Tenna stood at the bottom.
“Your wages will be delayed again,” Madame Badu said one morning without looking up from her tablet. “Next week.”
Next week had been promised three times already. Tenna nodded anyway. She always nodded.
Later, on her phone, a message waited from Cape Coast. Her younger brother’s school fees were overdue. He wrote carefully, apologetically, as if poverty were a fault he needed to soften with politeness.
Tenna slipped the phone into her apron and returned to work.
On Sundays, she was allowed out early only because Madame Badu did not like staff returning late. Tenna took the same route every week—past jacaranda trees, down streets that woke slowly—until the church doors opened before sunrise.
The church wasn’t grand. Plain concrete walls. Plastic chairs. But the singing filled the air with something that felt like breath after holding it too long.
That Sunday, she noticed him for the first time.
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