Green

The betting shop on Awolowo Road smelled like cigarettes and desperate hope.

Funke had passed it a hundred times without ever walking in. It was the kind of place her father would have hissed at, full of young men hunched over phones, eyes red, energy twitching between excitement and ruin.

She walked in anyway.

Nobody looked up. That was Lagos for you. Everyone too focused on their own gamble to notice someone else’s.

She stood at the counter, her mother’s ₦2,000 folded in her fist, her heart doing something irregular in her chest. The man behind the counter had a toothpick in his mouth and the bored face of someone who had seen too many people lose.

“What you wan play?” he asked without looking at her.

Funke opened her mouth. Then closed it.

She had seen the slip in her vision. She had seen her own hands writing the numbers. But standing here now, in the noise and the cigarette smell and the fluorescent light that flickered every few seconds, she couldn’t remember if she was being brave or being foolish.

Every gift has a weight.

She pushed the thought aside and called out the numbers.

The man finally looked at her. Something shifted in his expression — not quite respect, not quite pity. Just attention.

“Odds on this one high o,” he said.

“I know,” Funke said, even though she hadn’t known until he said it.

She paid. He printed the slip. She took it and found a plastic chair in the corner and sat down with the ticket between her fingers like it was something fragile.

Then she waited.

She didn’t pray. She wasn’t sure she had the right to, not with what she was doing, not with where the knowledge had come from. She just sat there, watching the screens on the wall cycle through matches, her knee bouncing under the table.

An hour passed.

Then another.

Then the screen she’d been watching all morning flashed.

Green.

The room didn’t change. Nobody cheered for her. The man with the toothpick was already helping another customer. But Funke’s vision went blurry for a second and she had to press her hand flat against her thigh to stop herself from shaking.

₦340,000.

She collected it in cash. She asked them to count it twice. They did, with the patience of people used to winners who didn’t believe they’d won.

She walked out into the Lagos afternoon sun and stood on the pavement and just breathed.

Then she called her mother.

“Mama. I have money. Don’t ask me how. I’ll explain when I get home.”

Her mother was quiet for a long time. Then: “Funke. Where did you—”

“Mama.” Her voice was steady. Steadier than she felt. “I’ll explain. Just know we’re going to be okay.”

She hung up before her mother could ask again.

She paid the hospital bill that same afternoon. Cash. She watched the cashier stamp CLEARED across the top of the invoice and felt something loosen in her chest — a knot she had been carrying so long she’d forgotten it was there.

She paid two months of rent on the way home. The landlord collected the money without apology, which was fine. She wasn’t looking for sorry. She was looking for survival.

By the time she got back to Mushin, the sun was going down and Tunde was standing at the gate with his arms folded, pretending he hadn’t been watching the street for her.

“Where you go?” he asked.

“Handle things,” she said.

He looked at the receipt she was carrying, the stamp, the numbers. His eyes widened. “Funke—”

“Later,” she said. “Let me see Mama first.”

Her mother was sitting in the parlour in the dark, which was how she sat when she was thinking too hard. When Funke turned on the light and sat across from her and put the remaining cash — ₦160,000 — on the table between them, her mother stared at it like it might disappear.

“Tell me the truth,” her mother said quietly. “Where did this come from?”

Funke looked at the ring on her finger. Dull silver. Quiet. Still.

“I won a bet,” she said.

It wasn’t a lie.

Her mother closed her eyes. “Your father would not like this.”

“Daddy is gone, Mama.” The words came out softer than she intended. “And we are still here. And we need to eat.”

The silence between them held everything — grief, relief, guilt, gratitude — all of it tangled together with nowhere to go.

Her mother reached across the table and covered Funke’s hand with hers.

Neither of them said anything else.

That night, Funke lay in bed staring at the ceiling again. The ring was still warm. Warmer than it should have been.

She told herself she was done. One time. Just to survive. She would find a real job now, figure something out, move forward like a normal person.

She told herself that.

But somewhere in the back of her mind, a number was already forming. A different match. A different slip.

And the ring pulsed once — soft, like a heartbeat — as if it had heard her.

To be continued…