The Woman on the Phone

Ify’s thumb hovered over the end call button. The woman’s voice still breathed through the speaker, rough and waiting. Ugochi stood in the doorway, her smile fixed like a mask welded to bone.

“Ifeoma,” Ugochi said again, softer this time, the way she spoke when guests were watching. “Who is on the phone?”

Ify pressed end call. The screen went black. She slid the phone face-down onto the desk, her palm covering it like she could hide the number from her mother’s eyes.

“Wrong number,” Ify said. Her voice came out steady. She had been practicing steadiness her whole life. “Somebody selling data bundles. At this hour. Can you imagine?”

Ugochi did not move from the doorway. Her gaze traveled from Ify’s face to the desk, to the brown envelope, to the photograph that Ify had not managed to slip back inside. The silence stretched between them like a wire pulled too tight.

“You should sleep,” Ugochi said finally. “Tomorrow we visit the tailor for your aso-ebi. Chief wants coral and champagne gold. Very traditional. Very respectable.” She paused. Her fingers found the doorframe, gripped it. “Ifeoma. Whatever that envelope contains, whatever you think you have found, some truths are buried for a reason. Some graves should not be opened.”

Then she was gone. Her footsteps retreated down the hallway, soft, careful, the walk of a woman who had spent twenty years tiptoeing around her own life.

Ify sat in the dark for ten minutes. The generator outside coughed and died, and the room went pitch black. NEPA had struck again. She did not move to find a torch. She sat in the darkness and felt her heart beating against her ribs like a bird trying to escape a cage.

She picked up her phone. The call had lasted forty-three seconds. The number was still in her recent calls. She pressed redial.

It rang four times. Five. She was about to hang up when the woman answered.

“You called before,” the woman said. Not a question. A statement. “And you hung up. Why?”

“I…” Ify’s voice cracked. She cleared her throat. “My mother. She walked in.”

The woman laughed. It was not a happy sound. It was the laugh of someone who had heard this story before, who had watched young girls discover their mothers’ lies and had learned not to be surprised.

“Your mother,” the woman said. “Ugochi. I knew her when she was your age. When she still had fire in her belly. Before she traded it for marble floors and a husband who buys her silence like stockfish at Ogbete market.”

“Who are you?” Ify whispered.

“My name is Amarachi. Amarachi Eze. I am a nurse at the University Teaching Hospital in Enugu. And I am your father’s sister.”

Ify felt the room tilt. She gripped the edge of the desk. “My father is downstairs. Asleep. In the master bedroom. His name is Bartholomew Nwadike.”

“Bartholomew Nwadike is a man who signed papers,” Amarachi said. “He is not the man whose blood runs in your veins. The man in that photograph you are holding, the man with your eyes and your stubborn jaw, his name was Chukwudi. Chukwudi Eze. He was a journalist. He was my brother. And he died three months before you were born, murdered by the same man who now calls you daughter.”

The word murdered hung in the air like smoke. Ify tasted metal on her tongue.

“You’re lying,” she said. But her voice was small. It was the voice of a child who had just learned that Santa was a story, that the tooth fairy was her mother, that the world was held together by performances she had never been invited to rehearse.

“I am not lying,” Amarachi said. “And I am not the only one who knows. Ask your mother about Enugu, 2003. Ask her about the warehouse on Agbani Road. Ask her why she married a man she hated less than six months after the man she loved was buried. Ask her why she has been sending me money every Christmas for nineteen years, money I never asked for, money that smells like guilt.”

Ify looked at the photograph. Chukwudi’s eyes stared back at her, unblinking, alive in a way that Chief Nwadike’s eyes had never been.

“Why now?” Ify asked. “Why tell me now?”

“Because you are twenty,” Amarachi said. “Because in three months, you will be twenty-one. Because at twenty-one, your mother signed her own life away. She married Bartholomew on her twenty-first birthday. She buried Chukwudi’s memory on her twenty-first birthday. She became someone else on her twenty-first birthday. And I have watched you from a distance, Ifeoma. I have seen your face in newspapers, at your father’s political rallies, smiling like a doll in a shop window. I could not let you walk into that same fire without knowing there was another door.”

Ify’s phone buzzed. A text from Chibuike: “Your father called mine. The introduction is moved to next month. We’re announcing the wedding date. Sleep well, future wife.”

She stared at the screen. Future wife. The words looked obscene.

“Can I see you?” Ify asked Amarachi. “In person. Not on the phone. I need to… I need to see someone who knew him. Who knew me before I was me.”

Amarachi was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice had changed. It was smaller. Older. Afraid.

“Come to Enugu,” she said. “But not directly. Do not fly. Do not take a bus with your name on the manifest. Bartholomew has eyes everywhere. Take a night bus to Onitsha first. Then a taxi. I will send you the address. And Ifeoma?”

“Yes?”

“Do not tell your mother you are coming. Do not tell anyone. If Bartholomew finds out you know, he will do to you what he did to Chukwudi. He has done it before. He will do it again. The only reason you are alive is because Ugochi convinced him you were worth more as a trophy than as a corpse.”

The line went dead.

Ify sat in the darkness. The generator outside sputtered back to life, and the ceiling fan resumed its lazy rotation. She looked at the photograph one more time. Chukwudi Eze. Her father. A journalist. A dead man with her eyes.

She opened her wardrobe. Pulled out a backpack. Threw in jeans, a hoodie, her ATM card, the photograph, the DNA test, the note. She did not pack her biology textbooks. She did not pack the gold bracelet.

Her phone buzzed again. This time it was not Chibuike. It was an unknown number. A text, three words:

“I know you’re awake.”

Ify’s blood turned to ice. She looked at her bedroom window. The curtains were drawn. Beyond them, the Lagos night hummed with generators, distant music, the eternal noise of a city that never slept.

Another text: “The bike man who delivered the envelope works for me. Everything you read tonight, I already know. Be a good daughter, Ifeoma. Go to sleep. Forget what you saw. Or tomorrow, your mother’s morning tea will taste different. And you will spend your twenty-first birthday at a funeral, not a wedding.”

The number was her father’s.

To be continued…