the edge of the brownish waters of the Logone River, eventually cutting west toward Nigeria and then north toward the deserts of Niger and Algeria. This was not a route anyone would undertake lightly; at the very least, there were likely to be multiple stops to repair the vehicle, and at the very worst, an unfriendly encounter with the terrorist group Boko Haram. Ordinarily, on the unlikely chance that you had to travel between N’Djamena and anywhere far away, you would fly. Seidou, however, had been on a plane twice in his life—once to get to medical school in Cuba, and once to get home—and the experience had been marred by an extreme amount of turbulence.

The slightly safer driving route would have been to cut around the north side of Lake Chad and avoid Nigeria altogether, but Seidou’s friend had business in Maiduguri and Yobe, so through Nigeria they went. From Yobe, he’d embarked on a four-thousand-kilometer slog along the Trans-Sahara Highway to one of the northernmost points of Africa. According to the authorities who later tried to piece together his route, this portion of the journey mostly took place on buses, although at least once—in Algeria—he hitched a ride with a caravan.