What fiction does

Hanna Adebowale had once been called the voice of a generation.

People said it in glossy magazines, in keynote introductions, and on long, sentimental Twitter threads. By thirty-five, she had three bestselling novels, one honorary doctorate in Literature, and a quote from her second book etched into a mural outside the British Library. She had been studied, cited,  dissected.

And then, she stopped writing.

No announcement. No press release. Just silence.

The kind of silence that grows thick over time, until it starts to hum. Until it begins to rot. At first, people were patient. They said, “She’s probably working on something big.” Then they got curious. “Do you think she’s done with fiction?” Then they got cruel. “Maybe she was never that good. Maybe she got lucky.”

In the eighth year of her silence, Hanna was living alone in a tastefully furnished apartment in Victoria Island, Lagos. Her floors were polished concrete. Her linen curtains never moved as if the air made a pact with silence. Her home resembled a luxury hotel, all shine, no story.

She barely left her bed.

On good days, she brushed her teeth. On the worst, she simply lay still, facing the window, letting Lagos blare and buzz outside her glass. She ate whatever didn’t require standing, mostly oats or thin custard. She had lost so much weight that her one bracelet, which she never took off, no longer stayed on. Phone calls went unanswered, except sometimes from her older brother, Matthew, who called every few days just to say, “I’m still here, okay?” She rarely picked up. But when she did, she cried.

Her friends drifted away. People grow tired of knocking on closed doors.

Her mother still called every Sunday, always beginning with, “Any news?” It used to mean: Are you dating? Are you pregnant? Now it meant: Are you still like this?

Once, her awards had filled an entire wall in the living room: the Commonwealth Writers Prize plaque, the Caine Prize certificate, the replica of her British Library quote. One day, she took them all down and stuffed them into the bottom cabinet of her workspace. It felt like walking away from a crime scene.

She had money, enough to live without working, thanks to residuals and a film adaptation that had done surprisingly well in France. But depression does not check your account balance. It makes princes out of beggars and corpses out of the wealthy.

She still tried to write. Every few weeks, she would open a new document. Untitled (again). NEW ACTUAL DRAFT.docx. PleaseWorkFinal.docx. She stared at blinking cursors until her eyes blurred. She tried thrillers, children’s books, even a romance set in pre-colonial Ibadan. But the words felt foreign, like reciting hymns in a dead language.

Once, at a panel in Manchester, England, a girl with blonde braids and a trembling voice had said, “Your book made me want to write again.” Hanna had smiled, signed her copy, and posed for a photo. That was eight years ago.

Now she barely recognized her own name.

***

It was a Wednesday, or maybe a Friday, when she found herself in Yaba, Lagos.

She stood still in the middle of Herbert Macaulay Way, dazed, as cars swerved and horns blared. Her slippers were soft with dust. Her dress clung to her back. She did not remember leaving Victoria Island, or how she’d crossed the bridges that separate Lagos from its own body.  She only remembered blinking, and then the lagoon was gone.

A boy selling plantain chips nudged her angrily back onto the side of the road. “Aunty, abeg! You no see road?”

She went home. She threw up. She cried. She slept for two days.

***

Two weeks later, she met Daniel.

It was at the café she haunted on Akin Adesola Street, the one with overpriced mochas and expatriates on Zoom. Daniel sat across from her, wearing a white cotton shirt that looked like it had been soaked in the breeze. She didn’t notice him until he looked up and said, “You’ve been trying to write the same paragraph for twenty-six minutes.”

She blinked. “What? Are you watching me?”

“Only with concern,” he said.

She should have walked away. But there was something about his presence that felt… steady. He didn’t flinch when she looked away. He didn’t rush when he spoke. He felt like silence, but the good kind.

That was how it began.

***

Daniel did not try to fix her.

He sat with her. He brought rice and beans from a spot near his “auntie’s house” in Obalende, and it tasted like wet sun. He never asked about her books, or her fame, or what it felt like to be adored and then discarded by the world. He asked her what her childhood bedroom looked like. What her first heartbreak smelled like. If she still believed in God.

They talked for hours. They walked the length of Akin Adesola street without checking their phones. He made her laugh, intense, stupid laugh, the kind that fogged her glasses and made her snort.

He reminded her, vaguely of Nonso, the boy she’d loved in university many years ago. The one who wrote her letters and once stayed up all night to print her first manuscript at the school library. That boy had inspired her first novel. But Daniel felt deeper. Quieter. More real, which, in hindsight, was its own irony.

He told her to write what she wanted, not what people expected. That she was not a machine. That grief had seasons, too.

And slowly, without any kind of miracle, Hanna began to write again.

***

The first time she wrote a full page, she cried into her keyboard. The second time, she wrote a sex scene that made her blush, and delete it. The third time, she let herself finish a chapter. Her hands shook after.

It wasn’t the sweeping novel about Nigerian black tax and inherited trauma her publisher had begged for. It was a love story. Messy. Erotic. Full of food. She felt shame about it at first, the same shame that successful women are taught to feel when they make something soft. But Daniel read it and said, “This is the most honest thing you’ve ever done.”

He became her ritual. They shared small silences, cutting fruits in the kitchen, or reading side by side at Jazzhole in Ikoyi. She didn’t want to call it love. But her body ached like it was.

They had sex on her living room floor once, slow and wordless, with the rain leaking music through the balcony. She had not been touched in years. Afterward, she cried.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be,” Daniel replied. “You’re returning to yourself.”

***

It was a Thursday when he told her.

They had just come back from reading at Jazzhole, where she’d smiled so wide her face hurt. He was drying her feet with an old towel when he looked up and said, “I’m not coming back. I have to go.”

She laughed. “Where? This is your house.”

“No,” he said. “It’s not.”

There was a stillness in the air. The kind Lagos never allowed.

Daniel told her the truth, or a version of it. That he had come to help. That his presence was temporary. That he had stayed longer than he should have. That if he remained, he would die.

She asked, “Are you an angel?”

He shook his head. “Not in any way that would satisfy you.”

She screamed. She begged. She cursed him. He held her face and said, “You were never broken. You were just tired.”

They made love that night like people trying to etch memory into their skin. She memorized his collarbone. His eyelashes. The way he always said “hmm” instead of “yes.”

In the morning, he was gone.

***

Her new book, “the man in the white cotton shirt”, launched a year later. It sold out in one month. She sat through interviews with ease. One podcaster in Italy asked her, “Was the character of Daniel based on anyone real?”

Hanna paused.

She smiled.

She said, “Sort of.”

What she didn’t say was this: Daniel was never real.

There was no man in a cotton  white shirt at the cafe. She never even visited the cafe.  No supernatural visitor. No perfect lover who rescued her. There was only her mind, brilliant, desperate, loving, building a person out of thin air. Because she needed to be held. Because she needed someone to witness her pain without flinching. Because her imagination was the only thing that hadn’t left her.

She had not written for eight years.

And then she wrote him. And then she healed.

That is what fiction does. It lies, and then it saves you.