CHAPTER FOUR: CHIEF OBIORA

"Leave through the kitchen," Kelechi said, already moving, already sounding like a man who had rehearsed this particular emergency before. "Now, Amara."

"I'm not hiding in your kitchen like a..."

"Like a woman who doesn't want my uncle asking why she's standing in my sitting room three weeks after her father's funeral? Yes. Exactly like that. Move."

The staff hallway smelled like polish and, absurdly, suya, and a startled kitchen girl nearly dropped an entire tray of small chops when I came flying through the swinging door.

"Sorry! Sorry o!" I caught two of the chin chin before they hit the floor, some instinct from a lifetime of never wasting food overriding every other instinct currently screaming in my body. The girl stared at me as if I'd materialized from the marble itself.

"Madam, you cannot be back here..."

"I know. I'm leaving. I'm just..." I looked down at the two pieces of chin chin still in my hand, and some small unhinged part of me thought, well, I did come all this way, and ate one anyway.

Through the crack in the swinging door, I watched Kelechi cross the sitting room just as the front doors opened, and a man walked in who I recognized instantly, even though I had never once seen his face before that evening because it was, unmistakably, older but unmistakably the second man from the photograph. Broader now. Greyer at the temples. Wearing the kind of agbada that costs more than most people's rent, moving through the house like he owned every marble tile in it, which, I would later learn, in a legal sense, he very nearly did.

"Kelechi." His voice filled the room the way expensive cologne fills a lift. "I heard you had a visitor."

"Business."

"At seven in the evening. In that dress code." Chief Obiora Obi laughed, a short, dry sound with no real humor behind it. "Your father used to do business at seven in the evening too. I remember exactly what kind."

"Uncle."

"Relax, relax." He crossed to the same window Kelechi had been standing at, and for one terrible second I thought he might turn and look directly at the kitchen door I was hiding behind, close enough now that I could smell his cologne even through the crack. "I only came to remind you the board meeting is Thursday. Try not to let personal matters interfere with matters of the company. Your father built something fragile, Kelechi. Fragile things need careful hands."

"I'm aware of what my father built."

"Are you?" Chief Obiora's voice dropped, quieter now, almost gentle, which somehow made it worse. "Because I remember a young man who used to ask far too many questions about his mother. I would hate for that habit to come back now, of all times. Some questions, once you start asking them out loud, don't let you take them back."

The room went very still.

"Is that a warning, Uncle?"

"It's family advice." Chief Obiora smiled and picked an invisible piece of lint off his sleeve with the unhurried precision of a man who had never once in his life worried about being late for anything. "The same advice I gave your father, the year before he died. He didn't take it either. Goodnight, Kelechi."

He left the way he'd come, unhurried, cologne trailing behind him like smoke that refused to clear the room.

I came out from behind the kitchen door still holding the second piece of chin chin, forgotten in my fist, and found Kelechi standing exactly where his uncle had left him, staring at the closed front door as if it had personally betrayed him.

"That," I said quietly, "sounded like a threat."

"It was." He didn't turn around. "He's done it before. Small, patient warnings, wrapped in birthday-card language, right before something happens to whoever he's warning." His voice had lost every trace of the composed boardroom man from an hour ago. "My father died eleven months after the last time my uncle 'gave him advice.'"

My stomach dropped through the marble floor.

"You think your uncle..."

"I don't know what I think." He finally turned around, and for the first time all evening, he looked less like Kelechi Obi the businessman and more like a boy who'd lost both his parents and was only now, three years too late, allowing himself to wonder if it had been an accident at all. "But I know he recognized that dress the second he walked in. And I know he's never once, in fifteen years, come to this house to remind me about a board meeting he could have mentioned in a text message."

He looked at me with something that was no longer suspicion, and not quite trust either something dangerous and new, sitting right in the middle of the two.

"He came," Kelechi said, "because someone already told him you were here."

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Is Chief Obiora someone both Kenneth and Amara need to be careful of? Drop your thoughts in the comments.

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