Walls Closing

She didn’t sleep well that night.

Not because she was afraid, or not only because of that. It was the kind of sleeplessness that comes when your mind refuses to stop working, when every time you close your eyes it picks up where it left off, turning the same details over and over like it’s looking for something it missed.

She lay in the dark and listened to the sounds of Mushin at night and thought about Rotimi’s eyes when he had seen the empty side table. That small fast movement behind them. The thing he had hidden so quickly she almost hadn’t caught it.

Almost.

She got up at two in the morning and checked that the front door was locked. Then the back. Then she stood in the corridor for a moment, listening to her mother breathing steadily behind her closed door, listening to Tunde’s room which was quiet the way a room is quiet when someone inside it is also not quite sleeping.

She went back to bed and stared at the ceiling until morning came.

Bello called at seven thirty.

“I filed for an emergency hearing,” he said without greeting. “Given the new evidence and the threat to a witness, I’ve asked the court to move fast. The medication goes to a toxicology lab today. I have someone who can turn results around in five days if we pay for priority.”

“How much?”

“Forty thousand. Can you manage it?”

She thought of the money under her mother’s bed. What was left of it. “Yes.”

“Good. There’s something else.” A pause, the kind that meant what came next was going to be uncomfortable. “I’ve been doing some digging on Emmanuel. The man has done this before. Not murder, not that we can prove, but land fraud. There’s a case in Abeokuta from eight years ago, a family that lost property through a similar forged transfer. They settled out of court, which means he paid them to be quiet, which means he had money and he had something to lose.” Another pause. “He’s not a small man, Funke. He has connections in that registry in Osun State. Maybe other registries. This is going to get messy before it gets clean.”

“I know,” she said.

“Do you? Because messy means he might try to discredit you before you can discredit him. He’ll look for something on you. Something to use.”

Funke was quiet for a moment. She thought about the ring. The betting shop. The real estate office on Victoria Island and the business card she had printed in twenty minutes. None of it was clean. None of it would look clean if someone decided to look at it.

“Let him look,” she said, with more confidence than she felt.

“Funke.”

“I’ll handle whatever he finds. Focus on the court date.”

She hung up and sat with the discomfort of that for a while, the knowledge that her own path to this point had not been straight, that the tools she had used to survive could be turned against her if someone was determined enough.

She pushed it aside. One problem at a time.

She dropped the medication bottles at the lab Bello sent her to, a quiet place in Yaba run by a small man with careful hands who looked at the bottles without asking too many questions and told her five days, maybe four.

On the way home her phone rang from a number she didn’t recognise.

She almost didn’t pick up.

She picked up.

“Funke.” The voice was calm. Male. Older. The particular calm of someone who had decided to try the soft approach first before the hard one. “This is Emmanuel. I think we should talk.”

Her blood went very still. She kept her voice completely neutral. “How did you get this number?”

“It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you and I are about to spend a lot of money and energy in a courtroom over something that can be resolved much more simply.” A pause. “Your father and I had unfinished business. The land is part of settling that business. I’m not an unreasonable man. There’s a way to handle this where everyone walks away with something.”

“You mean where you keep the land.”

“I mean where your family gets something instead of nothing. Because right now the document I have is legal and stamped and registered and your lawyer is going to have a very hard time in that courtroom.” His voice stayed smooth, unhurried, the voice of a man who had done this before and knew how long people took to break. “Think about your mother. Think about your brother. A court case like this drags on, it costs money, it opens things up, it gets complicated. A private settlement is cleaner for everyone.”

Funke looked out the window of the cab she was in at the Lagos street moving past. A woman selling oranges on the roadside. Two boys arguing over a handcart. Ordinary life happening in all directions.

She thought about her father’s voice. Funke-mi. The loop on the F.

“I’ll think about it,” she said.

She hung up.

Then she immediately called Bello. “Emmanuel just called me. He wants to settle privately. He’s nervous.”

She could hear the shift in Bello’s energy. “He called you directly? Good. That’s very good. Nervous men make mistakes.” A pause. “Did you record it?”

She closed her eyes briefly. “No.”

“If he calls again, record it. Everything. Don’t agree to anything, don’t reject anything, just keep him talking.”

She spent the rest of the day at home, helping her mother with small things, folding laundry, peeling yam, the ordinary texture of a life that had become anything but ordinary. Her mother looked at her grey hair sometimes when she thought Funke wasn’t noticing. She hadn’t asked about it yet. She would. But not today.

Tunde found her in the kitchen that evening and stood in the doorway the way he did when he had something to say and was deciding how to say it.

“Uncle Rotimi called me today,” he said.

Funke put down the knife she was holding. “What did he say?”

“He said he was worried about you. Said you seemed stressed, that grief does things to people, that he hoped you weren’t making decisions from a bad place.” Tunde’s voice was flat, reporting it the way you report something that has disgusted you. “He asked if you had found anything in Daddy’s room that you were confused about. Said if I had any concerns about what you were doing I could call him.”

Funke looked at her brother.

“He was trying to use you to find out what I know,” she said.

“Yes,” Tunde said. “I know.” He picked up the knife she had put down and started peeling the yam without being asked, his movements steady and deliberate. “I told him you were fine and that I had no concerns.”

“Thank you.”

“He’s scared, Funke.”

“I know.”

“Scared people are dangerous.”

She looked at her brother, seventeen years old, peeling yam in a kitchen that still smelled faintly of their father’s cooking, holding himself together with both hands.

“I know,” she said again.

Outside the window the evening was coming in, orange and loud and indifferent, and somewhere across the city two men were getting more frightened by the hour, and the toxicology results were four days away, and the court date was coming, and Funke stood in her mother’s kitchen and let herself feel, for just a moment, how heavy all of it was.

Then she picked up her phone and checked that her recording app was downloaded and ready.

Emmanuel would call again. She was certain of it.

And the next time, she would be ready.

To be continued…