The police station smelled of old paper and sweat.
Kennedy sat on the hard plastic chair, elbows on his knees, staring at the floor. Papa stood beside him, arms folded, jaw tight. Mama refused to sit. She kept pacing between the door and the counter, wringing her hands.
A young officer finally called them in.
“Mr and Mrs Okoro?”
Papa nodded. “Yes. Our daughter is missing.”
The officer sat behind the desk and opened a thin file. “Favour Okoro. Twenty-four years old. Last seen leaving the house around seven-forty-five yesterday morning.”
“Yes,” Mama said quickly. “She was going to work. She always goes to work.”
The officer looked up. “And her office confirmed she never arrived?”
“They said she didn’t sign in,” Kennedy answered. His voice sounded strange to his own ears, rough and tired.
The officer wrote something down. “Any enemies? Boyfriend? Arguments at home?”
Mama’s eyes flashed. “What kind of question is that? Favour is a good girl. She doesn’t have enemies.”
Papa placed a hand on her arm. “Take it easy.”
The officer didn’t react. “We ask these questions for every missing person report. It’s standard.”
Kennedy leaned forward. “She has a phone. Can’t you track it?”
“We’re already working on that. But if the phone is off or the battery is dead, it becomes harder.”
Mama’s voice cracked. “So what are you saying? That we should just wait?”
“We’re saying we will do everything we can. But these cases take time.”
Papa stood. “Time is what we don’t have.”
—
Back at the house, the living room was full again. Aunties sat on the sofas. Neighbours stood in the doorway. Someone had brought a big cooler of drinks that nobody touched.
Auntie Grace pulled Mama aside. “Have you checked her friends properly? That girl she always goes out with, what is her name again?”
“Cynthia,” Kennedy said from the corner. “I already called her three times. She hasn’t seen Favour since last week.”
Auntie Grace shook her head. “These young people. Always hiding something.”
Kennedy’s face tightened. “Favour doesn’t hide things.”
“I’m just saying,”
“Don’t say it.” His voice was sharp. The room went quiet for a second.
Papa cleared his throat. “Kennedy, go and rest. You’ve been awake since yesterday.”
“I can’t rest.”
“You will collapse if you don’t.”
Kennedy didn’t move. He kept staring at the front door, as if Favour might walk through it any second with her bag and her soft pink lipstick and her usual “Sorry I’m late, traffic was bad.”
—
That night, after the visitors left, the house felt too big.
Mama sat on Favour’s bed, holding one of her scarves. She didn’t cry. She just sat there, rocking slightly the way she had the night before.
Papa stood in the doorway. “You need to sleep.”
“I can’t sleep in our room,” Mama whispered. “It feels wrong.”
Papa came in and sat beside her. For a long time neither of them spoke.
Finally Mama said, “What if something has happened to her?”
Papa’s voice was low. “Don’t think like that.”
“How can I not think like that? It’s almost two days.”
Kennedy appeared in the doorway. He had been listening from the passage.
“I’m going out,” he said.
Papa looked up. “Where?”
“To check the hospitals. The ones near her office. And the ones on the way.”
Mama’s head snapped up. “Kennedy,”
“I can’t just sit here, Mummy.”
Papa stood. “I’ll come with you.”
They left the house together under the yellow streetlights, the same street Favour had walked down two mornings ago.
Neither of them said it out loud, but both of them were thinking the same thing.
What if they found her somewhere they didn’t want to find her?
—
By the third day, the police still had nothing.
No phone signal. No CCTV that clearly showed her. No witnesses who remembered a young woman in a white blouse leaving Adeola Street that morning.
Kennedy sat on the front steps alone, phone in his hand, refreshing Favour’s last WhatsApp status over and over.
It still showed “last seen yesterday at 7:41 a.m.”
He typed a message he knew she would never read.
“Where are you? Just reply. Please.”
The blue ticks never appeared.
Inside the house, Mama had stopped cooking. The smell of frying plantain was gone.
In its place was only silence, and the slow, heavy weight of waiting.
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