Adesola arrived at seven forty. The school was a concrete room with a tin roof. Out front, the dirt road. Out back, a mango tree with dusty leaves. The door had no lock. The brass handle had been polished by Adesola on the first Monday of every month for seven years. Above the door, painted in red, was the name of the school: Owode Oja Community Nursery. The N in Nursery had lost its left leg to the sun.

The school was four kilometres from Ahoro Esinele. The village was called Owode Oja. Thirty houses. The mothers of Owode Oja brought their small children to Adesola's nursery and sent the older ones on foot to the school at Ahoro, which was a proper school, with uniforms, classrooms in six rows, a headmaster in a jacket even in the heat.

The night between the eighteenth and nineteenth of May, the armed men had come to the school at Ahoro. They had taken thirty-nine children and seven teachers. Children between two years old and sixteen. In Owode Oja the word came at four in the morning, over the small radios. Adesola's small radio was on the bedside table, beside her mother's wooden rosary.

Adesola was thirty-two years old. She had been teaching at the Owode Oja community nursery since she was twenty-four. Her father had been a teacher too, in Ilesa. He had told her, and he had told her many times, that the chairs of small children must be light, because a small child must not struggle to pull out a chair, and the effort of that first movement stays with you for years. Adesola had cleaned the chairs every Saturday. The chairs were yellow.

That morning of the nineteenth of May Adesola opened the door. She set the register on the desk. The desk was a small wooden table with three drawers. In the drawers: thirteen pencils, a cloth flag folded badly, a box of chalk, two clean handkerchiefs.

Adesola opened the window. The dirt road was empty. A goat crossed. A woman at the far end, a bucket on her head, moved slowly past. The woman did not look toward the school.

It was seven fifty-two. The mothers always came between seven fifty-five and eight-oh-five. The mothers came with the child on their back if the child was under two and by the hand if older. The mothers often stopped a moment to talk with Adesola: about the price of millet, about the roof the last rain had broken, about a mother-in-law getting worse. Adesola listened standing in the doorway. It was part of the work.

That morning nobody came. No mother came. No child came. Not even the water seller who every three days came round with his cart and stopped at the gate to say hello.

Adesola sat down behind the desk. She touched her veil. She stood up. She went to the door. She came back to the desk. She opened the register. The page for the nineteenth of May was blank.

Adesola thought — and this I am the one telling you now — that closing the school would have been easy. The door had no lock. It would have been easy to leave it just like that. Get on her bicycle. Go back to her mother's house, eight kilometres. Wait for Monday. See who came back.

Adesola did not close the school. Adesola wrote the date in the top right corner: nineteenth of May. Below the date, where every day she wrote attendance, she wrote the first name. She read it out loud.

— Adekunle.

She waited two seconds. No one raised a hand. Adesola wrote a dash. She said the second name.

— Bisola.

She waited. Dash. She said the third.

— Damilola.

Dash. She went on.

— Folake.

— Funmi.

— Gbenga.

— Ifeoma.

— Kemi.

— Olu.

— Olawale.

— Ronke.

— Sade.

— Segun.

— Taiwo.

— Tunde.

— Uche.

— Wale.

— Yetunde.

Yetunde was six years old. She sat in the third row, beside the wall. Yetunde had a small scar on her chin, a fall from a chair on the first day, and Adesola herself had pressed gauze to it, and from that day Yetunde had learned to pull the chair with her whole hand and not with two fingers. Adesola said Yetunde's name.

She waited. Nobody answered. Adesola wrote the dash.

Adesola closed the register. She understood that she had not taken attendance. She had called the names and she had waited. She had called the names and spoken them aloud in an empty classroom. She had called the names and the names had hung in the air for the length of a breath and then settled on the yellow chairs.

She had prayed. She knew it. She knew it while she was doing it. She had not let herself know it before.

Adesola stayed sitting. The desk was clean. The register was closed. Outside the dirt road went on empty. The mango tree cast a shadow that grew slowly on the east wall.

Half an hour had passed since the first name. Down the road, far off, at the bend, a figure appeared. It was a woman. She was walking slowly. Adesola waited. The woman was walking toward the school. The woman was holding something by the hand. It was a child. The child was small. Maybe four years old, maybe five.

Adesola stood up. She went to the door. She opened the door wider. She said nothing. She stood in the doorway. The woman was coming closer. The woman held the child by the hand. The child walked one step behind the woman, slowly.

Adesola opened the register again. She turned back to the page for the nineteenth of May. She waited for the woman to reach the gate.