Tanda Cinta Tuan Benjamin

Chapter one -The Watcher

The rain had just started to fall, a thin mist that turned the morning streets of Lagos into a blur of umbrellas and impatient horns. Elena tucked her handbag closer to her chest as she hurried toward the bus terminal, her heels clicking against wet pavement. She hated Mondays. The city always felt more restless at the start of the week, like everyone was scrambling to erase the mistakes of the weekend before.

It was then she noticed him.

A man stood perfectly still near the terminal gates, as if untouched by the chaos around him. He wore a long gray coat that seemed out of place in the sticky Lagos humidity. While others shifted, gestured, and grumbled at bus conductors, he didn’t move. His head tilted slightly, eyes hidden beneath the brim of a dark hat.

At first, Elena thought nothing of it. Lagos was full of strangers, after all—faces that blurred, lives that brushed briefly against hers before vanishing forever. But something about his stillness made her pause. She felt his gaze, though she couldn’t see his eyes.

The bus conductor’s shout jolted her back. “Ojuelegba! Ojuelegba straight!”

Elena climbed aboard, squeezing between two women with baskets of plantains. She told herself she was imagining things. The city was large, messy, and unpredictable. A man in a gray coat meant nothing.

Or so she thought.

Two days later, she saw him again.

This time, he was standing across the street from her office building in Victoria Island. The lunchtime crowd bustled between fast-food stalls and banking halls, but there he was—still as stone, coat brushing against his legs as if the wind bent itself around him.

Her heart gave a nervous flutter.

Coincidence, she told herself. Lagos swallowed thousands of faces a day. Surely one of them could repeat.

But she couldn’t stop the uneasy chill spreading down her arms.

By Friday, she had seen him three times. And by then, Elena knew it wasn’t coincidence.

She didn’t consider herself paranoid—she was a financial analyst, trained to see patterns in numbers, not ghosts in shadows. Yet this pattern unsettled her more than any faulty spreadsheet ever had. Whenever she spotted him, he wasn’t near her—he was watching her. Always at a distance, never close enough to confront, but never far enough to forget.

The thought gnawed at her during meetings, when her boss droned about projections; it whispered to her at night when she locked her apartment door and double-checked the windows.

Who was he?

And what did he want from her?

On Saturday, she decided to test it.

She left her flat earlier than usual, dressing in casual clothes instead of her weekday suits. She walked quickly, weaving through the noise of Balogun Market, past stalls spilling with peppers, cloth, and cheap electronics. She deliberately took side streets she rarely used.

Twenty minutes later, as she pretended to browse a vendor’s jewelry stand, she saw him again.

Gray coat. Hat brim. That same unnerving stillness.

Her pulse kicked hard.

She ducked into a narrow bookstore tucked between a tailor’s shop and a phone accessories stall. The dusty scent of old pages wrapped around her as she slipped behind a tall stack of novels. Her hands trembled as she pulled out her phone and dialed her best friend.

“Mariam, he’s here again,” Elena whispered, her voice low.

“Who?” Mariam’s voice buzzed over the line.

“The man. The one I told you about—the gray coat. He’s following me, I swear it.”

“Elena, relax. You’ve been overworking yourself. Lagos is full of strange men. Maybe he just happens to walk the same routes.”

Elena peeked through the bookstore’s glass front. The man hadn’t followed her inside, but she could still see his reflection in the glass: steady, unshaken, waiting.

Her stomach sank.

She wasn’t imagining it.

She was being watched