The organ was relieved, not removed

Chika said, "You ask anybody about am?"

"I just told you. Ninety-four."

"I mean ask. Person for the street. Person wey work for am before."

Amara looked at her with the particular patience of a fourteen-year-old being asked to use a rotary telephone. "Why? It's all there."

And it was. That was the thing. It was all there — more of it, better checked, and more honest than anything Chika had ever had at that age, and the girl would never in her life be cheated the way Emeka Odugbemi was cheated, and would never lose ₦400,000 to a barber shop in Ikorodu, and would never sit on a step at eleven at night in the dark.

She had also never once in her life needed to know a neighbour's face.

She was not worse off. She could do things Chika could not do. And there was nobody left in that street who ran an ajo, because why would you — the ledger never forgot, never gossiped, never died, and never asked you to sit in a room with eleven people twice a month for years so that the eleven of you would know each other well enough for it to work.

The organ had not been removed. It had been relieved, which is the only way those things actually go.