Four Days

The second call came on a Wednesday.

She was in Bello’s office when it happened, sitting across from him going through documents, when the unknown number lit up her screen. She held up a finger to Bello, opened her recording app, pressed record, then picked up.

“You didn’t think about it long enough,” Emmanuel said. Same calm voice. Same unhurried patience.

“I’ve been thinking,” Funke said. “I just haven’t decided.”

“Then let me help you decide.” A pause, the kind that was designed to feel generous. “Two million naira. Cash. Your family keeps the Mushin house, we don’t touch anything else. The land transfers quietly and everyone moves on.”

Funke kept her voice soft and uncertain, the voice of someone being tempted. “That’s a lot of money.”

“It is. Because I’m a reasonable man and I want this resolved without pain.” Another pause. “Your father was a stubborn man, Funke. Stubbornness cost him. I hope you’re wiser.”

She let the silence stretch, let him think she was weighing it, let him feel the pull of his own offer.

“Give me two more days,” she said finally.

“Two days,” he agreed. Then the line went dead.

She stopped the recording and placed the phone on Bello’s desk between them.

Bello looked at the phone. Then at her. Then he picked it up, played it back from the beginning, and by the time Emmanuel’s voice said your father was a stubborn man, stubbornness cost him, something in Bello’s expression had gone very quiet and very focused.

“He just implied your father’s death was a consequence of his stubbornness,” Bello said.

“Yes.”

“That’s not a settlement offer. That’s a threat dressed in money.”

“Yes.”

Bello sat back. “This recording, combined with the WhatsApp messages, combined with whatever the toxicology report shows, this is a criminal case, Funke. Not just a land dispute. This man needs to be in front of a judge for more than a forged document.”

“I know,” Funke said. “But first we win the land. Then we give everything to the police. In that order. Because if we go to the police first, without the court win, he uses his connections to bury it and we lose everything.”

Bello looked at her for a moment. “You’ve thought about this carefully.”

“I’ve had time to think.”

He nodded slowly. “Okay. Your way. But we move together, no solo decisions from here. Agreed?”

“Agreed.”

She left his office and sat in her car for a few minutes before starting the engine. Two million naira. It was more money than she had ever seen in one place. More money than her family had ever had. And Emmanuel had offered it like it was a small thing, like a man who had much more than that and needed this particular victory badly enough to pay for it.

That told her something important.

The land was worth more than he was showing. Much more. Either its market value had grown in ways she didn’t know about, or there was something on or under that land that made it valuable beyond the obvious, and Emmanuel had known about it for years while her family hadn’t.

She made a note on her phone. Find out what the land is worth. Find out if anything is planned for that area.

Then she started the car and drove home.

Her mother was on the veranda when she got back, sitting in the plastic chair her father used to sit in, shelling melon seeds into a bowl with the mechanical steadiness of a woman who needed something for her hands to do while her mind went elsewhere. She looked up when Funke came through the gate and patted the empty chair beside her.

Funke sat.

They shelled melon seeds together for a while without speaking, the sound of it small and steady in the afternoon quiet.

Then her mother said, without looking up, “Your hair.”

Funke kept her hands moving. “I know.”

“It wasn’t there before your father died.”

“I know, Mama.”

Another stretch of quiet. Her mother’s hands didn’t slow. “What is happening, Funke? And I mean everything. Not the version you give me so I won’t worry.”

Funke looked at her mother’s profile, the strong jaw, the tired eyes, the woman who had built a life beside a man for thirty years and was now rebuilding herself without him, one day at a time.

She put down the melon seeds.

She told her everything.

The woman at the gate. The ring. The visions. The cost. The grey hair. The betting shop, the real estate office, all of it. Then the messages on her father’s phone. The forged document. The toxicology lab. Rotimi. Emmanuel. The recording she had made that morning.

She talked for a long time. Her mother listened without interrupting, hands finally still in her lap, eyes on the middle distance.

When Funke finished her mother was quiet for a long time.

Then she said, “Rotimi was always jealous of your father. Since they were boys. I saw it. Your father never wanted to see it because he loved his brother.”

“I know.”

“And the woman who gave you the ring…” Her mother paused, something moving across her face that Funke couldn’t name. “Describe her to me again.”

Funke described her. The plain white wrapper, the camphor smell, the eyes that looked through you, the steadiness that didn’t match her age.

Her mother closed her eyes.

“That was your grandmother,” she said quietly. “Your father’s mother. She died twelve years ago.” She opened her eyes. “I have a photograph inside. I will show you.”

Funke felt the ground shift slightly under her feet, sitting right there in the plastic chair in the veranda, the bowl of melon seeds between them.

Her grandmother.

Her father’s mother had come back, found her at the gate, and given her the ring.

Which meant someone on the other side had known what was coming long before it happened. Had been preparing. Had chosen Funke specifically and trusted her with something precious and painful and costly.

She sat with that for a long moment.

Then her mother reached over and covered her hand with hers the same way she had that first night, when the money was on the table and neither of them had words for what they were feeling.

“My daughter,” her mother said softly. “You have been carrying all of this alone.”

“I had to,” Funke said.

“I know.” Her mother squeezed her hand. “But not anymore.”

The toxicology results were three days away.

The court date was seven days out.

Emmanuel was waiting for an answer he was never going to get.

And somewhere in Ibadan, Rotimi was sitting with the particular dread of a man who had done something terrible and was beginning to understand that the ground beneath him was no longer solid.

Funke looked at her mother’s hand over hers and felt, for the first time in weeks, that she was not entirely alone in this.

It didn’t make it easier. But it made it possible.

To be continued…