“Now hear me well—what is not yours is not yours o, even if you marry the person that has that thing. If it… — Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀

“He stared back at her, unconcerned. She had always marvelled at his calm assurance that everything good in his life would either remain the same or get better. He took good fortune for granted. As though it were impossible that it would abide only for a spell. She had never been able to shake the sense that life was war, a series of battles with the occasional spell of good things.”

Maybe she was one of those people for whom satisfaction lay only in the future, forever slightly out of reach.

Time was unforgiving, it didn’t stop, not even to give people a chance to scrape themselves off the floor if they’d been shattered.