Red Flag District.

Season Finale: The Red Flag.

FOLARIN’S P.O.V:

Her office was on the fourth floor of a quiet building in Ikoyi.

Just a normal office building with marble flooring in the lobby and a security guard who waved me through after I gave him a name and a unit number.

I took the lift up.

The door said simply DR. T. ADESANYA.

No frills. No clinic name. No glass plaque advertising specialisations.

I rang the bell.

A woman opened it almost immediately.

She was younger than I had expected. Maybe thirty-eight. Hair tied up. Glasses. A face that looked like the kind of face you could lie to once before it clocked your dishonesty and stopped being interested in your version of the story.

“Folarin Cole?”

“Yes.”

“Come in.”

She led me into a small office at the end of a short corridor. Two armchairs. A small low table between them. A window looking out at a row of palm trees that were too dignified for Lagos to deserve. A box of tissues on the table.

A box of tissues placed in the precise centre of the table. The way professionals do it. So that the person who needs them does not have to ask.

I sat in the armchair facing her. She sat in the other one. She did not open a notebook. She did not glance at her watch. She did not ask any of the bureaucratic questions I had assumed therapists asked at the beginning.

She just looked at me. Calm. Patient. Slightly amused, I thought, in a way I could not yet read.

“So,” she said.

“So.”

“Why are you here?”

I had rehearsed this in the car. I had rehearsed it standing in the lift. I had rehearsed it in the corridor outside her door. I opened my mouth to deliver the version I had rehearsed.

And then, because the room was very quiet and because she did not seem to be in a hurry, I told her the truth as I understood it.

I told her about Amaka.

I told her about Derin.

I told her about Morolake—not the entire story, not the worst details, not yet—but enough. I told her about the months of disappearing into my apartment.

I told her about the women before all of them.

It was the women. All of them. That was what I believed. That my life had not gone wrong. That my life had been done wrong, by the women in it.

I talked for maybe twenty minutes.

She did not interrupt. She did not nod encouragingly. She did not ask follow-up questions. She did not look at her watch.

She just listened.

When I finally finished, the room sat quiet for a long moment.

Then she said: “Interesting.”

I waited.

She tilted her head slightly. She did not write anything down. She did not stand up. She did not consult any documents. She simply looked at me with the calm, patient, slightly amused expression of a woman who had been listening for a longer time than the twenty minutes she had been in this particular conversation.

Then she said it.

“Folarin.”

“Yes.”

“Have you considered —”

She paused.

She let the question shape itself in the air.

“— that you are the red flag?”

The room went very still.

I stared at her.

For a long moment I did not say anything.

Then, very carefully, I said:

“That is an interesting opening line.”

“It usually is.”

“You say that to all your new patients?”

“Only the ones who spend twenty minutes telling me about other people.”

I tilted my head slightly.

“That’s not fair.”

“It isn’t a question of fairness.”

“I told you about myself.”

“You told me about the women who have happened to you. That is a different conversation.”

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