Her father's maps were not maps of places so much as maps of mornings — the particular slant of light over Marina at six a.m., the smell of the lagoon before the fish sellers arrived, the sound a colonial office door made when it hadn't been oiled since the last administration.
Adaeze had inherited the trunk three weeks after the funeral, when the lawyer finally stopped clearing his throat long enough to mention it. Forty-two maps, hand-drawn, none of them matching any atlas she had ever seen.
The first one she unrolled showed her childhood street — except the street was labeled in a name she didn't recognize, and a small red X marked a house that, as far as she knew, had never existed.
She sat with the map a long while, tracing the unfamiliar street name with one finger, before she understood that her father had not drawn Lagos as it was. He had drawn Lagos as he remembered wanting it to be.