Teni created the group on a Tuesday, which should have been the first warning. Nothing good ever starts on a Tuesday. Tuesdays are the administrative day of the week — the day you file things, schedule things, sort things into folders you will never open again. The day you convince yourself that organizing a problem is the same as solving it.
She named it Pinnacle Wives.
She would later tell people it was Kunle's idea. Kunle had said, casually, over jollof rice she had not cooked, that it would be nice if the four couples socialized more deliberately. The operative word being deliberately, because Kunle was the kind of man who used words like that. Deliberately. Strategically. Going forward.
What Kunle had actually said was: "Babe, you should add Yeside to your phone."
Teni had added Yeside. And then Nkechi. And then Blessing, because you could not add two and not the third, not in this Lagos, not with these women. And then she had put them all in a group, because a group meant she could see who read what and when, and Teni was a woman who believed that information was simply organization applied to people.
She did not examine this belief. She had learned not to.
The group's first twenty-four hours were everything a group's first twenty-four hours should be.
Teni read Nkechi's message three times. Thank you for adding me Teni. Ten words. No emoji. No exclamation mark. No remark about the group name or the concept or the possibility of brunches. Just the precise minimum required to acknowledge that she had been added and was grateful for it.
Teni noted this the way she noted most things — quietly, in the part of her mind she kept filed under things to return to.
By day three, Blessing had posted forty-seven messages. Teni had counted. Not deliberately — she did not count messages deliberately — but the number was there when she looked, the way numbers always were when Teni looked at things.
Forty-seven messages. Seventeen of them were screenshots.
A restaurant recommendation with the receipt still visible. A WhatsApp forward about a Lekki Phase One property that had been on the market "suspiciously long." A photo of a dress she was considering for a wedding in September — but the dress was a background detail. The foreground was a dressing room mirror, and in the mirror, over Blessing's shoulder, was a man who was not Chukwuemeka.
Teni had looked at this photo for forty seconds before she understood what she was looking at. Then she had typed that dress is stunning on you and put her phone face down on the table.
Yeside had sent three heart emojis.
Nkechi had read it at 11:03pm and said nothing.
The wrong message happened on a Friday.
Not the wrong chat. Not yet. That would come later, the way the larger disasters always came — after the small ones had softened your defenses, made you careless, convinced you that you were simply living your life and not, in fact, being watched.
The wrong message was this: Kunle, texting Teni at 6:47pm, had written just leaving the office now, should be home by eight, traffic is mad on the island.
And Teni, not looking up from the chat, had forwarded it to Pinnacle Wives.
She did not realize she had done it immediately. She realized it when Blessing replied with a prayer hands emoji and safe journey to him! and Yeside replied with the Lekki-Epe is a nightmare today my own husband has been stuck since five.
Nkechi read it at 6:51pm.
Nkechi did not reply.
What Teni felt, deleting the message, was not embarrassment. It was something cooler and more precise than embarrassment. It was the feeling of having put something into a space and being unable to take it back out. The information was in the room now. It had a shape. It had been read by three women who now knew, with the specificity of a timestamp, that Kunle Adewale left his office at 6:47 on a Friday evening.
She thought about this for longer than the situation required.
She thought: why does it feel like it matters?
Kunle came home at nine-fourteen.
He kissed her on the temple and said traffic had been impossible, you would not believe the gridlock, he had sat on the bridge for forty minutes, these Lagos roads were a national embarrassment.
Teni said I know, I know, and put a plate of food in front of him.
She did not mention the message. There was nothing to mention. A man had texted his wife that he was leaving work. The wife had accidentally forwarded it. She had deleted it. That was the whole story. That was all it was.
She went to bed before he finished eating, which was not unusual, and she lay in the dark with the phone on her chest and looked at the ceiling and thought about Nkechi.
Who read everything within ninety seconds.
Who never replied.
Who had a husband — Tobenna — who worked in the same building as Kunle. Who had been Kunle's friend since their second year in Unilag. Who Kunle called, sometimes, when he thought Teni was in the shower, in a voice that was quieter than his regular voice, the way people speak when they are not choosing their words so much as releasing them.
Teni thought: I am probably imagining this.
Teni thought: I am very good at imagining things.
Teni thought: I should start logging the last-seen timestamps.
She did not open the app to do it.
She opened it anyway.
End of Episode One.