What Comes Next

The property assessors came on a Monday.

Two men in matching polo shirts with a company logo on the chest, carrying tablets and measuring equipment, pulling up to the Ijebu-Ode Road plots in a clean SUV that looked slightly out of place on the red earth road. Funke met them there with Bello, who had insisted on being present for anything that touched the compensation process.

She hadn’t been to the land since she was a child.

She had forgotten how it felt to stand on it.

Three plots of red Osun earth, overgrown at the edges with the particular stubbornness of Nigerian bush that reclaimed any space left alone long enough. A mango tree at the far corner that she had no memory of but that looked old enough to have been there before her father bought the land. The distant sound of a main road. The sky very wide and very blue above it.

She stood at the edge of the first plot and looked at it and thought about her father walking this same ground, paying it off piece by piece over twenty years, title by title, the way careful men built things, slowly and without announcement.

He had never told them about the land’s full value. Maybe he hadn’t known. Maybe he had been planning to tell them and had run out of time. Maybe he had simply believed that what he was building would speak for itself when it was needed.

It was speaking now.

The assessors worked for two hours, measuring, photographing, cross-referencing with their federal database. Bello stood nearby answering their questions in the clipped professional shorthand of men who dealt with government processes regularly. Funke walked the perimeter of the land slowly, once, just to feel it under her feet.

When the lead assessor finished he came to her with his tablet showing a preliminary figure.

She looked at the number.

Forty-nine million, two hundred thousand naira.

Slightly higher than the gazette figure, adjusted for the current assessment timeline and plot boundary confirmation. The final figure would be confirmed after federal review but he expected minimal variance.

She thanked him in a voice that came out steadier than she felt.

After they left Bello walked with her back to their cars and said, “Six to eight months for the federal process to complete. Possibly less if we file everything cleanly from the beginning, which we will.”

“And in the meantime?”

“In the meantime the land is yours, legally protected, and nobody can touch it.” He paused. “You should think about what you want to do with the compensation when it comes. Not now. But soon. That amount of money needs a plan or Lagos will help you spend it in ways you won’t be proud of.”

She almost smiled. “I know.”

She drove home with the windows down, the Osun air giving way to the thickening heat of the expressway back toward Lagos, and she thought about plans. About what forty-nine million naira meant for a family that had counted ₦4,700 on a kitchen table not so long ago.

She thought about her mother, who had worked beside her father for thirty years and deserved to stop worrying about plastic tablecloths and chipped mugs. She thought about Tunde, who was seventeen and sharp and deserved a university education at whatever institution he chose without the question of fees ever entering the conversation.

She thought about herself.

That was the part she kept arriving at and then stepping back from, the way you step back from something bright until your eyes adjust. What did Funke want. Not for her family. For herself.

She had spent so many weeks in pure survival mode, moving from problem to problem, vision to consequence to evidence to courtroom, that the question of what she actually wanted felt almost foreign. Like a language she used to speak and had temporarily forgotten.

She thought about the real estate office on Victoria Island. The way she had walked in with a fake card and accurate information and turned a conversation she had no business being in into a result. The way the agent had looked at her and said, you’re good.

She thought about Bello, the way he had built their case piece by piece, the quiet satisfaction of watching evidence become argument become ruling.

She thought about the notebook on her dresser with what comes next written at the top of a fresh page.

She wasn’t sure yet. But she was beginning to feel the outline of something.

Her mother was on the veranda when she got home, the same plastic chair, the same late afternoon light, but different from all the previous times Funke had found her there. She was sitting upright rather than folded inward, a cup of tea steaming beside her, reading a old magazine with the relaxed attention of someone who had remembered that rest was permitted.

She looked up when Funke came through the gate.

“How was it?”

“Good,” Funke said. “The land is ours. The number is higher than we thought.”

Her mother nodded slowly, processing it with the measured calm she had developed since the ruling, as though she was being careful with good news the way you are careful with something fragile until you’re sure it’s going to hold.

“Your father would have said told you so,” her mother said finally.

Funke laughed. A real one, sudden and unguarded, the kind that surprised her by arriving.

Her mother smiled, the full warm smile that had been missing for months.

They sat together on the veranda as the evening came in and talked about ordinary things, about Tunde’s upcoming exams, about a cousin’s wedding in December that they might actually be able to attend this year without the shadow of debt following them there, about whether the kitchen needed repainting, about nothing and everything, about life reassembling itself in real time around two women sitting in plastic chairs watching Lagos do what Lagos always did.

Later that night Tunde came and sat on the floor of the veranda leaning against the wall, his long legs stretched out, phone in hand, half listening to their conversation and half in his own world the way teenagers occupied shared spaces.

At some point he looked up at Funke and said, “What are you going to do now? Like properly. A job or something.”

“Something,” she said.

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the beginning of one.”

He considered that. “You should do something with the property thing. What you did on the island that time. You’re good at reading situations and making people believe you.”

“That’s a very polite way to describe what I did.”

“I’m serious.” He put his phone down, giving her the full attention he usually reserved for things he had decided mattered. “You figured out what someone needed to hear and you said it at the right time. That’s not nothing. That’s actually a skill.”

She looked at her younger brother, seventeen, sitting on a veranda floor in Mushin with his shoes finally off, telling her things about herself that she had been circling around for weeks but hadn’t been able to say directly.

“When did you get wise?” she asked.

He picked his phone back up. “I’ve always been wise. You were just too stressed to notice.”

Her mother laughed from her chair.

Funke leaned back and looked up at the Mushin sky, the particular shade of Lagos night that was never quite dark because the city pushed too much light upward, orange and grey and alive.

She thought about the ring in her dresser drawer.

She thought about her grandmother in plain white at the gate.

She thought about what it meant that a dead woman had come back specifically to arm a granddaughter for a fight, had chosen the gift carefully, had accepted that the gift would cost something, had trusted that the person receiving it was worth the cost.

You didn’t give something like that to someone you didn’t believe in.

Her grandmother had believed in her before the ring, before the visions, before any of it. Had seen her from wherever the dead could see and had decided, this one, this girl, she will not stop.

Funke intended to prove her right.

Not just in the ways that had already happened. In whatever came next. In the notebook page still waiting. In the outline of something she was only beginning to see clearly.

She didn’t know exactly what shape it would take yet.

But she knew who she was now in a way she hadn’t before all of this. She knew what she could hold. She knew how much she could carry and how long and what it cost and that she could pay the cost and still be standing.

That was not a small thing to know about yourself.

Inside the house her father’s photograph was on the wall, laughing at something off camera, completely alive in the way that photographs keep people alive, frozen in a good moment, permanent.

She would tell him about it all eventually. In the quiet of early mornings when the house was still and she had the particular conversation with him that couldn’t be answered. She would tell him about the ring and the grey and the courtroom and the land and the forty-nine million sitting in red Osun earth waiting to become the foundation he had always meant it to be.

She thought he would like that.

She thought he would say, Funke-mi, the way he always said it, like it meant something precious.

She thought he would be proud.

To be continued…