The Cost

Two left.

She turned the ring around her finger the whole ride home, the engraving pressing into her palm like a warning she couldn’t unhear.

Two left meant there had been a number from the beginning. It meant the old woman hadn’t given her something infinite. She had given her something counted. Measured. Like she already knew exactly how much Funke would need before she got greedy.

Or maybe that was the point.

Maybe two left was supposed to feel like urgency. Like she needed to use them fast, use them well, before they ran out. Maybe that feeling, that pressure, was exactly what the ring wanted her to feel.

Funke pressed her back against the cab seat and forced herself to breathe.

Think. Don’t react. Think.

She had ₦150,000 in her bag. Tunde’s fees were covered. They had food. They had rent. For the first time in weeks, they had room.

She didn’t need to use the ring again. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

She got home, paid Tunde’s fees from the envelope, and put the rest in the small box under her mother’s bed where they kept important things. Her mother watched her count the money without asking where it came from this time. That silence felt different from the last one. Less relieved. More worried.

“Funke,” her mother said as she was leaving the room.

“Ma?”

Her mother looked at her for a long moment. The kind of look that sees past your face. “You look tired. Not body tired. Something else.”

Funke almost told her. The words were right there, Mama there is a ring and a woman and I have been seeing the future and I don’t know what it’s costing me yet.

Instead she said, “I’m fine. Just stress.”

Her mother nodded slowly. “Come and eat.”

She slept without wearing the ring that night.

No vision came. Just darkness, and her own dreams, scattered, meaningless, already forgotten by morning.

She woke up feeling almost normal. Almost like herself.

Then she went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror and saw it.

A streak of grey in her hair.

Right at the front, above her left temple. Thin but unmistakable. Silver-white against her dark hair, the width of two fingers.

Funke leaned closer to the mirror. Touched it. It was real. It was hers.

She was twenty-six years old.

She stood there for a long time, very still, the ring sitting on the edge of the sink where she had left it the night before. Dull silver. Quiet. Watching her the way things that don’t have eyes somehow watch you.

Every gift has a weight. You will learn yours.

This was it. This was the cost.

Not money. Not luck. Not someone else’s pain.

Her.

Every vision she used took something from her directly. Aged her. Quietly. From the inside.

One vision, a streak of grey.

She was almost afraid to think about what two more would take.

She picked up the ring and held it in her palm and had a very serious conversation with herself. The kind you have when you finally understand that a thing you thought was helping you might actually be eating you.

She could stop. Right now. Walk to the window and throw it into the street and never think about it again. They had money. Not plenty, but enough for now. Enough to breathe.

She could stop.

But then her phone rang.

It was her mother’s sister. Aunty Bisi. Calling from Ibadan with the voice she used when something had gone wrong.

“Funke. Your mother didn’t tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

A pause. Heavy and wet with bad news. “The land in the village. Your father’s land. Someone is contesting it. A man is saying your father signed it over to him six months before he died. They have a document.”

Funke’s grip tightened on the phone. “That’s not possible. Daddy would never—”

“I know. We know. But the man has a lawyer and a court date and if your family doesn’t show up with proof in thirty days, the land goes to him.” Another pause. “That land is the only thing your father left you. If you lose it—”

“I know,” Funke said quietly.

She knew exactly what that land was. Three plots in the village. The thing her father had worked twenty years to pay off. The thing he had told her — this is for you and Tunde, this is your foundation, no matter what happens to me.

Someone was trying to take it.

And she had thirty days and no lawyer and no money for one and two visions left on a ring that was slowly ageing her from the inside.

She put the phone down and sat on the edge of her bed and looked at the ring in her hand.

The engraving stared back at her.

Two left.

She thought about her father’s face. The way he used to say her name — Funke-mi — like it meant something precious. The way he had talked about that land like it was a promise he was keeping for them even after he was gone.

She thought about a lawyer she couldn’t afford. A court date in thirty days. A man with documents she had never seen.

Then she thought about what one vision, the right vision, could show her.

Her hand closed around the ring.

Not yet. She wasn’t putting it on yet.

But she wasn’t throwing it away either.

She sat there in the morning light with the ring in her fist and a grey streak in her hair and a dead man’s land slipping through her fingers.

And she made a decision.

To be continued…