The Last Vision

She waited a week before she put the ring on.

Not because she wasn’t ready. Because she was afraid that she was.

There is a particular kind of fear that doesn’t make you run, it makes you very still. It settles in your chest like something heavy and cold and it makes you careful in a way that feels like wisdom but is really just terror wearing a sensible face.

Funke was careful for a week.

She filed the police report with Bello beside her. A tired officer took their statement, typed slowly, stamped the paper, and told them someone would follow up. The way he said it made clear that someone probably wouldn’t. But the record existed now. That was what mattered.

She sent the WhatsApp screenshots to Bello, to Aunty Bisi, and to a separate email address she created just to hold evidence. Three copies in three places. Her father had taught her that, never keep important things in one place, Funke-mi. Life scatters things.

She told her mother some of it. Not everything. She said there was a man trying to take the land and that she was handling it. Her mother listened with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes doing the thing they did now, present but somewhere far away, the way grief relocates a person even while they’re sitting right in front of you.

She didn’t tell her mother about the threats. Not yet. Not until she knew more.

Tunde she told more. He was seventeen but he had the kind of stillness that made you forget that. He sat and listened and didn’t interrupt and when she finished he said, “So this man might have killed Daddy.”

Not a question. A conclusion.

“I don’t know yet,” Funke said.

“But you think so.”

She looked at her brother. “Yes.”

Tunde nodded slowly. His jaw was tight. He was doing the thing boys do when they are feeling something too large and have nowhere to put it, compressing it, folding it inward, turning it into something harder.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

“Find out the truth,” she said.

He looked at the ring on her finger. He had never asked about it directly. But his eyes asked now.

Funke held his gaze. “Don’t ask me about the ring, Tunde.”

He looked away. “Okay.”

She put it on eleven days before the court date.

A Thursday night. Her mother asleep. Tunde asleep. The house quiet the way Lagos houses get quiet after midnight when even the generators start to feel tired.

She sat on the edge of her bed and looked at the ring for a long time.

One left.

She had been many things in the past weeks. Desperate. Resourceful. Grieving. Afraid. But sitting here now she felt something she hadn’t expected.

Calm.

Not the calm of someone who had made peace. The calm of someone who had decided. Who had looked at the cost and looked at what they were buying and said, yes. This. Whatever it takes.

She put the ring on.

She closed her eyes.

She waited.

The vision took her somewhere she recognised immediately.

Her father’s room. Not the Mushin room, the village house. The room he slept in when they visited for Christmas and New Year, with the window that faced the mango tree and the particular creak the door made when you opened it from outside.

It was night. The room was lit by a small bedside lamp.

Her father was in bed. Asleep or almost asleep, she could see his chest rising and falling, slow and steady. He looked smaller than she remembered him. Lighter. The way illness shrinks people before you notice it happening.

The door creaked.

Someone came in.

Not her mother. Not Tunde. Not anyone she expected.

The person moved quietly. Too quietly. With the practiced softness of someone who had thought about this moment before arriving in it. They went to her father’s side table, where his medications sat in their neat row, the blood pressure tablets, the diabetes management drugs, the ones the doctor had prescribed and the ones he ordered himself from the pharmacy because the hospital ones were too expensive.

The person picked up one of the bottles. Opened it. Tipped something in, small, white, dissolving fast.

Then put the bottle back.

Turned to leave.

And Funke saw the face.

She knew this face.

She had seen this face at the funeral, crying. Had accepted a hug from it. Had heard it say sorry for your loss, sorry for your loss in the receiving line while she stood numb in black lace.

The face did not belong to Okonkwo Emmanuel.

It belonged to someone inside her family.

She came back to herself on the floor again. Her cheek against the cold tile. Her breath coming in shallow pulls.

She lay there for a moment, maybe a minute, maybe ten, just existing. Just breathing. Just being a body that had just seen something it could not unsee.

Then she sat up.

Her hands were shaking. She pressed them flat against the floor until they stopped.

She stood. Walked to the mirror.

She made herself look.

The grey was no longer a streak.

It had spread across the left side of her hair, a wide sweep of silver that started at her temple and reached back almost to her ear. On a woman of fifty it would have looked distinguished. On a twenty-six year old it looked like something had moved through her.

Something had.

She touched it with two fingers.

Then she lowered her hand and looked at her own eyes in the mirror. They were the same. Still hers. Still sharp. Still here.

She had used all four visions.

The ring on her finger was cold now, for the first time since the old woman had given it to her. Not warm. Not pulsing. Cold and still and finished, like something that had given everything it had and was now just metal.

She pulled it off.

Held it in her palm.

The engraving was gone. The inside was smooth. Blank. Like it had never said anything at all.

Funke closed her fist around it.

She had the truth now. All of it. The land, the forgery, the threats, the face.

But the truth was a grenade and she was standing in a room full of people she loved.

Eleven days to court.

A family member who had killed her father.

And a ring that had nothing left to give her.

She was on her own now.

To be continued…