Abuja

He didn’t sleep that night.

Not properly. He lay beside Sade in the dark, her breathing slow and even, her body warm against the sheets they had picked out together at Ikeja City Mall on a Sunday afternoon three years ago — she had argued for white, he had wanted grey, they had compromised on this off-white that looked different depending on the light.

He had thought about that argument fondly for three years.

Tonight he lay on his side of the bed and felt the distance between them like a physical thing. Six inches of mattress that might as well have been the Lagos Lagoon.

At 1:14am she shifted.

He watched her through half-closed eyes. She reached under her pillow, slowly, the way someone moves when they think they are alone. Her phone screen lit her face from below — pale blue light turning her into someone he almost didn’t recognise.

She typed something short.

Put the phone back.

Settled.

And was asleep again in minutes.

Emeka stared at the ceiling fan until 5am.

He was at his laptop by six, Sade still asleep, the flat quiet except for the hum of the generator two floors below. He made Nescafé and sat at the dining table and opened the Abuja property records portal.

It was public information technically. Buried, the kind of buried that counted on ordinary people not knowing where to look or having the patience to dig. But Emeka was a quantity surveyor. He spent his working life reading land documents, title records, survey plans. He knew exactly where to look.

He searched D.O. Adeleke first. Nothing under that name in Abuja. He tried Dayo Adeleke. Nothing. Then Dayo Olumide. Nothing.

He sat back. Drank his coffee.

The unknown caller had sent him here specifically. Which meant the property existed but not under Dayo’s name.

He thought about the newspaper article. Proxy companies. Shell directors.

He went back to the article, found the investigative piece from eight months ago, read it properly this time. The reporter — a woman named Funmi Ojo, byline from a platform called The Dispatch NG — had listed three proxy company names connected to Commissioner Adeleke’s land deals.

Crestview Properties Limited.
Bluewater Assets NG.
Paramount Land Solutions.

He searched each one in the Abuja records.

Crestview — nothing relevant.
Bluewater — two plots in Maitama, directors listed as nominees, dead ends.
Paramount Land Solutions…

He stopped.

Paramount Land Solutions held title to a property in Asokoro. Acquired fourteen months ago. Value listed at below market — the kind of below market that only happened when someone knew someone.

The listed director of Paramount Land Solutions was not Dayo.

It was a woman.

Adunola Savage-Adeleke.

He stared at the name.

Savage-Adeleke.

He typed it into Google with his coffee halfway to his mouth.

The results came back in seconds. LinkedIn. A corporate lawyer based in Abuja. Educated in London. Partner at a mid-sized firm.

And in the third result — a society page from two years ago. A charity dinner in Transcorp Hilton. A group photograph, ten people, all smiling.

Dayo was in the photograph.

Standing beside Adunola Savage-Adeleke.

His hand on her back.

The caption underneath read: Dayo Adeleke and wife Adunola at the Heart Foundation Gala, Abuja.

Wife.

Emeka put his coffee cup down very carefully on the table.

Dayo had a wife.

This man, who had been telling Sade baby I can still feel you at 7am on a Saturday, had a wife sitting in Abuja in a property purchased under a shell company, probably knowing nothing, probably doing the same thing Emeka had been doing for the past eight months.

Living in a marriage that was already gone.

He heard the bedroom door open.

Sade padded out in her sleeping shorts and his old university sweatshirt — she had stolen it years ago and he had stopped asking for it back. Her hair was wrapped, eyes still soft with sleep, and she looked so ordinary and familiar that something in his chest moved despite everything.

She stopped when she saw him.

“You’re up early.”

“Couldn’t sleep.”

She came to the kitchen, began running water for tea. “Work stress?”

“Something like that.”

She leaned against the counter waiting for the kettle and looked at him with the particular attention she had when she was actually seeing him and not just looking.

“You okay? You’ve been quiet since yesterday.”

He met her eyes.

And for one long moment he almost said it. Everything. The phone, the messages, Biodun, the unknown caller, Adunola Savage-Adeleke standing in a Transcorp Hilton ballroom beside the man who had been in this marriage with them for eight months without ever being in this room.

He almost said all of it.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Just tired.”

She held his gaze one second longer than normal.

Then she turned back to the kettle.

And Emeka looked down at his laptop screen.

At Dayo’s wife smiling in a photograph she had no idea would matter to a stranger in Lagos on a Sunday morning.

His phone buzzed.

The unknown number.

This time not a text.

A voice note.

Forty seconds long.