The dust got into everything that week. It was harmattan, the season when the wind carries the whole Sahara south and lays a fine grey film over every surface in the house, and Abena had chosen exactly the wrong week to clear out her grandmother's room.
She found the box under the bed, pushed so far back that she had to lie flat on the tiled floor with her arm stretched into the dark before her fingers closed around the edge of it. It was an old Bata shoebox, the cardboard gone soft at the corners, held shut with a loop of raffia string tied in a bow that had not been touched in years.
Inside were letters. Dozens of them, in three different kinds of handwriting, the paper gone the colour of weak tea. Most were addressed to her grandmother, Efua, in a hand Abena didn't recognise. But the return address on the oldest ones stopped her cold: a name she had never once heard spoken in this house, in this family, in twenty-eight years of Sunday dinners and christenings and funerals.
Kwame Asante. Kumasi.
She sat back on her heels, the box in her lap, and for a long moment she just listened to the wind moving the dry leaves outside the window, and to the very particular silence of a house keeping a secret so well that even its dust had learned to keep quiet.
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