Writers 
CHAPTER TEN: Tunde's Confession
Tunde arrived at Chief Odukoya's compound Monday morning in his cleanest shirt, the one he saved for weddings and burials, because some instinct told him this meeting required the appearance of a man who still had dignity to protect.
The gateman let him through without a word. Kazeem was waiting in the garden, arms folded, watching him cross the compound
"Chief dey wait," Kazeem said, and led him inside.
Odukoya received him in the same study where he'd sat alone the night before, though now the whisky was gone and a tray of chilled Chapman sat untouched on the side table, a performance of hospitality neither man believed in.
"Tunde." Odukoya gestured to the chair across from his desk. "Sit, sit. How your mama?"
"She's managing, sir. Thank you."
"And the workshop?"
Tunde hesitated. "Slow, sir. But I'm working."
"Four hundred and fifty thousand your papa borrowed." Odukoya said it without looking up from the papers on his desk. "You don pay back — what. One hundred and sixty? Over six years?"
"Yes sir."
"Interest no dey stop because a man dey struggle, Tunde. You understand business."
"I understand, sir." Tunde's hands, folded in his lap, had begun to sweat. "That's why I dey try my best every month, even when—"
"I have work for you," Odukoya said, cutting through the apology Tunde hadn't finished making. "One job. You complete it well, I go wipe the whole debt. Finish. Clean slate. You go even get small balance for yourself, enough to buy proper spare parts, hire one apprentice, build the business back the way your papa wanted."
Tunde's heart, despite everything his instincts were telling him, lifted slightly at the words clean slate.
"What kind of work, sir?"
Odukoya finally looked up, and something in his gaze made the warmth in the room feel thinner.
"I need something moved. Lagos to Sagamu, Sagamu to here. Small package. No wahala, no stopping, no questions." He slid a folded piece of paper across the desk — an address, nothing more. "You get a van. Nobody suspects a mechanic moving spare parts."
Tunde didn't touch the paper.
"What's inside the package, sir?"
"You no need to know."
"Sir, with respect—" Tunde's voice came out steadier than he felt. "If I no know wetin I dey carry, and police stop me for road, na me go answer for am, not you."
Something flickered across Odukoya's face — not quite anger, more like mild surprise that the mechanic had more spine than he'd priced for.
"You're smarter than your papa," Odukoya said, almost approvingly. "Fine. Let me put it this way. Some men dey pay good money for things that are hard to get across state lines without wahala. Could be anything — spare phones, imported items, things customs like to tax too much. You carry, you deliver, you collect envelope, you come back. That's all your business needs to be."
Tunde sat very still, understanding, with the particular clarity of a man who has run out of good options, exactly what kind of man he was sitting across from, and exactly what kind of favor was being offered.
"And if I refuse, sir?"
Odukoya spread his hands, almost sorrowful. "Then the debt stays. Interest stays. And I will need to start thinking seriously about other ways to recover my money." His eyes moved deliberately to the window, toward the general direction of the workshop across town. "Property. Equipment. Maybe I take the workshop itself as settlement — your papa's name on the land title, sef, not even yours. These things happen, Tunde. Business is business."
The threat was delivered so gently it took a moment to land. Tunde thought of his father's hands, calloused and permanently stained with engine oil, teaching him to listen to an engine's cough. He thought of the signboard, ADEWALE & SONS, the only inheritance that had ever truly belonged to him.
He thought, unwillingly, of Ada — of the quiet hope that had started growing in his chest again since she'd walked back into his workshop two weeks ago, laughing at something small, looking at him the way she used to before life had made cowards of them both.
"Give me time to think, sir," Tunde said.
"You have till Thursday." Odukoya's voice had gone cool again, done with warmth now that the real business was concluded. "After that, I start looking at the workshop's papers myself."
Tunde found Ada that evening, not by plan but by the particular gravity two people fall into when neither of them has anyone else to tell the truth to. She was sitting outside her compound, waiting for something and when she saw his face, she rose immediately.
"Tunde. What happened?"
He almost lied. He had been lying by omission for six years, and the habit was deep enough that his mouth opened around a version of "nothing" before something in him simply gave out.
"I owe Chief Odukoya four hundred thousand naira," he said instead, the words coming fast now that the dam had broken, "balance from a debt my papa took before he died. I've been paying small small for six years. Today he offer me one job — carry package from Lagos to here, no questions — and if I refuse, he go take the workshop."
Ada's face had gone very still, the particular stillness he remembered from childhood, right before she decided to do something reckless.
"What kind of package, Tunde?"
"I no know. And I no wan know." He dropped onto the bench beside her, suddenly exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with his hands or his back. "Ada, I've been ashamed to tell you. All this time, since you start coming back around — I wanted you to see the man my papa trained, not the man owing another man like a slave."
"You should have told me from the beginning," Ada said, but there was no real anger in it, only a tiredness that matched his own.
"Why? So you could offer me your clinic money?" He shook his head. "I no go collect one kobo from you, Ada. Not for this."
"I wasn't going to offer it," Ada said quietly, which surprised him more than if she had. "I was going to tell you something instead. Something I should have told you already, because I think — I think our two problems may share the same root."
Tunde turned to look at her properly, something in her tone making the hair rise on his arms.
"The girl in Bed 6," Ada said slowly. "The sixteen-year-old. Tunde, I think she's connected to my family in a way I'm still trying to understand myself. And I think Chief Odukoya knows something about that connection too." She met his eyes, and in the dim evening light, he saw real fear there — not for herself, he realized, but for the people around her. "I think both of us just found out, on the same week, that we're tangled up in the same man's web. And I don't think that's an accident."
Somewhere down the road, a motorcycle engine coughed to life and idled, far enough to seem casual, close enough that both of them fell silent at the sound of it — two people who had just learned, in the space of one conversation, that the walls around their small, familiar town had eyes, and that those eyes had just started watching them as a pair instead of separately.
