She’s reminded of visiting Aso Rock and the sight of those parliamentarians, those government leaders, completely devoid of conflict, not even arguing. She’s reminded of how pristine and stainless all the buildings had been: the presidential complex, the National Assembly, the Supreme Court building. How she’d been expecting a statue, something large and hulking and made out of marble or obsidian, some massive, tragic thing to commemorate the unfortunate deaths Nigerians had suffered or to make reference to the unfortunate necessity of killing during wartime. Or a plaque with names on it, even just one name. A hero. Thinking back on that now, she knows what she was looking for.

She was looking for the man who had taken her from a Biafran camp and brought her to Abuja and raised her as his little sister. She was looking for the man who had taken her with him through the ranks of Nigerian society, dressed her in the finest robes, enrolled her in the finest schools, made sure she had a front row seat to the workings of government.

She was looking for the man who had killed and killed and killed and had taken her—a little bush girl—in as his own. Her adoptive brother. The man responsible for so much that was good in her life.

Who then became the man who took all of that away. Who let her rot in a Nigerian prison, who was too weak to save her.

The man she’d abandoned. The man who’d let her abandon him. Daren.

It all comes washing back over her.

She remembers walking the corridors of this facility with Daren at her side and strolling down a hallway to look in through a large window at an aid worker trying to coax adolescent child soldiers out of their trauma with toys and colored styluses. She remembers walking past cells where older boys, collars glowing around their necks with deadly red lights, would hiss at her. She remembers feeling nothing but a clinical distance. They were puzzle pieces in a larger project to be figured out. Puzzle pieces that screamed and bled and fought and cried out for their loved ones. But still just puzzle pieces.

Please don’t walk away from your memories.

You don’t know my memories, Ify wants to tell Céline.

What does she do now? She doesn’t know exactly what she was expecting, but perhaps what was waiting for her, she hoped, was completion. Or absolution. Or something to take the guilt growing in the pit of her stomach and scoop it out of her. This is what she ran away from. This is what she has tried so hard to forget. And if the past month has proven nothing else, it’s that everyone else has forgotten it too.