The final map was the largest of the forty-two, and the only one Adaeze's father had signed — not with his surveyor's stamp, but in his own hand, the ink slightly smudged where his palm must have rested too long before it dried.
It was a map of the whole city, but overlaid, impossibly, with a second city beneath it — streets that didn't exist drawn in fainter ink beneath the streets that did, like a photograph developed twice on the same plate.
Adaeze understood, finally, what six months of unrolling her father's trunk had been building toward: he had not been mapping Lagos at all. He had been mapping every version of it he had loved and lost — the city before the war, the city before her mother, the city before the office that took twelve hours a day and gave back a man too tired to draw anything but ghosts.
R, she now knew, had been a story he never told anyone, folded so carefully into cartography that it had taken his daughter forty-two pieces of paper to find it.
She rolled the final map back up, gently, the way you handle something that has finally stopped being a mystery and started being simply true. Then she added it to the others, and began, for the first time, to draw her own.