PROLOGUE

There are people you spend a lifetime trying to forget.

And then there are the ones you spend a lifetime trying to remember exactly as they were.

Years have passed.

The messages are gone. The calls have long since stopped.

The apartment in Kano has new tenants now. The plastic chair outside Nafisa's door is probably gone. 

The balcony where two friends once talked until midnight belongs to someone else.

Time has a cruel way of erasing places before it erases people. But sometimes...

On quiet evenings, when the sky blushes orange before Maghrib and the wind carries the smell of rain, I still think of him.

Not because I haven't moved on.

But because some people become part of the language your heart speaks.

His name was Ahmad.

And before he became the greatest heartbreak of my life...

He was my safest place.

This is our story.