CHAPTER TEN: WHAT'S LEFT STANDING

Kelechi's phone rang in the silent boardroom.

For one second, I thought it was Obiora's people calling to raise the price.

It wasn't.

"He's awake." Kelechi's security chief, breathless. "Bassey's awake. He wants to talk to you. He says it can't wait."

Kelechi put the phone flat on the table. Right in front of his uncle. Right in front of the whole room.

"Tell them," he said. "Tell them what you told us in Warri."

Bassey's voice came through tired but clear. He told it all again — the two minutes under the bonnet, the driver who wasn't Amara's father, the papers pulled from a burning car by a man who ran toward danger instead of away from it.

Then he added something new.

"There's a second tape," Bassey said. "Not from that night. From three weeks ago. Chief Obiora, on my hospital phone line, thinking I was too sedated to remember. Telling someone to 'handle the Warri problem before it becomes a Lagos problem.'" A pause. "I recorded that too. You should have finished the job, Chief."

Obiora's face went pale.

"That's inadmissible," he started.

Nobody was listening anymore. Three board members were already standing. Already on their own phones. A room full of careful, self-interested people had just decided, all at once, that they didn't want to go down with him.

"Where is Chidinma," Kelechi said. It wasn't a question.

Obiora didn't answer. He didn't need to. His own head of security slid a phone across the table, an address already pulled up on the screen.

They found her forty minutes later. Tied up. Unhurt. Already annoyed about it.

"Honestly, it wasn't even that dramatic," she told us later, hugging me so hard I nearly fell over. "They gave me small chops. The vibe was bad, but the snacks were decent." She pulled back and looked straight at Kelechi. "Has he said anything yet?"

"Chidinma."

"I'm just asking!"

He hadn't. Not yet.

Chief Obiora was walked out of his own company two hours later, by men who that morning had still called him Chief. The board moved fast once fear turned into self-preservation.

That night, we sat on the veranda of my father's house. Aunty Ngozi was pretending not to watch us through the kitchen window. Chidinma was pretending, badly, not to record us for her Instagram story.

I held the old photograph in my hands — my father, younger, laughing beside a woman who had trusted him with her life and hadn't been wrong to.

"I spent three weeks thinking he left me a debt," I said. "He didn't. He left me proof that doing the right thing still matters. Even twenty-two years later. Even when it's terrifying."

Kelechi was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, all that careful distance he'd kept since the funeral was finally gone.

"I don't want this to be a contract anymore," he said. "I told myself it was strategy. It stopped being strategy somewhere around a hospital corridor at three in the morning, and I've been too stubborn to say so."

"Kelechi—"

"I'm not finishing the sentence for you this time." He almost smiled. "Say it. Or don't. But I already know which one you'll pick."

"I love you," I said, and it came out easier than anything else had that whole month. "I have for a while. I was just waiting for the danger to be over first."

"It's over," he said, reaching for my hand. "Everything after this is just us."

From the kitchen window, Aunty Ngozi finally gave up pretending.

"Finally!" she shouted. "I will plan this wedding myself if you two keep wasting time!"

Chidinma laughed so hard she dropped her phone into the flowerpot, then immediately dove in after it, more upset about the phone than the flowers.

"MY SCREEN"

And Kelechi Obi — billionaire, boardroom warrior, a man who had once looked like a verdict standing outside my father's funeral — laughed too. Loud. Unguarded. Like a man who had finally put something very heavy down, right there on my veranda, in front of his future auntie-in-law and a cousin currently elbow-deep in soil rescuing a cracked phone screen.

"So," he said, still laughing, "should I speak to Aunty Ngozi about this wedding, or is she already planning it without either of us?"

"She's already texted three caterers," I said. "I saw her phone."

"Then I suppose," he said, pulling me closer, "we're getting married."

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THE END