I had grown used to rooms that hummed with machines and smelled faintly of bleach—the kind of quiet that wasn't really quiet, only the pause between complaints. Hospital ceilings learned your face quicker than people did. They reflected you back at odd angles; they made you look like a stranger. I lay there counting the slow wheeze of the AC and the rhythm of shoes in the corridor, as if numbers could keep my mind from wandering to the impossible thought that anything good might still happen to me.
Visiting hours had squeezed the evening thin. Abigael had made the nurses laugh without even trying, Mama Efua had prayed under her breath in Ewe until the nurse clucked her tongue and promised to chase us all out. When they finally left, their absence made the clock louder. I told myself I liked the silence. I told myself that peace was the shape of a room with nobody in it to look disappointed if I failed again.
The handle turned, a silver oval catching the overhead light, and the door opened on a man whose steps were careful, as if the floor might complain. He carried a briefcase the color of old wood and the air of someone who didn't waste words or sweat. There was a gravity about him that made me sit up even before he started talking. It was Maître Kossi that came back.
I didn't expect the lawyer to look like someone's tired uncle, but Maître Kossi carried his suit like it had history. He closed the hospital door behind him, leaving the air hushed. Abigael and Mama Efua had gone home at last, dragged by visiting hours and stubborn nurses.
That left me, the lawyer, and the weight of a silence I couldn't quite name.
"Mr. Taye," he began, setting a folder on the table. His voice had a slow patience, like he'd repeated this speech too many times in his life. "You had an uncle. A reclusive man in South Africa. Few knew him, but he knew you. He left everything he owned… to you."
He pushed the folder closer. Numbers spilled out—houses, land deeds, bank accounts I couldn't read without blinking twice. The ink itself felt unreal, like it would dissolve if I touched it.
My name, written in clean type, looked borrowed. The paper smelled faintly of dust, like a room unopened for years. I tried to hand the folder back, but my fingers didn't listen. They clamped there, as if the paper might float away if I loosened my grip.
"Did he—" My voice snagged. "Did he ever meet me?"
Kossi's gaze softened but did not quite become pity. "He watched from a distance. Wrote notes. Asked after your school. There are letters in the packet. He instructed that you read them only when you were alone." He tapped the corner of the folder, then studied the wall clock as if it might reassure me.
Something burned in my throat. I laughed once, awkward and short. "This is… a joke."
"No joke," Kossi said softly. "He believed you were chosen for something. He left no children, no heirs. Only you."
Chosen. The word lodged like a bone. Chosen for what—debt collection? Another task I would fail? My vision blurred. I hadn't cried in years—not since the night my mother slipped into that endless sleep. But tears forced themselves anyway. Not graceful tears. Ugly, quiet ones that smudged the page until all the numbers swam together.
Memories arrived without knocking: Mama Efua spooning her own portion of stew into my bowl and pretending she wasn't hungry; the flicker of candles when the lights went; the endless arithmetic of scarcity—how to stretch bread into tomorrow, how to pay for a cough that grew teeth. In all the versions of my future I had imagined, none had the weight of these sheets, this sudden avalanche of more.
"Why me?" I whispered.
Kossi closed the folder and leaned back. "That's the question, isn't it? Perhaps you should ask God."
A small, rueful smile touched his mouth, like a man who had tried asking and found no satisfying reply. He stood, smoothed his jacket, and slid a business card under the folder. "There will be formalities," he added in that steady voice. "Identification, transfer schedules, the reading of the will in full. I'll return tomorrow. For tonight… rest if you can."
When he left, the room was too quiet.
I watched the door for a while, half expecting him to reappear and say he had misread the name, that a second August existed somewhere in the building and I had borrowed his miracle for fifteen minutes. The AC clicked off and on like a metronome. Somewhere down the hall, somebody laughed the hard laugh of a caretaker who'd been awake too long. I wiped my face with a rough napkin and slid the folder under my pillow like a child hiding contraband under a mattress.
Tell them, a voice in me said—tell Abigael, tell Mama Efua. But another voice, smaller and sharper, said Wait. Not a lie. Just a pause. Let your hands touch this future before other hands do. The thought felt selfish and also necessary. If I said it out loud too soon, it might dissipate like breath on cold glass.
I remembered church mornings when I was small and squirming, when the preacher spoke about blessings that arrived like storms—fierce, noisy, changing the shape of the earth. I never believed one would come for me. And now? The storm had a lawyer and documents with embossed seals.
That night, I dreamed in symbols.
A parchment unrolled in my mind, glowing faintly, as though lit from inside. The top blazed with bold letters:
THE DIVINE WILL
Beneath, words carved themselves into the air, one by one:
Rise before the sun. Strengthen the vessel I have given you. Run until your breath is fire, and your heart learns discipline. This is your first charge.
The glow had a temperature, not heat exactly, but a living warmth that met my chest like the press of a hand. The letters didn't sit on the surface; they sank as if inked on the inside of my bones. A faint sound accompanied the script—something between a whisper and the sound a page makes when you turn it in a quiet library. I knew there were more pages hidden behind this one, and that someone patient as the tide would reveal them on a schedule I didn't control.
I jolted awake, heart hammering.
It was ridiculous. A hallucination. Too much stress, too much talk about destiny. And yet, when I closed my eyes, the scroll was still there—waiting, patient, holy in a way my imagination had no business faking.
"Get a grip, August," I muttered to myself. But at dawn, my legs were already moving.
The floor was cold in the pre-morning dim when I eased out of bed. I dressed quietly, as if I might wake the sleeping ward with the scrape of my belt. Outside, the world wore the thin blue of before-sunrise. The city hadn't decided yet whether to be loud. A bird tested a single note. A zémidjan coughed past with an apologetic sputter. Streetlights blinked their weary yellow.
The streets of Lomé were cool and blue when I started to run. My lungs screamed betrayal after the first kilometer. Sweat dragged down my shirt, my body protesting every step. But when I finally collapsed on the curb, chest heaving, something stirred in me that wasn't weakness. A thread of pride, maybe. Or obedience.
I ran past the shuttered kiosks where women would later arrange bread and sachets of water in neat, hopeful rows. Past a wall painted with a politician's smile that looked more like a grimace in the dim. Past a boy kicking an invisible ball, his bare feet finding the music in the concrete. The air smelled faintly of salt from the sea and of last night's charcoal fires going to ash. My legs argued for a ceasefire with every stride, but the words on the scroll unraveled their own rhythm inside me—Rise before the sun—until my breath began to fit that cadence.
As I bent forward, trying not to puke, a shape flickered in the corner of my vision—tall, cloaked in light. I turned sharply. Nothing. Just a lamppost humming against the dawn.
For a heartbeat the hair on my arms lifted as if a small wind had passed through me. There was a taste in the air, metallic and sweet, like the breath of a thunderstorm that changed its mind. I swallowed it and straightened, embarrassed by nothing in particular.
I shook my head. Hallucinations. That's all.
By the time the sun considered the edge of the roofs, I had walked my breath back down to something manageable. A woman sweeping her storefront smiled when I half-bowed to avoid the dust. A stray dog watched me like I owed it an explanation. I returned to the hospital with the odd satisfaction of a man who had done what a page had told him, even if the page was nowhere but his head.
In the bathroom mirror, a stranger met me. Not transformed—nothing so dramatic. But my eyes were awake in a way they hadn't been yesterday. My skin shone with the proof of effort. I thought, absurdly, of the word vessel. The vessel I have given you. I had been living like a passenger inside my own body. Maybe the scroll wanted me to become crew.
I rehearsed confessing to Abigael while washing my face. "Something weird happened." No. "I think I saw—" Worse. "There's this… scroll?" Idiot. I laughed at myself and let the water run until the mirror blurred.
Later that morning, Abigael barged into the hospital room, holding a bag of bread and enough energy to power the city.
"You look like you fought a lion," she said, staring at my sweat-damp hair.
"Something like that," I said, forcing a smile.
She dropped the bag on my lap. "Well, next time, let me know before you go chasing wildlife. I could've filmed it. We'd be famous."
I tore a piece of bread and used it to delay any answer. "You'd narrate badly on purpose so I'd look worse."
"I would narrate beautifully," she said, drawing herself up with mock offense. "I would say, 'Here you see August Taye, bravely battling the great Lomé dawn while the dawn remains largely unimpressed.'"
Her laughter filled the room, ordinary and golden, grounding me again.
She sat, chin in her palm, watching me in that way she had of pretending she was not watching me. "You're somewhere else," she said lightly. "In your head. Is the bill worrying you again? I can talk to the nurse about a plan. Or we'll sell my cousin's motorbike. He doesn't deserve it."
"I'm fine," I lied, then softened it. "Just… thinking."
"Dangerous habit," she said, eyes bright. "Try bread instead."
I bit into the bread, but in the back of my mind the parchment waited, glowing, patient.
She nudged the bag toward me. "Eat. Then tell me what you want to do when you get out. And don't say 'sleep.' Say something irresponsible. I'll approve it. I'm feeling generous."
Say: There's money now. There's more than money. Say: Something opened. Say: I heard words that weren't quite words. My mouth shaped none of it. If I told her now, it would put a weight on her I couldn't explain; if I waited, perhaps I could find a way to carry it properly.
"Walk by the sea," I said instead. "Pretend the wind is free and belongs to us."
"Approved," she said. "The wind is already writing us a receipt."
Her phone buzzed. She glanced down, grimaced in apology. "I have to run. Mama Efua said she'll come later with soup. She was praying for you this morning; I could feel it from three houses away." She stood, then leaned down and pressed a friendly, unhurried fist to my shoulder. "You'll tell me when the serious face is about something I need to fight, yes?"
"Yes."
She made a show of squinting at me suspiciously, then grinned and slipped out, dragging a ribbon of warm air with her.
In the quiet that followed, I slid the folder from beneath my pillow and traced the embossed seal with a fingertip, as if it might purr. I pictured Mama Efua's hands on this paper, hands that had lifted pots and children and hope for years. I pictured Abigael pretending not to calculate whether I was worth the trouble I always brought and deciding I was, each time.
The Divine Will.
The phrase felt both too big for me and perfectly cut to my shape, like a suit I had yet to grow into. Outside, a horn honked an unmusical scale. In the corridor, a trolley rattled like distant thunder. I closed my eyes, and there the scroll was again, patient as breath, offering not a destination but a next step.
And I wasn't sure if I was terrified… or finally alive.