What the Vision Showed

She didn’t put the ring on immediately.

She spent three days trying to solve it the normal way first. Because she needed to know she had tried. That she hadn’t just surrendered to the ring the moment things got hard.

She called two lawyers she found online. The first one quoted her ₦350,000 just to review the case. The second one didn’t pick up. She visited a legal aid office in Ikeja that a friend mentioned — sat in a plastic chair for four hours and was told they were overloaded and couldn’t take new cases until the following quarter.

She asked Aunty Bisi to find the original land documents in the village. Aunty Bisi called back two days later sounding shaken. The documents were gone. The file her father kept in the iron box under his bed in the village house — gone. Not stolen violently. Just absent. Like someone had known exactly where to look and exactly when to look.

Whoever was behind this had planned it. Carefully. Before her father was even buried.

On the third night Funke sat at the kitchen table after everyone was asleep and put the ring on.

The vision didn’t come the way the others had.

The first two had felt like watching, like standing outside a window and seeing something play out. This one felt like being pulled. Like the ring reached into her and dragged her forward into something it had already decided she needed to see.

She was in a office. Government building — she could tell from the peeling paint and the smell and the particular exhaustion that lives in public buildings. A registry. Land registry, she realised, reading the faded sign above a counter nobody was standing at.

She watched a man, fifties, round face, ankara cap, the kind of man who had learnt to make his ordinariness into a disguise, slide a folder across the counter to a clerk. The clerk didn’t even look at the folder properly. Just stamped it. Three times. Then signed something and slid it back.

The man smiled. Picked up the folder. And as he turned to leave, Funke saw his face clearly.

She also saw, just before the vision pulled back, the name on the folder.

Okonkwo Emmanuel — Land Transfer, Osun State Registry, Plot 7B, Ijebu-Ode Road.

And below that, a signature.

Her father’s name. But the handwriting was wrong. She had grown up watching her father sign things — his signature had a particular loop on the F of his surname that he had taught her to recognise. He had told her once, if you ever see my name on a document without that loop, someone is lying.

There was no loop.

She woke up on the kitchen floor. She didn’t remember falling.

Her neck ached. Her mouth was dry. And when she pushed herself up and caught her reflection in the dark window above the sink, she saw it immediately.

The grey streak was wider.

Not dramatically. But enough. The silver had spread, reaching further into her hairline like roots finding water.

She touched it with two fingers and felt nothing — no pain, no sensation. Just hair. Just time, moving through her faster than it should.

She sat on the kitchen floor for a while, not moving.

Then she got up, found a pen and paper, and wrote down everything she had seen before it could fade. The name. The registry. The plot number. The clerk’s face. The stamp. The fake signature.

She wrote: No loop on the F.

Evidence. Real evidence. The kind a lawyer could use.

She found him through Tunde, of all people.

Tunde had a friend whose uncle was a lawyer — not a big firm, not Victoria Island, just a quiet practice in Surulere, a man named Bello who handled land cases for people who couldn’t afford the ones on the island.

Funke went alone. Sat across from a man who looked like he was always slightly tired but whose eyes were sharp in a way that made her trust him.

She told him everything. Not the ring, she wasn’t telling anyone about the ring. But she told him about the contested land, the missing documents, the fake signature, the land registry in Osun State, the name Okonkwo Emmanuel.

Bello listened without interrupting. When she finished he leaned back in his chair.

“How do you know the signature is fake?” he asked.

“My father showed me,” she said. It was true enough.

“And the registry — how did you know which one?”

Funke met his eyes. “I did my research.”

He looked at her for a moment longer than was comfortable. Then he picked up his pen and started writing.

“I’ll need a retainer,” he said. “₦80,000. If we win, the rest comes from whatever we recover.”

Funke exhaled. ₦80,000 she could manage. Barely. But she could manage.

“How long do we have?” he asked.

“Twenty-three days.”

He nodded slowly. “Then we need to move fast. If the signature is forged and we can prove it — and if that registry stamp can be challenged, this case is winnable.” He paused. “But Funke. Whoever did this had access to your father’s personal information. His signature. Probably his house in the village. This wasn’t a stranger.”

The words landed quietly but heavily.

Not a stranger.

Someone who knew her father. Someone who had been close enough to study his signature, access his home, time everything perfectly around his death.

Funke drove home with her hands steady on the wheel and her mind running fast and cold.

She had one vision left.

One.

And she was starting to think she might need it for something bigger than the land.

Because if someone close to her father had done this — someone who had watched and waited and planned — then there was a chance that her father’s death hadn’t been as simple as the doctors had said.

She hadn’t let herself think it before.

She was thinking it now.

To be continued…