CHAPTER THREE: HIS TERRITORY

"I know enough," I said, which was a lie wearing a very confident jacket.

Kelechi Obi didn't answer right away, and I let the silence sit there and do its work, the way you let a pot boil without touching it.

"Come to the house tomorrow. Seven o'clock." He said it like an order, then seemed to catch himself and softened it by exactly one degree. "If you'd like answers, Miss Chukwu, I'd rather give them to you across a table than a phone line."

"Fine."

"Fine," he repeated, and hung up first, which annoyed me more than it should have.

I went back inside to find Chidinma had appointed herself Minister of My Wardrobe.

"You're going to a billionaire's house, and you want to wear that?" She held up my church blouse as if it had personally offended her ancestors. "Amara. This is not a prayer meeting."

"It's a business meeting."

"It's a business meeting with a man who owns a car worth more than Papa's whole compound, and you want to show up looking like you're about to collect church offering." She was already digging through my wardrobe with the focus of a surgeon. "Wear the green one. The green one says 'I am not afraid of you' without saying anything at all."

"I am a little afraid of him."

"Yes, but he doesn't need to know that."

Even Aunty Ngozi, three weeks a widow's sister deep in mourning cloth, found the energy to poke her head in with instructions. "Don't eat anything he offers you. If a man wants to trap you, he starts with food. My friend Comfort's daughter—"

"Aunty, I'm going to discuss a contract, not get married in his living room."

"That's what Comfort's daughter said too."

I left the house the next evening in the green dress, against my better judgment and entirely because of Chidinma's better judgment, and I told myself the whole drive over that I was not nervous. I was lying to myself with roughly the same confidence I'd lied to Kelechi Obi on the phone.

The house — if you could call something that size a house and not a small, tastefully lit country — sat behind gates that opened before I'd even finished giving my name at the intercom. A different driver than the one from the funeral led me through a compound with more marble than my entire street had concrete, past a fountain that was, absurdly, still running despite there being nobody around to enjoy it, and into a sitting room where Kelechi Obi stood by a window with a glass of something amber in his hand, not drinking it, just holding it like a prop for a conversation he'd already rehearsed.

"You came." He sounded almost surprised.

"You invited me at seven and had your gate open by six fifty-eight. You knew I'd come."

Something that wasn't quite a smile moved across his face. "Sit."

"I'll stand."

"Everyone stands the first time they're in this room. It's the marble. People think if they sit, they'll owe the chair money too." It took me a full second to realize he'd made a joke — a small, dry, almost reluctant joke — and an even longer second to realize I'd almost smiled at it before I caught myself.

"I'm not here to admire your furniture, Mr. Obi."

"Kelechi." He finally set the glass down, untouched. "If we're going to discuss what your father may or may not have known about my mother, I'd rather you not call me by my father's name while you do it."

That landed harder than I expected from both directions. He'd said it plainly, no performance in it, and for the first time since the funeral I saw something on his face that wasn't calculation. It looked almost like fear.

"You know about the photograph," I said slowly. "You already know something."

"I know my mother didn't die the way I was told she died." His jaw tightened. "I've known for three years. I found the first piece of it in my father's papers after he passed, and I have spent three years trying to find the second piece, and then your father died, and a contract with his signature surfaced in a file I was told didn't exist." He looked at me directly then, and whatever performance had been running the show since the funeral seemed to switch off entirely. "I didn't come to your father's funeral for a debt, Amara. I came because your father's name was the last in my mother's file before it goes cold. I need to know what he knew. I think you might be the only person left alive who can tell me."

Behind him, through the window, headlights turned in through the gate — a second car, arriving uninvited, sweeping light briefly across a framed photograph on the side table that I hadn't noticed until that exact moment.

A photograph of a woman. The same woman from the one hidden in my father's folder. Except in this one, she wasn't laughing with my father.

She was standing beside a second man I had never seen before in my life and Kelechi's whole body went rigid the instant he followed my gaze and realized exactly which photograph I was looking at.

"You need to leave," he said quietly. "Now. Before that car reaches the door."

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