Femi’s Report

He didn’t read it in the kitchen.

He went to the bathroom, locked the door, sat on the edge of the tub, and opened the message.

Femi had sent a voice note. Ninety seconds. The voice was flat and professional, the voice of a man who had seen enough that nothing surprised him anymore.

“The two companies, Goldview and Primrose, are shell accounts. Registered under proxy names through a microfinance bank in Ogun State that has been flagged twice by CBN for compliance failures but is still operating. The beneficial owner of both accounts, meaning the person the money actually reaches after it moves through two intermediate accounts, is a company called Crestview Properties Limited.”

Emeka’s eyes closed.

Crestview.

One of Commissioner Adeleke’s proxy companies from the newspaper article. He had searched it himself yesterday and found nothing concrete. But Femi had gone deeper than a newspaper archive.

“Crestview Properties Limited has received a total of one million, two hundred and forty thousand naira from these two accounts over eleven months. Your wife’s transfers are not the only ones feeding this account. There are six other source accounts sending similar amounts through similar shell structures. All of them routed through event or logistics company references. All of them landing in the same place.”

A pause.

“This is a money laundering structure. Small amounts from multiple sources, cleaned through fake business transactions, aggregated into a property company that then uses the funds for land acquisition. Whoever built this knows what they are doing. Your wife’s account is one node in a network. I don’t know if she built the node or if someone built it for her. That distinction matters legally. You need a lawyer before you do anything else.”

The voice note ended.

Emeka sat on the edge of the tub for a long time.

One million, two hundred and forty thousand naira.

His money. Their money. The savings they had built together, the transfers he had never questioned because he trusted her completely, moving through ghost companies into a property laundering network connected to a corrupt commissioner whose nephew was sleeping with his wife.

The bathroom fan hummed overhead.

He thought about Sade at twenty-six, the first time he had seen her across a room. Laughing at something, one hand on her friend’s arm, completely unaware of him watching. He had spent twenty minutes working up the courage to walk over. She had made it easy, turning at exactly the right moment, catching his eye, not looking away.

He had thought that meant something.

He stood up. Splashed cold water on his face. Looked in the mirror.

The man looking back at him had aged somewhere in the last thirty-six hours. Not visibly. Something behind the eyes.

He unlocked the bathroom door and walked to the bedroom.

Sade was at the dresser in a t-shirt and shorts, removing her makeup. Their eyes met in the mirror. She smiled at him. Small and familiar.

“You okay?” she asked. “You’ve been in the bathroom a while.”

“Stomach,” he said. “Something I ate.”

“There’s Flagyl in the cabinet.”

He sat on the bed. Watched her hands moving with the cotton pad, the careful way she always removed her makeup, the same routine he had watched hundreds of times without ever thinking it would one day feel like watching a stranger perform a ritual he wasn’t meant to see.

“Sade.”

She looked at him in the mirror.

“The Goldview transfers,” he said. “From the joint account.”

Everything stopped.

Just half a second. Her hand, the cotton pad, the expression on her face. Half a second of complete stillness that lasted longer than any silence he had ever sat in.

Then she turned around slowly.

And the look on her face was not guilt.

It was fear.

Real, unguarded, unperformed fear.

The kind that does not come from being caught doing something wrong.

The kind that comes from realising that someone you love is now standing too close to something dangerous.

“How do you know that name?” she whispered.