The Voice

He didn’t play it immediately.

He sat there looking at the notification the way you look at a door you know has something terrible behind it. Not because you won’t open it. But because you understand that once you do, you cannot go back to not knowing what’s inside.

Sade was three metres away making tea.

He picked up his phone, stood up casually, stretched like a man with nothing on his mind.

“I’m going to shower,” he said.

“Mm.”

He went to the bedroom. Closed the door. Sat on the edge of the bed and put the voice note to his ear.

A woman’s voice.

Calm. Educated. The kind of calm that had been constructed deliberately over a long time because the alternative was falling apart.

“Mr. Emeka. I know this is strange. I know you don’t know me. My name is Adunola. I think you already found me this morning. I saw the search come through on a notification alert I set up a long time ago for my name and my husband’s. I set it up because I stopped trusting him fourteen months ago and I needed to know when someone else started looking.”

A pause. The sound of a room. Air conditioning maybe. Somewhere quiet.

“I know about your wife. I have known about her for three months. Before her there was someone else in Port Harcourt. Before that, Kano. My husband collects women the way other men collect property. And he does collect property, so perhaps it is the same instinct.”

Something that might have been a short humourless laugh.

“I am not calling you because I want your sympathy or because I want to compare pain. I am calling you because Dayo has done something with your wife that goes beyond what you think this is. There is money involved. I don’t have all of it yet but I have enough to know that your wife, whether she understands it or not, is being used. And when Dayo is done using people he makes sure they cannot talk about it.”

Another pause. Longer.

“The man in Abuja that your cousin probably mentioned. His name is Rasheed Musa. He lost his import business, his federal contract, and his marriage inside four months. He tried to go to the police. Dayo’s uncle made three calls. That was the end of that.”

“I am telling you this because you seem like a man who is planning carefully. Good. You will need to. But you cannot go at Dayo alone and you cannot go at him loudly. If you want to talk, really talk, call this number tomorrow between 10 and 11am. I will pick up. If you don’t call I will assume you have chosen another path and I will wish you luck.”

The voice note ended.

Emeka lowered the phone.

He sat completely still for almost a minute.

Then he stood up, went to the bathroom, turned the shower on, and stood under cold water with his eyes open, letting it run over his face.

Adunola.

Dayo’s wife.

She had been watching for fourteen months. She had known about Sade for three. She had a notification alert on her own husband’s name like a woman who had turned her grief into a surveillance system.

And she was saying Sade was being used.

Money involved.

He turned the shower off. Stood dripping on the tiles.

What money? Sade was an event planner. Successful but not wealthy. They were comfortable, not rich. Their joint account had a decent balance, their savings modest and accounted for. He managed their finances carefully. Quarterly reviews, spreadsheets, everything documented.

Or so he thought.

He came out and dressed quickly. Sat at the small desk in the corner of the bedroom where he kept his files. Physical files. He was old-fashioned about paperwork, his colleagues teased him for it. He opened the bottom drawer and pulled out the folder for their joint account statements.

He went back six months.

He read slowly.

The first two months were normal. Salaries in. Bills out. Their regular patterns. The supermarket, DSTV, the gym she used twice and then stopped.

Then in month three he found it.

A transfer. Outward. Eighty thousand naira. Reference: event deposit, Goldview.

He didn’t recognise the name.

The following month. Another transfer. A hundred and twenty thousand. Same reference format. Event deposit, Primrose.

Month five. Two transfers. Combined, two hundred and forty thousand naira.

He flipped to last month.

Three transfers.

Total. Four hundred and ten thousand naira.

He closed the folder.

His wife was moving money out of their joint account in amounts small enough not to trigger alarm, disguised as event deposits, with company names he had never heard of and had never thought to question because he trusted her completely.

He put the folder back.

Went to the window.

Outside the compound the street was waking up. Sunday morning, church traffic building, women in gele, children in stiff clean clothes, a praise song leaking from a car stereo somewhere down the road.

Sade appeared in the bedroom doorway. Dressed. Looking fresh.

“I’m going to church,” she said. “You’re not coming?”

He turned from the window.

Yellow dress. Simple gold earrings. She looked beautiful in the uncomplicated way she always had. The way that had nothing to do with effort and everything to do with just being herself.

Money involved.

“No,” he said. “Go ahead.”

She picked up her bag. Paused at the door.

“There’s tea on the counter.”

Then she left.

He listened to her heels on the stairs. The compound gate opening and closing.

Then he opened his laptop.

He needed to find Goldview and Primrose before 10am tomorrow.

Because if those companies didn’t exist, the money hadn’t gone to any client.

And Sade wasn’t just having an affair.

She was funding something.

Or someone was funding through her.

And she might not even know which one was true.