Under The Umbrella

Chapter Seventeen: Road trip

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6:48am.

The first thing Josie registered was quiet. No machines beeping. No nurses. Just pale Sunday light spilling across the linoleum.

The second thing was him.

Orwell was slumped in the bedside chair, arms folded on her mattress, forehead resting on his forearms. His suit jacket was gone. His shirt was wrinkled. Hair mussed from rain and sleep.

Not Covenant Pages. Not Étoile. Not a boardroom god.

Just a boy. Breathing slow. Dark lashes against his cheek.

Her chest did something dangerous. _He stayed_. All night. Didn’t go home. He stayed, guarding her sleep like it was a contract he’d signed in blood.

She slipped from the bed, careful not to jolt him. Her feet were bare on the cold tile.

At the window, the world looked washed. Lagos after rain. The hospital courtyard gleamed. Flamboyant trees dripped. A nurse pushed a wheelchair across wet concrete.

The room itself was ridiculous. Private suite. Flowers she didn’t remember arriving. A flat-screen TV. This wasn’t the general ward she knew from before. This was _Orwell_ money. _Orwell_ fear.

7:03am.

She turned from the glass and froze.

He was awake.

No movement to give him away. He was just… watching. Elbows still on the bed, head lifted now. Eyes dark, unfocused with sleep, then sharpening on her.

Josie’s pulse skipped. “Hey.”

“Good morning.” His voice was gravel. Used once. Then, “Let’s go.”

That was it. No _how are you_. No _did you sleep_. He stood, rolled his shoulders like he was shaking off a weight, and stepped out. “I’ll wait. So you can change.”

The door clicked shut.

By 7:40am they were in the car.

He drove. Silent. The AC hummed. His knuckles were white on the wheel. The Orwell from the buka, the one who’d laughed at _rich man soup_, was gone. This was the cold one. The one made of marble and thermodynamics.

Josie stole glances. His jaw was locked. His profile gave nothing. At the hospital he’d barely spoken. In the car, nothing.

_Did I do something?_ _Is it the attack?_

She didn’t ask. The quiet felt fragile. Like one word would shatter it.

Dorm gates came too fast.

He parked. Didn’t cut the engine. Didn’t look at her.

“Thanks,” Josie said softly. “For… staying.”

He gave a single nod.

She opened the door. Stepped onto the curb. Sunday morning was heavy with church bells in the distance, with students moving in sleepy groups.

She was at her doorstep when she heard his door shut.

Footsteps. Then he was there.

Josie turned, expecting a nod. A _rest well_. Something Orwell-brief.

Instead, he pulled her in.

The hug wasn’t casual. It wasn’t polite.

It _hit_.

His arms came around her like he was memorizing her. One hand splayed wide across her back, the other cradling the base of her head. He was solid. Warm. He smelled like rain and hospital soap and something expensive underneath. His chest was a wall against her cheek. She could feel his heart. Too fast. Not _alert_. _Afraid_.

Josie’s breath caught. The physical of it overwhelmed her.

*How it felt*: Like being wrapped in a heated blanket after nearly drowning. Like safety with a pulse. His frame swallowed hers whole. No space between them. Her hands came up on instinct, fisting the back of his shirt. She felt the tension in his shoulders, the way he was holding himself together and falling apart at once. There was a tremor in him. Barely there. But she felt it. A longing that ached. Like he’d been starving for this and was terrified of the taste.

He held too tight. Like letting go meant losing her to something he couldn’t fight.

He held too brief. Like staying longer would break some rule he’d lived by his whole life.

Josie melted. Brain offline. Too stunned to move, too tired to think, too _gone_ to want to. She just breathed him in and let her forehead rest against his collarbone.

Then he let go.

No warning. One second she was anchored. The next, air.

His hands dropped. He stepped back. His face was blank again. Masterful Orwell mask. But his eyes— his eyes were wrecked.

“Goodbye, Josie.” Quiet. Almost a whisper.

He turned. Walked to the car. Didn’t look back.

The car slid away from the curb, silent as a shadow.

8:16am.

Josie stood on her doorstep, arms empty, skin still warm from him, and heart completely undone.

---

Wellington University smelled like endings.

Josie stood in her doorway, arms crossed, while Cassie sprawled across the bunk bed with a convocation checklist and zero chill.

The campus was screaming that graduation was here. Finalists were lining up for fittings at the assembly hall, black polyester and gold stoles flashing in the sun like the whole place had been dipped in ceremony. Over the cafeteria a crooked banner read _“Wellington Class of 2026: 19 Days To Go!”_ and someone had scrawled _“And Then We’re Free”_ under it in red marker. Since 8am the marching band had been murdering the same three notes outside the chapel, determined to be perfect by convocation or go deaf trying. Parents had already taken over family WhatsApp with _“Our child did it!!!”_ flyers and cap-and-gown photoshoots, and Josie’s phone had three missed calls from Auntie Yemi asking about seat allocations. Inside the library the desperation was physical; you couldn’t find a seat unless you’d claimed it with your backpack at 6am, and the air smelled like instant noodles and printer ink.

The mood on campus was _bittersweet electricity_. Laughter was louder, hugs lasted longer, and every “see you later” sounded like “see you never.” Seniors walked slower. Underclassmen watched them like they were already ghosts.

“Okay so for convocation,” Cassie said, ticking boxes, “we need heels, undergown shorts—because sweating is not the aesthetic—and a speech in case they call you up for best thesis.”

Josie laughed, but it didn’t reach her eyes. She was still half-standing in the doorway, like she might bolt.

Then her phone rang.

The screen lit up: *Papa*.

Josie’s stomach dropped. He never called mid-morning.

“Hello, Papa?”

His voice was steady. Too steady. “Josie, my daughter. Come home before graduation. Just for the weekend. It’s urgent.”

Ibadan. He lived in Ibadan. Three hours from Lagos. Outside the chaos, outside Wellington, outside her control.

Josie’s grip tightened on the doorframe. “This weekend, Papa? But convocation prep—”

“I know,” he cut in. “But Deacon Alade’s son is in town.”

The air left the room.

10:27am.

Cassie saw Josie’s face drain. She dropped the checklist. “Josie? What is it?”

Josie didn’t answer. Couldn’t. Because she knew what _Deacon Alade’s son is in town_ meant. It wasn’t casual. It wasn’t _say hi_. It was an arrangement. A door her father had tried to close years ago, now being forced open again. Right before she walked across that stage.

Her father’s last words before he hung up: “Just the weekend, my daughter. Come home.”

Josie lowered the phone. Her hands shook. Not from pneumonia. From dread.

Cassie shot off the bed, grabbing her shoulders. “Hey. Breathe. What did he say? Why are you scared?”

But Josie was already somewhere else. Back in Ibadan. Back to a future she thought she’d outrun with grades and distance and Wellington.

10:33am.

Outside, the marching band hit the right note for the first time all morning. The sound swelled across campus, bright and triumphant and completely oblivious.

Inside the dorm, two girls stood frozen. One shocked and worried. The other scared, because _convocation month_ just collided with a past she wasn’t ready to face.

The countdown banners kept flapping. 19 days.

---

11:42am.

Wellington’s Engineering block hallway was a stampede. Finalists with clearance forms, group chat threads blowing up about gown fittings, the air thick with hairspray and panic.

Josie slipped through it like a rumor. Pale. Thin. Eyes too big for her face. She looked like a ghost haunting her own graduation.

Orwell was leaning against the wall by the lecture hall, arms folded, pretending he was waiting for no one.

“Josie,” he said when she appeared. Voice level. Controlled. “Convocation prep treating you well?”

She blinked at him like she had to remember his name. “Orwell. Yes. It’s… fine.”

Pleasantries. Empty words. They stuffed them between them like cotton wool to keep the heat from burning the hallway down. But the heat was there anyway, humming under his ribs, because her face was sharper and her laugh didn’t come anymore.

He tried Orwell-ish teasing. Dry. Precise. A scalpel instead of a hug. “If you float away, I’ll have to file a report on lost finalists. The department hates paperwork.”

Nothing. No smile. No flicker. She just nodded, clutching her thesis folder tighter.

Even when they ended up at the same study table later, even when they argued about convocation seating and whether the marching band would survive the recessional, she was absent. Present in body, miles away behind her eyes. Drained. Hollow. A girl-shaped shadow of the Josie who used to fight him on thermodynamics just to see him smirk.

It gnawed at him. He didn’t show it. Marble mask on. Hands at 10 and 2 even when he wasn’t driving.

1:17pm.

He cornered Cassie after class. Casual. Like he wasn’t desperate. “She’s not eating. She’s not sleeping. What’s happening to her?”

Cassie crossed her arms. Looked guilty and furious all at once. “Her dad called her. Said she has to go home this weekend. Urgent.”

“Why?”

“Josie won’t say. And I don’t know either. Just… Ibadan. This weekend.” Cassie’s voice dropped. Formal now, like she was back in lecture mode. “That’s all I got, course rep.”

Not enough. Never enough.

The weekend crept closer. 19 days to convocation became 18, then 17.

5:03pm.

Josie pushed out of the cafeteria by the Engineering block, appetite gone. She wasn’t watching where she walked.

He was there. Bracing himself against the concrete pillar like it was the only thing keeping him upright. He’d rehearsed confrontation lines. Demands. Physics metaphors about entropy and decay.

The second she saw him, her steps faltered. Fear flashed across her face for half a second before she shuttered it. She didn’t say she was scared of his answer. She didn’t have to. It was in the way she hugged her folder to her chest like armor.

Orwell opened his mouth. Closed it. For the first time in his life, control failed him. Because he was braced to confront her, and terrified of what she’d say.

The courtyard emptied around them. Lagos hummed. Wellington counted down.

And Josie stood there, ghost-thin and silent, while Orwell drowned without making a sound.

5:06pm.

The Engineering block cafeteria was chaos in stereo. Students jostling, trays clattering, the smell of cheap rice and stew thick in the air. Everyone was loud, hungry, desperate to beat the queue.

Orwell fell into step beside Josie the second she passed the exit. “Walk with me.” Not a question. His voice was even, but there was a crack under it he was hiding badly. He was offended. Hurt. She’d told everyone except him that she was going to Ibadan. That stung. He didn’t let it show.

Josie hugged her folder tighter. Her eyes darted around the crowd. “Not here, Orwell. I can’t… not with all this.” Too many ears. Too many people watching. The cafeteria wasn’t safe for truth.

He nodded once and steered her away from the noise. Down the path, past the labs, to the nearest football field. The grass had been cut that morning. Sharp, clean, green. It smelled like rain and cut stems and something honest. They both breathed it in without meaning to.

5:41pm.

They walked. Slow. Side by side. The silence stretched, pulled thin. Orwell didn’t push. He just stayed. Present. Worried in a way that didn’t demand anything back.

It took minutes. Maybe ten. Maybe twenty. But his care wore her down. The kind of care that didn’t ask, just waited.

“I’m leaving,” she said finally. Voice small. “Family issues. My dad… he needs me home. This weekend.”

Orwell stopped walking.

His countenance dropped like a stone. Dread moved across his eyes, fast and ugly. The exact look of someone who’d been bracing for a bomb and still wasn’t ready when it landed. Even if he’d known it was coming, he’d hoped it wouldn’t.

Josie saw it and froze. She didn’t get the look. Didn’t understand the depth of it. It scared her. Mystified her. Why would her leaving hit him like that?

7:02pm.

Then he spoke. Quiet. Steady. Not trying to fix it.

“You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to, Josie.”

She stopped breathing.

The field went quiet around them. The grass, the sky, the dusk settling in. Everything held still.

Because Josie would be shocked about how he knew, and even more afraid of the thought of him actually knowing.

7:05pm.

Josie’s voice came out smaller than she meant it to. “What are you talking about?”

Orwell didn’t look away. He gave her that stare again. Deep. Distant. Like he was seeing past her skin, past the folder she clutched, past the excuses she wore. Weeks ago it would’ve burned her with embarrassment. Now it didn’t. Now it just made her curious. Mystified. Like he was a door she couldn’t unlock but couldn’t stop testing.

He finally answered. Quiet. “I saw. In my sleep. In my visions. As usual.”

The words landed like stones in still water.

And then it hit her, sudden and sharp: every time he found her like this, it meant he’d been praying. And every time he’d been praying, it meant he cared. Not casual care. Not course-rep care. The kind that kept watch when no one asked him to.

7:33pm.

But then her brain caught up with her heart. Just friends. That was the rule. That was the boundary they’d never crossed out loud.

And if he’d really seen her… then he’d seen too much.

Shame flooded her, hot and fast. She felt stripped. Unsafe. Like her private fears, her family mess, her silent tears had all been laid out on that cut grass between them without her consent. It felt improper. Wrong, somehow, that one human could carry that much of another human’s interior without being invited in.

She recoiled under his gaze. Took half a step back. “How much do you know?” The question scraped her throat.

Orwell didn’t answer. The air between them turned cold, thin. Instead of replying, he broke. His mask slipped, just a fraction. “How bad is it?”

Josie looked up. Met his eyes. The warmth was back in them, steady and unbearable. Her eyes watered without permission.

Orwell stiffened. He didn’t reach for her. Didn’t touch her. But he looked like he was holding back an entire storm with both hands. Like his heart was too heavy to hold upright and too honest to set down.

8:01pm.

Neither of them moved. The field kept its secrets.

---

9:47pm.

The dorm room smelled like damp sheets and camphor. Rain drummed against the window, impatient.

Josie pushed the door open and Cassie was there, sitting cross-legged on her bed, phone face-down. Worry already creasing her forehead.

“Everything fine?” Cassie asked. Too fast. Like she’d been holding the question in her mouth for hours.

Josie opened her mouth. No sound came out. Then her knees gave. She folded onto the bed and broke. No sobs at first. Just a shuddering collapse, like her bones had decided they were done carrying her.

Cassie went still for half a second. Then looked distraught, hands hovering like she didn’t know where to land them.

Josie’s mind slipped.

She was 15 again. Secondary school finals were done, her uniform still smelled like chalk dust. In her father’s living room in their Ibadan face-me-I-face-you flat: faded blue paint, plastic chairs with doilies, a standing fan clicking on speed 2, the smell of kerosene from the stove in the next room.

Lower middle-class. The kind where every expense was discussed like war strategy.

Deacon Alade sat across from her father. Bible on his lap. Voice smooth, reasonable. “We can fund her university school fees. And the pneumonia treatments. No child should suffer.” He paused. Smiled like he was offering salvation. “On one condition. Josie will marry my son when she’s of age.”

Josie crouched behind the thin curtain by the doorway, peeping through a gap. Her heart wrenched inside her chest. She didn’t understand the weight of ‘marriage’ then. She only understood that Daddy’s shoulders would stop sagging for once. That Mama’s empty chair wouldn’t be the only thing he stared at. And that the hospital bills that choked them every month might finally stop.

Deacon Alade looked like rescue. Like an answer. It wasn’t salvation. It was the first link in her chain.

10:12pm.

---

Josie’s mind snapped back. The dorm ceiling swam above her. Cassie’s palm was warm on her head, patting her in slow, fond circles. The rain hadn’t let up.

She’d never told Cassie. Never said out loud that her school fees were paid by a stranger who wanted ownership in return. Never said she was an item of exchange for peace in her family. Shame sat in her throat like a stone. Too ugly. Too much.

Josie cried into Cassie’s lap, shoulders shaking. The tears came hot and endless. Cassie thought it was her health again. Josie had breakdowns like this sometimes. Episodes Cassie blamed on pneumonia scars and exhaustion and convocation stress.

She didn’t know it was grief. For the 15-year-old girl behind the curtain. For the woman she’d become because of her.

10:58pm.

The rain kept pouring. Josie kept crying. And Cassie kept patting her head, holding a girl who was drowning in secrets she didn’t know existed.

---

8:03am

The weekend had finally arrived, and with it tmhe weight Josie had been carrying since Monday. She was going to Ibadan to see her father. Orwell waited by her dorm, leaning against a jeep she didn’t recognize. Not his usual sleek black car. This one looked built for bad roads, for long hours, for carrying more than luggage.

He loaded her bags without asking. The metal doors clanged shut. Josie stood there, hands in her pockets, too tired to ask where the jeep came from. She’d never seen it in his compound. But exhaustion dulled her curiosity.

Cassie hugged her quickly at the gate. “Text me when you get there.” Then the engine started.

Inside, the air was still. No music. No small talk. Orwell kept his eyes on the road, jaw set, patient in a way that made the silence feel deliberate. Josie pressed her forehead to the window. Ibadan blurred past in streaks of green and rust. She was there, but not there. Her mind kept slipping back to the dorm, to Cassie’s worried eyes, to the debt she hadn’t asked for and still couldn’t name out loud.

12:47pm

Traffic trapped them near the Ojoo axis. Heat pressed through the glass. Orwell rolled down his window and called to a hawker weaving between cars with a cooler and black nylon bags of snacks.

Josie watched him count out cash. Watched the sweat on his temple. Then the question left her before she could stop it, small and sharp in the stuffy air: “Did you mean it? Why?”

Orwell didn’t answer. He just took the bottled water and plantain chips, paid, and shut the window. Only then did he glance at her. One quick look, like he was deciding how much truth she could carry right now.

He handed her the water. The bottle was cold against her palm. That was when he understood. She wasn’t asking about the snacks. She was asking about the promise he’d made on the field weeks ago, after she’d broken down and told him everything. Her father’s bills. Deacon Alade. The way her life had been bartered before she was old enough to understand the word.

He’d said he’d clear it. All of it. Like it was simple.

4:21pm

The jeep moved again, slower now. Josie unscrewed the water but didn’t drink. Her throat was tight for a different reason.

What hollowed her out wasn’t just the debt. It was how easily he said yes. How many times he’d said yes without her asking. Umbrellas when it rained. Noodles and hydrate when she skipped meals. Transport fare when her account was empty. Clothes when hers wore thin. And now this. Her family’s shame, handed over like it weighed nothing to him.

For months she’d been taking, and he’d been giving.

“Because we’re friends,” Orwell said finally, eyes still on the road. “That’s what friends do.”

The word landed wrong. Josie stared at her hands. Friends didn’t look at you like that when you asked ‘why’. Friends didn’t carry your father’s burden without flinching.

Her sadness deepened, quiet and certain. Because somewhere under the heat and the traffic and the jeep that wasn’t his, she knew the truth. This wasn’t just friendship. It couldn’t be. And the knowing of it hurt more than the debt ever had.

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