CHAPTER FIVE: TWO TRAILS

"Someone told him," Kelechi said again, quieter this time, more to himself than to me, and the stillness in the room after his uncle left had a weight to it that hadn't been there an hour ago. "Which means someone in this house talks to him. Or someone followed you here tonight without either of us noticing."

"You think I'm being followed?"

"I think," he said, crossing to the window and checking the driveway with the practiced calm of a man who had done it before, many times, for reasons he'd never had to explain to anyone, "that as of tonight, we are both people worth following."

His phone rang before I could answer that. He looked at the screen, and something shifted behind his eyes not fear exactly, sharper than that, like a hunter catching a scent.

"I have to take this." He stepped away, but not far enough that I didn't hear the first line of it. "You found him? The old driver - the one who worked the Ikeja route in '99—" A pause, longer this time, his shoulders drawing tight. "Don't let him disappear again. I'll send someone tonight."

He hung up and turned back to me with the look of a man recalculating everything at once.

"My father had a driver before the accident. He vanished the same week my mother died and nobody could ever find him again. Someone just found him. Alive. In Warri."

"That's your trail." I said it before I'd decided to, something in me recognizing the shape of it because I already had one of my own. "I have one too. There's a name in my father's old bank passbook — an account he sent money to every month for years before he died. I never asked him about it because I assumed it was one of his church offerings. It isn't a church. It's a person."

We stood there for a moment, two strangers with two threads that clearly led toward the same knot, neither of us quite ready to say the word partners, because partners trust each other, and I still wasn't sure I trusted a man whose family had built a mansion on top of whatever my father had helped bury.

"We're not doing this together," I said finally.

"No," he agreed, a little too quickly for it to be entirely convincing. "Of course not."

"I'll find my own answers."

"As will I." He almost smiled. "I do hope, for both our sakes, that they turn out to be the same answer."

The house was too quiet when the driver dropped me home, which after three weeks of a full compound and mourning visitors felt wrong in a way I couldn't name. I let myself in, went straight to my father's room, and pulled the passbook out from under the loose floorboard where I'd hidden it the night before, running my thumb down the column of names until I found it again. E. Okonji. Monthly, ₦15,000, unbroken, seventeen years.

I was so deep in it that I didn't hear the window latch give way behind me until it was already halfway open.

Every horror film my brother had ever forced me to watch came back to me at once. I grabbed the nearest weapon available to a Nigerian woman in a crisis — my mother's old wooden pestle, propped by habit near the door for exactly no reason until this precise moment — and swung around the doorframe ready to do genuine violence to whoever was climbing through my dead father's window at eleven at night.

"AH! Amara, it's me, it's me, put that down—"

Chidinma froze halfway through the window frame, one leg in, one leg still hooked over the sill, a bag of suya somehow still intact in one hand despite the acrobatics required to get it there.

"You climbed through the window."

"The gate man was asleep and I wasn't about to shout my business into the whole street! I brought suya. I need the full gist about the billionaire's house before I explode." She finally tumbled the rest of the way in, entirely unbothered by the pestle still raised over my head. "Also I may have accidentally told two more people the location. Don't look at me like that, it slipped."

I lowered the pestle, my heart still going twice its normal speed, somewhere between wanting to laugh and wanting to throw the suya back out the window she'd just broken into.

"Chidinma. I nearly hit you with a pestle."

"You'd have missed. You always close your eyes when you swing things." She was already unwrapping the suya like nothing had happened, settling onto my father's old bed like she owned it. "Now. Tell me everything. Did he touch your hand? Because from the way you—"

She stopped mid-sentence, staring past my shoulder at the window she'd just climbed through, her whole face changing.

"Amara." Her voice had gone very small. "Why is there a car parked outside your gate with its lights off?"

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FOLLOW UP FOR CHAPTER SIX