Ella did not ask her mother anything that night. She just came and sat beside her on the step and leaned her head on Grace's arm, and neither of them said a word. Grace understood that her daughter already knew. Children always do.
"Go and sleep," Grace finally said. "Tomorrow I'll tell you everything. Properly."
The next morning, over a breakfast of bread and tea, she told them. She used simple words. Their father had gone to live with another family. He was not coming back to live with them. It was not their fault. It was not anything they did.
Evelyn, who was seven, asked, "Does he still love us?"
Grace took a long moment. "Some people do not know how to love well," she said. "That is their weakness, not your problem. But I am here. I am not going anywhere. Do you understand?"
Evelyn nodded and went back to her bread. Ella just stared at the table.
On Thursday, Grace dressed in her best blouse, put the girls with Auntie Joyce, and took a minibus to the market side of town. Everybody knew where Madam Harper operated from. She sat behind a small table at the back of a provisions shop, with a ledger, a calculator, and eyes that missed nothing.
"Sit," Madam Harper said. "How much?"
"Three months' rent. Plus capital for my food business. I want to cook for the construction workers at the new site."
"How much?"
Grace said the number. Madam Harper wrote it down.
"Thirty percent per month," she said, as if saying the price of tomatoes.
"Thirty? Madam, that is too much."
"Then go to the bank." Madam Harper did not even look up. "Go and tell them you have no payslip, no collateral, no husband. See what they say."
Grace felt that last word land like a slap. She sat very still.
"You will pay every last Friday of the month," Madam Harper continued. "If you miss, my boy comes. I do not like to send my boy."
Grace knew perfectly well what thirty percent meant. It meant she would be running to stand still. It meant working twice as hard for the same bread. But the landlord was coming Friday, and Friday was tomorrow.
"I accept," she said.
She signed with a pen that smelled of old ink. Madam Harper counted the notes into her hand, slowly, and Grace tucked them into her bra the way her mother had once taught her.
Walking out into the bright market noise, she felt dizzy. For the first time she was holding more money than she had in months, and for the first time she owed more than she could easily imagine.
She would pay it back. She had to.
She did not yet know that the very next day, her daughter would be sent home from school.