Monday

She woke up at five without an alarm.

The house was still dark, the street outside quieter than it ever got during the day, just the distant sound of a generator somewhere and a dog that had been barking at nothing since midnight. She lay still for a moment, feeling the weight of the day before it had even started, the way you feel a thing you have been moving toward for weeks finally arrive at your feet.

She got up. Showered. Sat at the mirror.

She looked at herself for a long time.

The grey swept across the left side of her hair in a wide silver arc, stark and unmistakable against the dark. She had bought a headwrap the previous week, a deep burgundy one, the kind her mother wore to church. She had thought about wearing it today, thought about covering it, thought about walking into that courtroom looking like a 26 year old instead of whatever she looked like now.

She left the headwrap on the table.

She was done covering things.

She dressed carefully. The black blazer, the white blouse, the dark trousers. The same outfit she had worn to the real estate office on Victoria Island what felt like a lifetime ago, when she had walked in with a fake business card and information from a supernatural vision and bluffed her way into a deal that helped keep her family alive.

She was walking into a courtroom today. No fake cards. No ring. No visions.

Just everything she had gathered, piece by piece, the hard way.

She made tea and sat at the kitchen table in the quiet and when Tunde appeared from the parlour at six fifteen, still in yesterday’s clothes, shoes still on, he looked at her and she looked at him and neither of them said anything. He sat down. She poured him tea. They drank in the comfortable silence of two people who had already said everything that needed saying.

Their mother emerged at six forty-five in her best wrapper and matching headtie, her good shoes already on, her handbag over her arm, her face composed in the particular way it got when she had made peace with something and was ready to walk through it.

“I’m coming,” she said. Not a question.

Funke looked at Bello’s instructions in her head, the ones about keeping civilians away from proceedings that could get complicated. Then she looked at her mother standing there in her best clothes, the woman who had built a life with the man they were going to court for today.

“Yes,” Funke said. “You’re coming.”

They left the house at seven thirty. The CID car was still on the street, a different officer from the overnight one, younger, who nodded at Funke when she came out. She nodded back.

Bello was outside the court building when they arrived, twenty minutes before it opened, holding a leather folder thick with documents and looking like a man who had not slept much but had used the sleeplessness productively. He greeted her mother with a respectful bow, shook Tunde’s hand, and pulled Funke aside briefly.

“Emmanuel filed a counter application on Friday evening,” he said quietly. “I found out yesterday but didn’t want to call and worry you. He’s arguing the transfer was legitimate and that you’re contesting it on emotional grounds following your father’s death.”

“What does that mean for us?”

“It means the judge will hear both sides today. It’s not ideal but it’s not damaging. Our evidence is stronger.” He paused. “Emmanuel is here. He arrived twenty minutes ago with two lawyers.”

She absorbed that. “And Rotimi?”

“Sitting with Emmanuel’s team. As a witness to the original agreement, supposedly.” Bello’s expression said clearly what he thought of that. “CID has an officer in the courtroom today as well. Plain clothes. If anything is said that advances the criminal case they want it on record.”

“Okay,” she said.

“One more thing.” He looked at her steadily. “You may see them today. Emmanuel, Rotimi, both of them, in the same room. How are you?”

She thought about the question honestly.

She thought about her father’s photograph on the wall, laughing at something off camera. She thought about a medication bottle with residue on the inside of the cap. She thought about a WhatsApp message, men who cheat other men do not die peaceful deaths, sent four months before a cardiac arrest that wasn’t a cardiac arrest.

She thought about a cold ring sitting in her dresser drawer at home, its engraving gone, its work finished.

“I’m ready,” she said.

They went inside.

The courtroom was smaller than she had imagined, the way official places often are when you finally stand in them after building them up in your head. Wooden benches, a tired ceiling fan, afternoon light coming through high windows even though it was still morning. The smell of old paper and something institutional she couldn’t name.

Emmanuel was already seated on the opposite side with his two lawyers. He was wearing agbada today, deep green, the clothes of a man who had dressed for a victory. He didn’t look at her when she came in.

Rotimi sat behind him.

He looked at her.

She looked back.

She held his gaze for three full seconds and then she turned away and sat beside Bello and opened her notepad and clicked her pen, because she had not come here to make him feel anything. She had not come here for a moment. She had come here for a result.

The judge entered at nine fifteen, a woman in her sixties with reading glasses and the brisk energy of someone who had seen every version of every case and was not interested in theatre.

Proceedings began.

Bello presented their case with a quiet precision that Funke had not fully appreciated until she heard it in a room. He laid everything out in order, the original land ownership documents reconstructed from secondary sources, the forged transfer, the expert analysis of the signature showing the absent loop her father always used, the land registry irregularities in Osun State, the prior relationship between Emmanuel and her father, the motive established by the federal compensation gazette.

Emmanuel’s lawyers objected three times. The judge overruled twice and sustained once on a technicality that Bello had anticipated and worked around smoothly.

Then Bello played the recordings.

Emmanuel’s voice filled the small courtroom. The settlement offer. The two million. Your father was a stubborn man, stubbornness cost him. The threat wrapped in concern. Think about your mother. Think about your brother.

The judge’s expression didn’t change. But she wrote something down that she underlined twice.

Funke watched Emmanuel’s lawyers lean toward him urgently, whispering. She watched Emmanuel’s jaw tighten. She watched him look at the table in front of him with the careful blankness of a man constructing a response he hadn’t prepared for.

She watched Rotimi behind him, very still, looking at nothing.

The judge called a short recess at eleven thirty.

In the corridor Bello found her and said quietly, “She’s going to rule in our favour. I can’t promise anything but the way she responded to the recording, the way she looked at their team, she’s seen what this is.”

Funke nodded.

Her mother appeared beside her and took her hand without a word.

Tunde stood on her other side.

They stood in that courthouse corridor, the three of them, a family that had been taken apart and had put itself back together piece by piece, and they waited.

The recess lasted twenty minutes.

It felt like a year.

To be continued…