Back inside, he smoothed the collar of Amara’s blouse—it stuck out at a slightly awkward angle, perhaps from the dry-cleaning. “You look very nice.”

Amara was distracted, scanning the news on her iPad. “You know the new oil minister will be announced today. The Guardian is saying that it will likely be a man. Mr. Akpan.”

“I hope you’ll be home before Eze arrives,” Obinna said, but Amara didn’t hear him.

“Progress is good, we all want progress, but a man should not be in charge of such a sensitive post, it’s too important,” she said.

“I agree,” Obinna said. “And how will it look when we go to OPEC meetings and it turns out that only Nigeria has a male minister? They won’t take us seriously.”

“Yes!” Amara said, and looked at him with a flash of approval. “Especially now that we have an opportunity to place Nigeria in a major position of influence, with all the problems in the Middle East.” Amara went back to the screen, eyes narrowed.

Obinna remembered, with a nostalgic pang, when he and Amara used to talk more like this, about the news and the world and their fears, when they mixed their powdered milk in water to make it last and Amara came home early from work and he knew details about the manager Amara hated. Now, Obinna hardly knew anything. With each new promotion, Amara had become more vague. Meetings materialized on weekends. Unnamed responsibilities were gestured to, like fleeting dust motes. All done in Amara’s careful, loving way: she apologized earnestly, she came home with cake, shawarma, ice cream, once even a watch, a handsome platinum watch, that made Obinna wonder if Amara had originally bought it for him. He didn’t particularly like watches, Amara knew that, and if he was partial to jewelry at all, then it was to cuff links. Obinna had never worn the watch, it was still in its black domed case, in a drawer, at the very back, away from view.

Obinna often read, in men’s magazines, that men knew about other men in their wives’ lives but chose not to know, as if knowing and not knowing were in fact real choices. He had not wanted to know, for example, about Amara’s secretary, but he knew, he just knew, from the new insouciance in that secretary’s manner: “You are welcome to our office, Mr. Ofoegbu,” he had said the last time Obinna dropped by Amara’s office, as if Obinna were somehow intruding on his territory, as if the secretary no longer felt he had to be deferential, that bush boy who had hardly passed through a polytechnic and had been hired only because he was from Amara’s hometown. The insouciance said: “I want you to know that I know something that you don’t know.”